How do you deal with the possibility of losing information when you power down your equipment? How do you work for multiple days on one idea?
If I really want to be sure that everything will come back up how I left it, I need to make sure every machine’s sound has been saved to a preset (did I modify the original preset? Should I risk duping a preset with a slight change?). Then I need to program PC messages on the Hapax so that it knows which presets to use (and every machine has their own arcane scheme and limitations).
I want this to work, I love being totally dawless and being off the computer because it’s so immediate. But there is nothing immediate about packaging up a project so I can power down or work on something else.
There’s got to be a better way! Should I bake down every sound to a sample on the Digitakt? Record to tape/computer and resign myself to freezing a track in an arrangement before the day’s over?
these concerns come with the dawless territory. personally i embrace the conveniences a daw offers. i even make windows modules so i can have my daw right in the case and believe me its liberating. my hardware fits right in to the equation! and when theres a plugin with no hardware equivalent (quite often these days) i just open it and use it with midi from hapax as if it were a hardware synth. the better way you are searching for is a daw. embrace advances in music technology! you can still have your hardware.
or simplify with the use of something like dirtywave m8 tracker, which has a lot of big sound all wrapped up in a small package with total recall. also available as a simple midi target, used from hapax!
Stuff with presets, I save the presets.
I also use the definitions a lot, so for some gear the preset is essentially held in the Hapax project.
For the kit without presets or midi CC, I tend to leave the knobs and cables as they are and hope the cats don’t sit on anything!
This is definitely the nature of working with hardware that one has to accept. For me, I went from saving presets (or leaving the settings on my analogue devices) and hoping for the best, towards multitracking in a DAW and assembling it later in the DAW, re-recording bits and pieces, adding new things in. If your goals are live performance, obviously you have to be more diligent about presets, and know every piece of gear you have inside and out, and accept that sometimes things will sound a little bit different.
I really like that, I’ve been doing automations in the Hapax but I should just start from a basic preset on the synth and then keep all the deviations from that in the Hapax.
For other responses about integrating a DAW, I’m on a computer all day and really am resisting bringing a computer into my setup. But I hear you, that’s where I’ll go if I have to!
i get it. i dont feel like im staring at the screen a lot honestly.
theres definitely strength in listening to your music and motor memory and the idea you have to figure out how to make it work instead of simply pushing a button on screen.
I decided to only buy new gear that has full midi control and patch storage. This helps a lot. And Hapax is perfect for recalling the right patches per project.
This thread got me thinking about sysex program dumping. This is not so universal any more but maybe midi 2.0 can bring it back for more complex modern synths.
What I was thinking is a simple device that you could ping to grab sysex dumps from the synths you are using for a session and then just store all of that under a session.
I could do this with a virus, but the jupiter-xm doesn’t seem to have a program dump, for instance.
Actually, it looks like midi-designer can do this but it is likely pulling all of the values since the JXM midi implementation doesn’t appear to have a dump command.
If I understand you correctly, it’s almost as if you’re talking about external sysex store/recall functionality?..
Electra One is close, but not quite there yet.
Writing a custom app should be feasible, i.e. request the sysex, assign it to a pair of input/output program change slots + midi channels…
I have an electra one mk i and it has never really clicked with me.
I’m thinking of a much smaller and cheaper box based on a teensy or pi zero and yeah, you could do something with program changes to make it pretty transparent. This would be pretty straightforward for devices that have a sysex program request but you’d need custom code for other devices.
Given that midi 2.0 allows things like json, it would be great to come up with a mapping system based on that. The electra is frustrating because it uses its own unique data model to handle parameter mapping.
I do agree, E1 does require quite a bit of effort.
But when you do really need it - I couldn’t find any programmable alternative that would come close. And I love the pots
And writing a custom application required even more justification
