I love a lot of things about the Hapax, but the one that grinds my gears is the fact that once you’ve muted a track, you cannot play on it. The best workaround I found is to change patterns instead of muting, but it’s annoying because you need to wait until the pattern is over.
someone suggested dedicating a track specifically to live play and adding an output effect to change what should it control, and it’s a great tip, but it doesn’t work in my use case: my music is mainly improvised, and i like to be able to noodle live on the transposition track, which requires me to do the pattern changing routine if i want to switch from a prerecorded pattern to me improvising.
I used to use a Conductive Labs NDLR specifically for the ability to quickly go back into a “drone on the tonic” mode, but the other day i went out for a set and realized the NDLR emits some HUGE noise when plugged to the Hapax (weirdly it doesn’t happen at my place), so I am now working on replacing my NDLR workflow with the Hapax only.
I’d love to have an option somewhere in the menu that would make it so the mute is only applied to the patterns of a track and not on what you play in live mode.
Scenario 1:
You have a pattern playing on a track and want mute it and then play live using the sound addressed by that track … In which case, yes, the current mute behavior would prevent that.
Scenario 2:
You have a sequence being sent to that track from an external source and you want to mute it as though it’s a native sequence (assuming that the Hapax is your primary interface) … In which case, the current mute behavior is optimal.
Now, considering that you can accomplish Scenario 1 by simply launching an empty pattern on that track (which can be done just as directly and with the same number of actions as muting it), I’d say that we have our bases covered.
And there are other solutions as well, as already mentioned – like addressing the sounds that you wish to play live via a separate, dedicated track, or having more than one MIDI pathway from your controller to a given sound source, etc.
Anyway, lots of options there.
There are always going to be caveats when it comes to step sequencing and live looping versus, say, simply playing an instrument live, and vice versa.
You can’t launch an empty pattern and expect it to immediately start playing so that’s not a good solution according to me, it does not allow for smooth switching between hapax sequences and live playing.
Using a separate, dedicated, track means that you have two tracks listening to the same incoming midi so if you unmute the track playing a recorded sequence and then play on top of the sequence with your midi controller you get two of each midi event. Also far from ideal.
To me, personally, it makes sense to let midi input through, including going through all effects, even if a track is muted. I constantly get surprised when an instrument isn’t reacting to input just because I muted the track.
I’d also like to see an “allow thru on mute” option. It could be a “misc” settings value.
Another work around for some situations is to duplicate you projA track settings on projB, then when you mute a track in projA you can select projB and and keep playing on that channel. This assumes you don’t really use 2 projects at once though, this is like setting projA as the “sequencer” and projB as a throughput
I was mostly just responding to the guy who came here to drop a bunch of comments in several threads at once about how “bizarre” and “stupid” the Hapax is, and let him know that there are reasons and workarounds for these functionalities that he doesn’t seem to fully understand.
That said, I too would prefer it, if I could play live through an otherwise muted track. I do this a lot when performing on other machines, and would certainly embrace the option to change that behavior on the Hapax if I could.
