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| Get our free newsletter for the latest releases Contents Music Software Quick Reference Resources Online Ordering Software Authors Company Info | Shareware Music Machine News We look at how one band uses Hammerhead for drum loops Date posted: June 23 1999 Alan Brown is a member of Mistake Theory, a New Zealand-based band with both trip-hop with World music influences. Some might put them in the same category as Massive Attack and Portishead. You can be the judge by visiting their site and checking out their music. Here Alan offers us some tips on how he uses Hammerhead to create loops in Mistake Theory's music, taking through the process he used in the song 'Broken Earth'. Over to you Alan! I use Hammerhead as an ideas and jamming tool as much as a loop creation programme. Its free! Its very easy to use and it suits my set up as I export the loops to my trusty old Ensoniq EPS sampler so obviously sample size is an issue. I generally work with a loop that I've obtained from a CD, the Net or wherever, as a basis and then use Hammerhead to make it more interesting (or change it entirely). I firstly trim the loop using Cool Edit 96 and then put it in a user bank pub file. (Hammerhead "Makebank" happily uses .wav files in spite of what it tells you). I then use that on the first beat of the Hammerhead pattern and add other beats and/or loops to taste. In the case of the song 'Broken Earth', one of the factory loops is also used part way through the pattern as can be seen in the screen shot. I also use the distortion settings a lot as they sound great!
To export to the EPS I use a rather long winded but effective method. I firstly save the loop (from within Cool Edit) as a .AIFF file. I then use a tiny little programme called 21s to convert it to a .EFE or Ensoniq format. Another free programme epsdisk1.30 writes this to an EPS disk and voila! - no resampling required. I do have to set the root key and key range parameters in the sampler but that's a fairly quick procedure. I'm checking out Recycle! at the moment which will be even easier to export a .wav file to the EPS via MIDI. (Recycle! can send sliced loops or an entire loop). I sometimes also use Hammerhead to spice up sequenced loops by recording my sequence as a .wav, playing around with it in Hammerhead and then inserting it back in the sequence as an audio loop. I use a simple but effective Sequencer/Audio programme for that - Emagic's Micrologic AV. Hammerhead suits me well - its quick, fun, and doesn't get in the way of the most important aspect of all this - the creation of music. If you like what Alan has to say, check out the Mistake Theory site. While you're at it, download Hammerhead
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When I'm happy with that I just save the pattern as a .wav file ready to export to the sampler. One annoying thing that does put people off is the way that Hammerhead some times puts a click on the beginning or end of a loop. I think it all depends on the loop that is used as the main one in a pattern. However its not really a problem as it is easy to use Cool Edit to zoom in and silence the offending sound.