Introduction

genDrumkit

Quick Overview

The tool

• imports a drum kit (e.g. in Hydrogen format),
• optionally reads a CSV map file (to assign instruments to audio outputs) and
• exports the drum DB in a different format (e.g. DrumGizmo)

See chapter Hydrogen Importer for some invocation examples.

Motivation

For home recording with the open source DAW Ardour on Linux most of the time I use the X42 AVL drum plugin which is perfectly fine. Every now and then I would like to use a different drum sound. There are lots of free drum kits available in various formats but most of them only can be used in a stereo output environment.

However, I would like to have a dedicated output per instrument, so I can have full control per instrument for mixing and effect processing.

I did some research and the plugins that I found useful for this purpose (support for multiple outputs) were the LSP Multi-Sampler (which comes in versions with 12, 24 and 48 outputs) and DrumGizmo that supports up to 16 audio outputs.

However, only a small number of - albeit high quality - drum kits are available for DrumGizmo, none for the LSP player.

For the free drum machine Hydrogen more than 100 kits can be found on the internet, so the idea came up to create a converter tool to transform Hydrogen drum kits to DrumGizmo format.

And this is what the first version does, although I hope the tool is architected in such a way that it can support other formats for import and export in the future.

Example Workflow

See Hydrogen Workflow for an example work flow.

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