Thursday, December 22, 2011

Hydrogen pattern editor buttons

After finding out about some nifty 'new' features (not really new, i just didn't know they existed!) in Hydrogen i created some more mockups:



It still needs work, but it's getting better IMO !


And a previous version :

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

PRO DSP1000P automation with Hydrogen PART 2

The original post can be found here, but to recap :

The goal : control a hardware FX unit with Hydrogen
Why : to be able to select a specific FX per song (or part of the song)
How : using Midi + minimal tools



After some googling and great help from the Linux Audio Developer mailing list (thanks Harry, Jeremy, Clemens, Frank, Olivier, Adrian) my FX unit now switches to a specific preset whenever i jump to the next/previous song in Hydrogen !


Sunday, December 4, 2011

Simple guitar A/B switch

A couple of weeks ago my brother, my cousin and I attended the annual Muzikanten dag (musicians day) event in the AB in Brussels.  On that day you can participate in numerous music workshops, demo's, training sessions ... you name it.
I really enjoyed the day and my cousin got inspired by the 'wall of sound' workshop by the Belgian band The sore losers.  They had some really good tips on how to create your guitar sound, and one of the key elements in their setup was a simple A/B switch.  They use the A/B switch to switch between 2 amps.  This is a very simple -but clever- way to get a punchy solo sound : hit a button, second amp switches on > instant boost.
The trick is to set the second amp relatively 'clean' so you don't loose the 'punch' of your sound.

A couple of days later my cousin asked me if i could build such a switch, and this is the result :


Thursday, December 1, 2011

Hydrogen GUI update

I'm currently working on some updates for the Hydrogen manual, and i also made some mock-ups of the Hydrogen GUI.  More specifically the pattern editor control buttons (the part just above the pattern editor)
Currently this is a mix of buttons, 'LCD' displays and dropdowns.  This inconsistency has been bugging me for some time now and i decided to have a go at it.
First priority : replace the different elements with simple, intuitive buttons. Simple.

The buttons are all bitmaps so it is quite time consuming to get a good looking 'icon' on them.

Below is a first attempt (top=new, bottom=current) :


It's far from perfect, but it's a start !