I haven’t found this exact disuccsion before (at least not with my upcoming point), so I hope it adds to the topic. As you all know, you can’t have two projects with different BPM running simultaneously. Which is kind of a bummer in a live setting, because you need to find workarounds to transition from one song to another.
Here’s my question: has anyone tried circumventing that with time elasticity? I don’t have my hapax with me at the moment, so I haven’t been able to test it, but here’s my idea.
Let’s say you have a song A at 156 BPM and a song B at 132 BPM. If you set both project to 100 BPM but adjust the time elasticity to match the desired BPM on each track, would that work? Since your project is set to 100 BPM, you simply have to calibrate the time elasticity to 156% or 132%. Then both project could play simultaneously, or at least one after the other without having to set the BPM manually.
It seems that this could work on paper, but I’m curious about possible limitations. Is it super CPU intense and may cause crashes? In which case, not a good option at all in a live setting. Can it mess up LFOs somehow? That’s not too bad in my case, but some might see that as a problem.
That’s it basically, I’m hoping to test that myself at the end of the week, but maybe someone has already done it and can tell me if it’s worth the trouble.
not for 2 projects. you need a second sequencer for that. hapax imho is suitable for 32 tracks of the same project. its not really good for 2 songs at the same time. some complain of not enough tracks but using it this way youve got 32. you could have a ball in the mixmute screen!
Also, I realize that the clock will always be at 100 BPM with this approach. So you’d need to make the appropriate adjustments for any time based effect (for instance delay). But you could compensate that by sending an automation to the appropriate destination when you switch project. That would require you to figure out the equivalence in values between your songs (URGH).
In conclusion, it seems that there’s no simple way to get two projects with different BPM to play at the same time. But there’s enough flexibility with the HAPAX, and probably with any modern box that you might use with it, to find workaround.
I’m gonna stick to samples as transitional elements between my songs, good luck to anyone trying to figure that conundrum for their live sets!
Ideally, it would be the other way around - i.e. have Hapax would calculate and overlay / apply calculated elasticity to all tracks of the proB in order to keep the original project speed with different BPM.
Then there would be some key combo (BPM + proA / proB), that would allow us to switch in a moment which projects sets the master BPM. When changed to the proB, the proA would get its elasticity adjusted in order to stay at previous speed with new underlying BPM. The reverse key combo (proA / proB + BPM) would allow to change the underlying BPM of each project, so that we could mix in the second project and running at 125, even though it’s stored as 120 BPM project.
Hapax likely has the necessary precision to do these adjustments over the tempo ranges most of us would use, but not sure if it could react fast enough to additional ongoing master BPM changes and keep everything synced. Or if it would be possible to do over external BPM. So it might require running on internal clock and disabling the possibility of additional master tempo adjustment when two projects play at the same time and one of them is elastically adjusted.
In any case, it would require a second layer of time elasticity above the existing layer, unless it would be possible to do only with projects, that don’t use time elasticity at all.
