Taping the beats ala Four Bricks Rook?

[escargot]

Can hermod use its 8 pads to tap beats/ enter gates directly on its interface?
I’m interested in a four bricks rook from shakmat but i wonder if my newly acquired hermod can pull it off. i guess via midi or cv it can?
any 4BR owners here who could ship in how those 2 cover common grounds or each offer specific specs not doable on the other. (im just talking about gate sequencing here)

thanks

[thetechnobear]

sorry, dont know 4BR

you cannot ‘tap’ in beats on the hermod - it’s not a playable interface as such.
(personally, Im not sure, it would work well as one)

however, Hermod does have (lots of) recording functionality, so you could plug in any midi controller and tap in the beats … which for me at least is a much better ‘playing’ experience, and also allows you things like CC control. (and of course, melodic entry too)

midi is via DIN/USB host or device… so fantastic connectivity.
it’ll even power controllers over USB… so keeps it all simple/compact.

and yes, you can also do this via CV too…

[cowboy]

I have both Hermod and 4BR. I use a combination of 4BR and 2x Dnipro DOT for all my core rhythms, and Hermod for everything else.

I’m not sure how others use Hermod, but I’ve personally found it to be really insufficient for doing any kind of drum looping or manipulation, because it has no way of being able to mute/delete/manage all the notes with the same pitch value (like you’d have with drums) on a track. Like, if I wanted to take a beat and then re-record JUST the kick drum, it just wouldn’t be possible. I’d have to erase and re-record the whole track.

4BR lets you do that, and quite well, I might add! My only gripe with 4BR is that you can’t hook it up to a computer to manage your drum patterns. You have to do all the programming entirely in-unit. Which is fine, but having some kind of SD card or USB port with MIDI files (or similar) would be amazing, because I’m not the best finger drummer and would like to create some high-resolution patterns I know I’ll never be able to play in-unit.

That said, of all the sequencers I’ve used, Hermod has been by far the most immediate and fun. Once I have the drums going, I can very easily record some chords, a bass line, melody, whatever. I can delete any track and re-record easily. I can duplicate the entire sequence, tweak it, and then go back to the original.

I use them both in all my YouTube videos and on my weekly Twitch stream. If you pop by the stream sometime, I’m happy to show you how they work

The Entire Robot

[thetechnobear]

@cowboy

I’m not sure how others use Hermod, but I’ve personally found it to be really insufficient for doing any kind of drum looping or manipulation, because it has no way of being able to mute/delete/manage all the notes with the same pitch value (like you’d have with drums) on a track. Like, if I wanted to take a beat and then re-record JUST the kick drum, it just wouldn’t be possible. I’d have to erase and re-record the whole track.

not quite sure I follow this…
do you mean for sequencing midi or cv?

when Im using CV (well gates), I use a (mono) track per instrument, since there is only one gate output anyway. … so I cannot see this as an issue, as you don’t use multiple notes.

for midi, then yeah, this i can see this is a bit of an issue…
for this I use the pyramid, which has the option you describe … though since it also has so many tracks I still often put on separate tracks. (partly so I can use the Euclid steps)
(though 4BR doesnt have midi, so seems odd comparison?!)

I think everyone uses the hermod differently, since we all have different number of voices in our racks, and more or less requirements to use the midi2cv of hermod.

I have quite a few different setups which I switch between…
the 2 most common setups I use are
a) 4 mono voice + 4 mod
voices I use for oscillators/env (duh!) , and mods are either sequenced or lfos
then the 4 gates on the mod tracks are used either for drum trigs or clock related functions.
b) 4 poly voice (pitch/gate/velocity)
similar to (a) , but here I want the modulation for the voices to be sequence via velocity, or played from a keyboard…
again, the gates on the velocity tracks can then be used for drum trigs or clock related functions.

[cowboy]

That’s a good point. I was talking about for a MIDI-style drum track, where each drum is associated with a note value, and multiple drums can exist on a single track. I regularly sequence 4-6 voices in Hermod, so I can’t afford to dedicate 4+ tracks just to drums.

I’m sure Hermod is fine for sequencing drums, when each drum has a separate track. But there are dedicated gate/trigger sequencers, like 4BR, that have a better (IMO) workflow for that kind of thing.