Kit Converter for Hydrogen
A Toolkit to convert drum kits from other VSTs to Hydrogen h2drumkit format
About Hydrogen
Hydrogen is a software synthesizer which can be used alone, emulating a drum machine based on patterns, or via an external MIDI keyboard/sequencer software. Hydrogen runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.
Hydrogen v1.1 Online Manual
Intro
I’ve been using Hydrogen for a quite some time now to do basic drum patterns. I’m not by any means good at drum programming but I get to write some basic ideas pretty quickly in Hydrogen.
What I like about Hydrogen is that the user interface is simple and straightforward, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time learning the software to write basic patterns and also that is very lightweight in resources. My only complaint has been finding good quality sounding kits. I appreciate the big effort a lot of people has put on to share their drumkits online, but I just haven’t found a Metal Kit that I feel happy when it comes to sound quality.
So my workflow usually goes like this:
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Write the song patterns in Hydrogen
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Previewing with one of the kits in Hydrogen
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Exporting to midi
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Load midi in DAW and apply another VST with a better sounding drum kit
Getting better sounds on my kit
I know there are a lot of resources online and probably recording a real drumkit is the recommended way but is not easy and not everyone can do it. In the past, I thought if I could somehow use the samples from some other VSTs in Hydrogen it would be perfect, but there are a couple of reasons why this is not doable. For starters, using the samples from another program to build a kit is likely a breach of the EULA, not to mention a lot of these programs use proprietary formats for the audio samples.
Recently I was searching again for a better kit, when I thought why not create a song with one of the available kits in one of the VSTs I like and use sounds from that song to create my own Hydrogen kit? this is at least a workaround for the proprietary formats, and also, is not using the samples in other application, but rather extracting fragments of a song creation; ok, this last point, probably depends on the restrictions of individual applications. And I wouldn’t go as far as sharing the kits online.
The Drumkit Toolkit
And so this small project was born! I created a script to generate Hydrogen drumkits using sounds from other drumkits and I’m happy with the results! I no longer need to preview in Hydrogen and use a different VST in the final song, I can use my favorite sounds directly in Hydrogen!
Before I explain how this works, lets set the expectations; This is not going to turn your Hydrogen into a full Superior Drummer replacement or whatever VST you are using. These VSTs have a lot of flexibility to tweak your kits and compose complex layers. But if you are looking at something that you can just drop in and produce good sounds without the need to tweaking each instrument for each song, specially during song composition, then this solution might help you.
So this is how the whole thing works:
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First you create a configuration file with all details of your kit. Things like "Kit Name", "Description", etc. and a list of instruments. I have created a pretty decent default configuration file that can be used as template
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Second, run the script and generate a midi file. This midi file contains the notes to produce the sounds for each of the instruments at various velocities that will be used as different layers in the kit
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Load the midi file in your DAW or standalone application with the kit you want, and bounce to one WAV file. The resulting audio should look something like this (you can see the various velocities in the waveform)
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Run the script to create a the drumkit. Behind the scenes, the script extract the fragments for each layer of each instrument from the wav file and produces a final compatible h2drumkit file
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Finally Import your new kit in Hydrogen and enjoy it!
The source code is licensed MIT and is available here: Hydrogen Drumkit Tools Repository
My intention is to add a few more utilities over time. For example, re-adjusting existing kits and some other things that I have in mind, but for now, that’s it.
If you run into any issues feel free to contact me on Github or Reddit.