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MORE TUTORIALS
- Creating a simple drum loop
- Saving your pattern as wav
- Using the Userbank Creator
- Using HH in your music
- How to play triplets

TUTORIAL - ODD TIME SIGNATURES

You need to have some basic understanding of time signatures to be able to understand the ramblings below. This is a good place to start.

HammerHead was designed to make drum loops in 2/4, 4/4, 8/8 etc. time. But it's possible to make loops in 3/4, 6/8, 5/4 and 7/8 (and more) as well. You can never make a drum loop that's just one bar long in these time signatures though, they'll always be at least four bars long.

Take 3/4 time for example. If we consequently use HammerHead's yellow buttons for the quater notes, we'll see that every measure (in Hammer-
Head) has four quater notes (yellow buttons). But since there are only three quater notes per measure in 3/4 time, we can't create our 3/4 drum loop without increasing the Total measures to three. Four quater notes per measure and three total measures makes a total of 12 quater notes. In 3/4 time, 12 quater notes is the same as 4 measures, and therefore that's the smallest number of bars we can have in our 3/4 loop.

The first accentuated hit would then be on the 1:st yellow button on the 1:st measure, the second one on the 4:th, the third on the 3:rd yellow button on the 2:nd measure and the fourth on the 2:nd yellow button on the 3:rd measure as shown in the image below. In this example, the bass drum (BD) and snare (SD) are hitting the quater notes and the hihat (HH) is playing eighth notes throughout the pattern.



As you probably can tell, you can use virtually the same pattern for 6/8. 5/4, 7/8 and many other time signatures can be achieved by using the same principle. To make four bars in 5/4 time you will need to set Total measures to five and seven measures are needed to make eight bars in 7/8.

Examples of loops in different time signatures can be found on the User Submissions page.


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