The track on/off toggle behavior is very useful, and I would like to see it implemented in the sequence workflow on the Hapax. In a song mode, needing to be able to turn an instrument off seems to involve holding aside a blank pattern for the instrument, which means, essentially, you don’t even get the full eight tracks.
I’d suggest either implementing a menu item for on/off or simply using the on/off toggle like the Pyramid has. I think, currently, pressing a track a second time restarts it (similar to Ableton, Force, etc.), but that could be a user-selected behavior in the Settings menu.
tl;dr - Being unable to toggle all the patterns off for a particular track is, IMHO, a counterproductive limitation, especially for people wanting to use the Hapax for sequencing out whole songs.
Edited to add: I have already used the feature request form. Posting this here to see if anyone else would find it valuable or if there are workarounds people have uncovered besides leaving a track blank.
I’d like there to be a button that works like Push 2’s “Stop Clip” button. The use of it would be similar to Mute (or Solo, which I’d also like to see), where you would hold that button and then press a pattern button, track button, or row select button. Instead of muting the running pattern while it continues to play, it would stop the pattern entirely, allowing another pattern to be played without having to first unmute the track.
Mute is really cool in that it keeps the current pattern playing, so that it can be resumed really easily. It’s great when you want to toggle a single pattern on and off. However, if you want to stop a pattern and start a new pattern, Mute is less cool, because it requires more button presses to get the second pattern playing after the first has been stopped, since you have to both unmute the track and start the new pattern, which just adds friction when performing.
to be clear, they thought (when I made the suggestion) that the empty pattern solution worked well.
and in fairness, it does… I use this approach (rather than stop) quite a bit on the Push 2 / Live
BUT, I think being limited to 8 patterns, kind of plays against this.
anyways, as above … feature requests are a dialogue with Squarp, not a simple yes/no. (they didn’t say no , never )
in particular, perhaps this feature request, might also be considered alongside perhaps adding more patterns… another common feature request?
e.g. we could perhaps have N pages , each with 7 patterns, and top row = stop.
Id really prefer not to be getting lots of button combos, esp for stop… I think its more performative, hitting a pad… which is why I use empty patterns so much in Live.
but again, ymmv… we all have different preferences.
yeah, I hope so too…
but no idea if its on the cards, or how far up the list it is …
all down to demand, ease of implementation, other things that are more pressing etc.
all that said,
I assume the next firmware release or two, will be pretty much focusing on issues/bugs… which I think is what we’d all want… a stable sequencer is top priority for us all.
but they are ‘processing’ feature requests (probably classifying/grouping etc) at the moment.
A pattern toggle feels more natural to me. You press a pattern pad to start it, you can see it running, you press it again to stop it, it goes wide/grey/faded whatever. This is the workflow for nearly all pad/clip launcher thingies. Playing an empty pattern is just that. Playing an empty pattern. It is not stopping that track from playing.
Which pad/launcher-based sequencers are you talking about where pressing a running pattern’s pad stops that pattern? The two that I can think of that are most similar to Hapax are AKAI Force and Ableton Push 2, and I’m pretty sure neither of them do that.
On Force, pressing a running clip’s pad causes that clip to restart from the beginning. If you want to stop it, you press that track’s Clip Stop button. Also, if a clip is recording and fixed length recording is off, pressing the recording clip’s pad tells Force that the loop end has been reached, at which point it continues playing from the beginning (and for MIDI clips, enters overdub mode).
I don’t have a Push 2, but considering that it has a dedicated Stop Clip button, I assume that pressing a running clip’s pad doesn’t stop the clip, but someone please correct me if I’m wrong.
Being able to stop patterns is important, but so is being able to restart patterns from the beginning, which is the default behavior I’d expect when pressing the button of an already playing pattern.
In the current mode, you can set each pattern to restart when it is selected (pattern mode, old pattern button, change Trig from Free to Re-start) so guess this would be the same? Otherwise they all run in the background anyway.
Interesting… I would say stopping a clip (for me at least) would be a more frequent use than restarting a clip, so a separate restart functionality (2nd+clip button? - I know you love any kind of 2nd+button key combo!) might be more useful.
But… we’ll have to see what our glorious benefactors at Squarp think at the end of the day.
yeah, its interesting what you get used too…
I’d find stopping a clip by hitting the pad to be completely counter-intuitive, just because Im so used to Live.
I think this is also why I like the empty clip approach, its pretty unambiguous.
also, in Live people quite frequently use clips for more ‘creative’ functions, e.g. using it to trigger other events … with follow actions, clips are more like a non-linear timeline… so an empty clip, is almost like a ‘pause’… so goes quite a bit beyond “play pattern”.
(Id love to see follow actions implemented in Hapax … opens so many doors !)
I think part of this, is of course, Live and its clip approach, has been around been around for so long now, it’s really gone beyond a ‘technology feature’ , and people are able to use it as a musical approach. (*)
this is while others, have adopted it… I tend to look to Live and musicians that use it, for inspiration as its so mature.
I also do wonder if for Squarp, playing an empty pattern might be easier to implement… for example, if they are have an assumption that there is always an active pattern, thats going to take ‘effort’ to remove.
whereas empty clips are already there.
BUT as you say, really up to Squarp to decide how they want to move forward.
(*) which, is of course, not suited to every music style/genre or musician.
Yeah, I have never used Live, so that workflow is alien to me. Does it not have the option to stop a track from playing without selecting a different one?
I actually reckon the coding a heck of a lot easier to switch to an ‘empty’ track than coding in a bona fide stop functionality, which is very possibly why they’ve gone that way (and a perfectly acceptable reason, I reckon) but in my head, changing to an empty clip feels very ‘workaround-y’ and with the limits of 8 clips per track, does feel limiting.
Although I would 100% rather see more than 8 clips (even 16 would make an enormous difference) than stop track functionality. And we got a lot of improvements of that kind (thinking of patterns in track mode) so I am holding out for (a hero…?) that.
yes, as I said above, there is dedicated stop clip button…
on push, its one button you use in combo with track.
in the live UI… you have dedicated button (per track) but there are a bunch of options… that are very useful , but probably overly complicated for hardware interface.
yeah, I think an empty clip is likely easier for Squarp… as they already have it.
generally I think, given the (undoubtedly) huge number of feature requests, Im hoping some they do some as quick wins/low hanging fruit using the easier route… even if that means latter revisiting.
aka, prefer ‘imperfect’ in 3 months, rather than perfect in 3 years
)
you essentially say the same thing.