Free Drum Machines to try out: Hammerhead 1.0

I have been playing with Hammerhead Rhythm Station version 1.0, a FREE software drum machine created by Bram Bos way back in 1997:

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Here’s an extract from the developer’s original notes for Hammerhead Rhythm Station:

“Aimed at the dance scene, HammerHead is a simple software drum machine similar to the Roland TR-909. You can use it to create techno loops and jungle patterns, and record your actions to a high-quality, noise-free WAV or RAW file for use with your sampler or sequencer. It includes 23 separate drum patches and six complete loops, plus a feature to implement banks with six samples of your own, making a total of 35 samples that can be used at one time. HammerHead also features adjustments for tempo, shuffle, feedback, and distortion, as well as the ability to export drum loops by measure or by entire session.” Bram Bos.

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A Quick Review of Hammerhead Rhythm Station version 1.0:

Let’s start with a couple of little niggles:

1) Installation:

Once you have installed Hammerhead, you will need to “run as administrator” in Windows 7. If you don’t, the little start up screen with “Groovy” on will not go away until you restart your machine. That’s not so groovy.

2) Wav Files:

It doesn’t save them in Windows 7 on the default setting [File, Stream to disk, Whole Session]. I did recently find out that if you use the other two settings [Current measure] or [All measures] it does create wav files. Prior to that discovery I used Total Recorder “Total Recorder” instead. Once you have a wav file you can convert these to Rex loops in Reason 7 (or above) or Recycle if you want.

If you want to import the recorded wav file into a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), then make sure you adjust the tempo in your host DAW first.

Pluses:

Very easy to program. Click on a channel, select a sample from the dropdown, then click on any of the 16 buttons to program your beat, then proceed to the next channel. You have the option to reverse the sample, apply distortion and adjust the tempo. You can also turn on and off any channels so that you can focus on an individual sound within a channel if you wish. There are some good preset patterns you can load up and some nice samples of 909’s, 808’s 606’s and the like.

You get 35 samples in all, including 7 Bass drum samples, 7 Snare Drums, 2 closed hi hats, 2 open hi hats, 1 crash cymbal, and 6 loops, including “the funky drummer”.

You can add one of your own to each channel into one of the 6 [user] slots. You have independent sliders for tempo (from 50 – 250), shuffle, distortion and feedback. It appears to play with random velocity, so some notes are louder than others.

You can also get additional user patterns from the three chords website (link given below).
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I have created a video where I use Hammerhead Rhythm Station in order to capture a snare drum sample.

This is the accompanying narrative from YouTube:

This is the first video in a FREE series to be featured on http://howtoprogramdrums.com

The video describes how to capture a drum machine sample from software playing inside your computer, recording it using Total Recorder and playing it back and editing it in Goldwave to create both stereo and mono .wav files.

Hammerhead Rhythm Station – Mark 1.0 is used as an example but any source could be used. It provides links to the various software products which you can start using for FREE on evaluation, which you can also Google without too much difficulty.

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Download Links:

You can download Hammerhead Rhythm Station version 1.0 from the following site:
 
You can also download Hammerhead Rhythm Station version 1.0 from the following link:
There are some more of Bram Bos’s software and a donation button (NB which does not appear to work – Use it at your own risk) here:

Further reading:

I featured HammerHead on my best drum machines ever roundup amongst some distinguished company. Is your favourite on the list? Check it out here:

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