Question:
Please explain how to use this program. I don't know how to run it and can't get it to work for me. How do I set up my own rhythms?
Also, can HammerHead be made to play 3/4 time?
I am only trying to use it as a metronome at this time.(Nothing too complex.)
Thank you!
Answer:
Originally Posted by finchfeeder Please explain how to use this program. I don't know how to run it and can't get it to work for me. How do I set up my own rhythms?
Also, can HammerHead be made to play 3/4 time?
I am only trying to use it as a metronome at this time.(Nothing too complex.)
Thank you!
Hey Finch! I haven't seen you around in a long time. You never came back to my blog, but just flew away like a finch!
Of course, I don't hang out in my blog either as it is, so I guess it's a moot point.

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Chesh
Answer:
Hey FF,
I have used Hammerhead a few times. I used to use it as a metronome as well, and I used it for the blues collaboration we did a while back on here.
Just to get you started, I'll tell you how to make a simple 4/4 beat. And by you creating it, you should be able to then play around with it yourself to make more complicated beats.
Ok, so you have 6 channels to put different 'instruments', or drum sounds into. You can turn these channels on and off at the bottom. Make sure channels 1, 2, and 3 are on, you can turn the others off if you like. Select channel 1 by clicking on the Channel 1 button. In Channel 1's drop down menu, select Jungle BD. With the channel still selected (there will be a red light on the button), you can edit the rhythm part of this deal. It's divided into 16 boxes, representing 16th notes. To "program" a note to be played, simply click one of the boxes. The note won't play until it has gone through every other note. So basically when a box isn't selected think of it as a 16th rest. For this simple beat, we just want to select the very first box, and the 9th box (the third gold box). If you press play now, you'll just hear a bass drum playing over and over again. We've programmed our bass drum.
Now to program in the snare. Select channel 2. You'll see that those white bars in the boxes have disappeared. That means you're working on a new channel. You can't program all the channels at the same time, which is a limitation, but it's o.k. So from channel 2's drop down menu, select Ac. Snare 1. And with channel 2 still selected, click on the 5th and 13th boxes (the 2nd and 4th yellow boxes). If you press play now, you should hear a bass drum, then snare, then bass then snare, over and over again.
Now, select channel 3, and in the drop down menu select Ac. Closed HH. Select every second box in the rhythm section. If you press play, you should here the original bass and snare drums, now with a high hat playing 8th notes over the top. And that's you're basic 4/4 beat.
You can mess around with the tempo, the volumes of the different channels, the beats, the instruments, what have you. Oh, and you can also download different "userbanks" from the website. If I remember correctly, my favourite is the Acoustic 3 bank. It just has a different set of drum sounds in it. When you download them, I'm pretty sure they're in zip format. Just extract the userbank to an easy to remember folder (you could create a Hammerhead folder in your My Documents folder), and browse to the file by clicking the button on the top menu that says "Userbank: sample bank" and searching for it. To use the actual sounds from the userbank, select a channel, and from the drop down menu, select one of the <User #>'s. You'll have to figure out which drum is which, as sometimes they don't put them in the same order if you have a few userbanks. Usually, though, <User 1> is the bass and <User 2> is the snare.
It isn't REALLY able to do 3/4, but you can get around that by imagining there were no separate pages for measures. Just remember that each "box" thing represents a 16th, or semi-quaver, note. Four 16th notes make up a quarter note, and there are three quarter notes in 3/4 (that's how that time signature gets it's name). So on one measure page you'd use up 12 of those boxes and that's one measure of 3/4. You're then left with 4 more boxes, and that is the beginning of your next measure, but in order to make a whole 3/4 measure, you need to use up 8 more boxes, so you go to the next measure page to use them up, and so on, until it works out that it will start back at the beginning again without having to spill into another measure page.