When I was only a kid, I had a little obsession of becoming a drummer. The problem is of course, I believed that my father would not let me. But I still love to hear the sound of the drums. Sometimes I imagined that I was the drummer of my favorite songs (by playing an imaginary drum). I always dislike a song with a bad drums sound (this is one of the reasons I dislike most of the Indonesian songs, the sound of the drums is so.....horrible).
Instead of never having chances to learn how to play drums, I always pay attention to the drummer of a band in every TV show. That is how I began to know how to play it. The normal drummer (not the left-handed drummer) always hit the snare with their left hand, while the right hand was hitting the hi-hat or cymbals. Not to forget that the drummers also used their feet to play kick part (the bass part). I still wanted to play drums somehow.
It wasn't until 2006, when I finally used SuSE Linux 10.0 as my computer operating system (I'd been introduced to Linux operating system the year before). I found a very interesting software named Hydrogen (a drum machine software) there. A software that can produce the sound of drums.? I said, wow!!
Then I started learning how to create a drum pattern by learning the demo included. Little by little, I tried to re-interpret the drum patterns used in my favorite songs, and of course created a new pattern myself. Now, let me introduce you to Hydrogen, An Advanced Drum Machine.
How To Get Hydrogen?
How can we get Hydrogen? It's easy, just get it from the atmosphere! :-P .(Sorry, I'm just joking about it). Some Linux distributions have included Hydrogen in their software repositories. If you used the SuSE Linux/ openSUSE distributions, Hydrogen has usually been included in the installations CD/DVD. Or if you chose Ubuntu distribution instead, you'll need to install it from the software repositories (both the net or the DVD repositories). Use apt or synaptics packages manager to install it in Ubuntu (or at least in the Ubuntu-based distributions). Or you may download the Hydrogen installation file from this address (there is also the Windows version). But I suggest, if you don't wanna get mad, don't ever install Hydrogen from its source-code.
Starting Hydrogen
This tutorials uses Linux Mint 4.0 XFCE Edition (an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution), but you can apply it in other Linux distros. To start Hydrogen, from the start menu, choose the Multimedia section, and then choose Hydrogen. The Hydrogen splash screen will then appear
Fig 1. Starting Hydrogen from the menu (sorry for the picture of Curious George behind it, I'm one of George's fan)
Fig 2 Hydrogen splash screen
Fig 3 The Main Window of Hydrogen
Hydrogen Interface
The Hydrogen interface consists of many parts, the panels, pattern editor, drumkits manager, song editor, mixer, and also instrument editor, but you can freely select which part to appear (except for the panels).
1. The Panels
There are two panels in Hydrogen, the top panel and the bottom one.
Fig 4 Top Panel
At the top panel, we'll be able to do all the things we can do with the menu. Saving patterns, exporting into other formats, choosing other windows to appear and so on.
Fig 5 Bottom Panel
At the bottom panel, we'll be able to play/stop/pause the pattern, set the tempo, set the mode of how we play the pattern (we can choose between the pattern and song). A song usually consists of more than one pattern that we combine.
In the next tutorial, I will explain the function of other parts and of course I will also show you how to create drum patterns and combine them into a full song. See you next time!
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