I’m new to the Hapax and I’m slowly migrating over from the Elektron workflow sequencer. The Hapax is wonderful, but I might be missing something with quantizing and utime when live recording.
I like record some of my melodies live from the Hapax’s using the live option with the pads or from the keystep and I am trying to set it up similar to the Digitone/Digitakts 1/16 steps and quantized. I set the track to 1/16 and hit record and play and expect to be quantized, but due to my bad timings everything is off and not quantized and I have to spend ages manually moving the notes and also setting the utime to 0.
I think I am being stupid, what am I doing wrong here? I was hoping to get it similar to the Elekton’s then once I’m there is start to explore to move away from that world.
Squarp doesn’t do quantize like Elektron which may or may not be a good thing.
With Elektron the quantize is destructive so everything is physically snapped to the grid and you would then nudge things back off grid manually for some humanization.
With the Squarp workflow, quantize is non-destructive and is based on the quantize setting which you can freely change and notes will adapt accordingly but not physically move. So in theory, you don’t need to adjust the uTime as it will audibly be done for you.
This works in theory and is flexible, but in practice seeing steps positioned ‘wrong’ is a little odd and can cause issues down the line when you’re eyeballing a pattern (eg: why is that step positioned there?). This happens a lot if your playing is off (like me) and so you then spend a frustrating amount of time moving steps back into place.
Also sometimes you want full control over the exact positioning of notes with manual timing adjustments (so no quantize). And that will inevitably mean moving every note, once to get them on grid and again for any you want deliberately off grid.
I wish there was a way to visually and/or physically snap notes to the a grid, but it’s been like this since the Pyramid so I don’t think Squarp will change the way this works.
Open a pattern in [Step] mode, hold [all] to select all notes, then press and short hold the [uTime] encoder to snap every note start to the nearest step division.
I forgot to add - the above locking notes to the grid applies to Elektron when using ‘quantized record’ . You can also apply non destructive quantizationdepending on the machine.
That’s good to know thanks! Though the issue I have is that Hapax snaps any early note to the previous step even if it might actually be closer to the next step in the grid. So for example a note on step 2 with a uTime of -1% will snap to Step 1 even though it is closer to Step 2. This might have been fixed since I last used Hapax…?
I’ve actually never heard of non destructive and destructive quantization, could you explain that?
Good to know I can use that snap to grid feature, but as you say annoying it if puts in on the other step.
My timings when I live record are always off so being about to quantize and 0% utime the notes will help to get it close to the timings I want. I just seem to be spending so much time manually moving notes if the melody is over 128 steps or so.
However, it doesn’t actually quantize, but rather shift the notes to snap the start time to the grid. This means that the end time also gets shifted, since the note length doesn’t change. This can cause changes in how the melody is played when a note suddenly overlaps another note, or vice versa.
With real quantize, it should leave the end time untouched (except when it also quantizes end times), so it will actually change the note length if the note start is shifted. This will prevent unwanted changes in notes overlapping or not.
I really hope Squarp will add a proper destructive quantize function in the future (I did send them a feature request a while ago).
Sure. Destructive means the notes will physically move and you won’t be able to move them back (once you’ve past undo). This is the same as you manually moving them to a specific place.
Non-destructive will move the notes in realtime depending on the Quantization setting (eg: 1/16) but leave them where they are so in the future you could change Quantization to another value (1/32 etc).
