I just love my Hapax and use it with my Novation Peak, Digitakt and Digitone and use a Bluebox1010 mixer.
Recently I’ve been using VCV rack which is nice and I’m into ambient music. I’d love to get some real modules one day, but as you know it’s expensive.
If it did get into modular I’d love to use the Hapax to sequence it all use all of its wonderful features but wondered what module would you need to connect it all (knowledge block for me)? Using it as a clock source, sequencer, use anll those wonderful effects. I assume I’d need to use the CV ports.
The Hapax for me was specifically for sequencing my modular setup, so it’s definitely perfect for that! The CV outs on the back of the Hapax connect directly into the CV ports on whichever modules you want to control, so you don’t need any kind of module in between. For (Eurorack) modular, everything is CV–gates, triggers, audio, pitch–so the whole idea is that you can plug pretty much anything into pretty much anything else. That’s the beauty of it. Hapax just fits directly into that. The most obvious thing is to sequence notes and triggers, but it’s really up to you what you plug in to what.
I started off in VCV Rack for a while, then picked up a couple of modules with the idea that I’d mainly use VCV Rack and link it out to a few hardware modules. That quickly turned into lots of modules, and not much VCV Rack. You have been warned!
For connecting VCV Rack to the Hapax on the computer you can just use USB MIDI and one of the MIDI to CV plugins–no need for expensive hardware until you actually take the Eurorack plunge.
For connecting VCV Rack to Hapax via CV, or out to hardware modules, you’d need a DC coupled audio interface to get CV into and out of your computer. Probably the most common way to do that is with one of the modules from Expert Sleepers. I think the most common one at the moment is the Expert Sleepers ES-9, which is basically a full audio interface that plugs into your PC via USB and gives you some DC coupled in and outs, as well as line and headphone outs.
(There’s also the ES-8 which is just USB and CV, without all the headphone and line out bits. Quite a bit smaller and a slice cheaper.)
I actually use two modules: the ES-3 for computer to Eurorack, and the ES-6 for Eurorack to computer. (They plug in to my audio interface via ADAT.) I actually quite like that I can separate them so that my signal flow in my rack goes from “input” on the ES-3 across to “output” on the ES-8 on the other side of my rack. If I were buying now, though, I’d probably just go to the ES-9, because it’s not much bigger but adds a lot of convenience and extra features.
Also check out the Befaco MIDI Thing V2 for an affordable option. It can be a VCV bridge (VCV<>Hardware) and can also add 12 more CV outs to your Hapax (Hapax <> Hardware). I’m pretty sure a Thing V2 emulation is currently available in VCV
