DHL was sandbagging the estimate, Hapax showed today, not Fri like they told me to expect. It’s beautiful, seriously. I have only HW first blush, I’ll probably film in some impressions soon. I’m really digging the OXI but my immediate impression is this is the machine I want to sequence tracks with, and the OXI I want to spend time developing ideas on an instrument or synth. The Hapax is definitely a lived at home device, while OXI plus iPad plus anywhere has been amazing.
Hapax knobs are … ok? Not soft touch, not metal like OXI. They got swapped before using them so… yeah. The replacement chroma fatty aren’t deep enough so they stand off a dumb looking amount, and neither are the tall rubber encoders. The chrome ones fit great.
More to come, I have some things to compare against if anyone has questions on build stuff.
The Hapax seems to be the magical beast I’ve been hunting for a long time.
I’ve barely scratched the surface and every section I start to dig into makes sense and makes something cool sounding happens. I need to pivot into the steps sequencer and the algos I got it for in the first place, but I’m having too much fun exploring the chords and master transpose to even make it that far.
Hapax the drum track setup is really on point. Each row/part is assigned a note. It’s really easy to dial in a kit against hardware and the 16 pads Live layout is such an improvement over single trigs. The random fill worked great on hats and perc. The added row of track buttons makes a big difference because the grid can always respond as if you want to play notes, and doesn’t have to be selected first instead. It’s really easy to pivot into velocity or any automation.
The OXI I keep struggling to align with how kits work. You map the root, then each row/track is an offset from the root. The rows are more flexible like a Electron in that any trig can be assigned a new sound. I’m not sure what I keep doing wrong but I often put in a step and it trigger the wrong drum like a step on the HH lane will play a snare, because the default note shifted. its easy to pull it back to the correct note with hold and dial, but I need to figure out how to manage it better. The random is seemingly as random as on the Hapax (I mean, right?) but the OXI also has MI Grids which I haven’t used but sounds cool and it was fun to mess around with. OXI you can pivot into velocity really easily too, and there’s a one click humanizer and it sets up automation ranges really easily.
Both machines feel like they can take a drum groove you’ve built and start to tweak with it. setting up felt easier on the Hapax. Step sequencing did too. The MI generator is cool though and I wish Hapax had it too. OXI sort of wants you to harness chaos into your HW machine a bit more and it’s sounded lovely so far.
MC-101 and either of them is doing great work. the acoustic bass presets sound amazing and so do any mallets. it has so.many.good.synths and you can load sounds into it in stupid amount of ways and it seems like I can start mapping the effects and prog changes, too.
Your review is insightful