Hi ,
Anyone sequenced a full song via the hapax without a daw involved.
It would great to know how you got along or even hear
i’ve gotten through about three tracks in Hapax, not 100% finished but 50-75% between the three of them. mostly have the basic parts for each track but not fully sequenced from start to finish (some of them are more finished than others in terms of the composing). taking a break from finishing them in Hapax for a few reasons (1) i use a lot of vocal samples in my tracks, which not only eat up patterns for a full intro/verse/chorus/breakdown structure but also often don’t start immediately on the first beat of a given pattern; accommodating anything that doesn’t start on the first beat of a pattern I find to be a pain in Song mode – either you have to insert blank measures in the pattern, create two Sections – one without the Pattern you want to bring in late and one with it, or make one-bar fill Patterns (again, eating up more Patterns on the drum and vocal tracks) and then shorten the immediate previous Section by a bar when you’re sequencing them in Song mode; and (2) even when I could make this work in theory, Patterns still weren’t all running perfectly in sync as they should in Song mode when I play from the start, e.g., a Pattern that should have started on the first beat of a new section was being played back from the middle or 3/4 through the Pattern on beat one (other users have identified the same issue so hopefully if it’s a bug, will be addressed in future updates). all to say . . . it’s not impossible just more laborious for what i’m trying to do within Hapax’s limitations and if I switch over to Deluge, no point really trying to take these tracks further in the current workflow
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I’ve successfully played several sets fully sequenced from Hapax.
Basically starting building patters and then songs out of those patterns in a song mode. Then triggering song to be played, works pretty straight-forward.
Where I have more struggle is how to change between two projects for a transition. With the approach in song mode it’s hard to catch begging of the track in project b, during the transition.
i’m now thinking playing live by triggering patterns manually without going to the song mode. This way I can overlap few patters first between the two projects and then mute the first one, without risking project b to advance too far in the track.
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Interesting, i guess for more stripped down tracks / song purposes it can work ,?
@chrisroland yea was thinking similar in terms of drum tracks - 8 patterns over 8 drum parts might be a challenge
Can you use two drum tracks for this ?
Song sections can be a pain just like the mpc which stops me for using it in that way too.
Was it different using the pyramid? I never tried the pyramid …but i do have the hermod in my euro rack, which is cool but i still have record racks out to audio to arrange them in any purposefull manner
Hi when you mention triggering pattens , would that be manually or via another method
I was think triggering manually by pressing one of the eight buttons on the right hand side and setting pattern to play as a loop, this way I can play certain part longer or shorter or skip altogether, depending on how people are reacting.
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Hoo i see live , but they would be in sync to bar measure
Hi chris
I think you mentioned previously owning the pyramid,
Just wondering if was it more suited to your midi set up with more patterns available?
I know song sequencing is similar to mpc again …but maybe less limited pattern wise for you ?
still have the Pyramid, which i do love for the reasons you mentioned. but still bump up against a lot of the same friction in building out full tracks in Sequence mode as Song mode on Hapax (structurally they both work the same way, chaining a series of snapshots of mute states for all active tracks). with Pyramid, the limitation is on 32 discrete Sequence parts in total. i could probably make that work too but like Song mode, still just a chore to try to keep that many mute/unmute settings for 16 tracks and as many patterns per track (or more) straight. Hapax does make that part of the task much more efficient with the grid but . . . now only seven effective patterns per track per song.
i were only writing tracks to record in the studio, i might just go back to Pyramid but wanting to also play them out live as a set without stopping to load the next project into Pyramid, looking like it’s easier to just switch over to Deluge despite it being far less intuitive a workflow than Hapax. c’est la vie!
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I sequenced over half of the score for a live (non-musical) theater production late last Summer. It was a nice forced deep dive into Hapax and song mode. I ended up using a DAW in addition the the Hapax for some arrangements and sometimes round-tripping Hapax-DAW-Hapax in order to “Consolidate” arps. I used Song Mode on Hapax some of the time, other times stayed in Pattern mode. When the DAW wasn’t involved with the composition, the audio was recorded on a 1010 Music Bluebox (and then transferred to the DAW for mixing and mastering). When the DAW was involved with the composition, I usually played the MIDI from the Hapax to the DAW and then continued arranging in the DAW and used software instruments instead of hardware instruments.
More recently I’ve been working up a lot of multisamples for my Blackbox sampler and testing them as I go by composing on Hapax. It seems to be about the same 50/50 mix of Song Mode vs staying in Pattern Mode and controlling patterns as I go.
For a truly “finished” song, I always have my DAW involved at some point even if it is only the final master step.
This is pretty early in the Songs composed using Hapax thread, But 44 of my 52 Weekly Beats from last year are all Hapax dawless tracks. I have a 45 minute live set which is also Hapax based, which will get recorded soon.
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