"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 hub file. (Hammerhead "Makebank" happily uses .wav files in spite of what it tells you (Not true, use .raw only. /Ed.)). 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. I also use the distortion settings a lot as they sound great!

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 (Use .raw files only to avoid this problem. /Ed.). However its not really a problem as it is easy to use Cool Edit to zoom in and silence the offending sound.

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."