I was hesitant to buy a Hapax when first announced because there were a few things that Pyramid did that no other sequencer in my price range did, things that made Pyramid the only real option for me. Unfortunately, one of those things Pyramid does that most don’t involves the length of tracks.
32 Bar track length limitation
The Pyramid track length of 384 bars blew away (blows away) so much of the competition and for the music I made, it sealed the deal. The 32 bar max on Hapax is an infuriating limitation for me every. single. time. Track elasticity is great for a certain use case but almost never works for me. When I’m running multiple instruments on my sampler, I can’t just set one track to be half-time because that screws up the clock being sent to the sampler (the correct clock and the halftime clock hack) and even then, what does half time elasticity really do for me? 64 bars instead of 32? That’s not really helpful.
Math is great! I love it! But it is no substitute for a sensible track length. Want a note to be a quarter note the first time through but be an eighth the second time? If that is possible, I haven’t figured out how to do it.
I’ve worked around this by… well, I just haven’t made that kind of music on the Hapax. I’m hoping this is fixed soon but until then, I’m keeping my Pyramid. For this reason but also for a couple others.
Pyramidi
Nuff said.
Consolidate
When composing on the Pyramid (and to a lesser extent on the Squarp), I often use arps, delay, scaler, chance, LFOs, and/or harmonizer fx on a track until I get something I love, then I make it permanent. That was extremely simple on Pyramid thanks to the Consolidate feature. With the Hapax, I play the midi to my laptop, record it in Logic, then play it back from Logic and record it on the Hapax. Not my favorite workflow. I mean, one of the top 3 reasons I own a hardware sequencer is so that I can avoid using the laptop.
Named notes in Instrument Definitions
Back to the sampler. I almost always have multiple instruments on my sampler, thanks to multisamples. I’ll have a multisampled drum kit or a piano or vocal parts or whatever, each on their own MIDI channel, then a single MIDI channel for the rest of the sampler pads. On the Pyramid, my drum kit multisample instrument definition uses named notes so that I can see which note is which drum, and the notes that aren’t part of the kit are hidden. I also use named notes for hardware that has note range limitations (like the Minitaur). Hapax doesn’t support named notes so using the drum kit on my sampler is just too much trouble for me. I’m not good enough to remember note 50 is Crash Cymbal 1 choke. When I use the Pyramid, I don’t have to remember that. So I still use the pyramid for drums.
But wait, what about drum tracks on Hapax?
Only 8 lanes in a drum track
Let’s see… what can I do with 8 drums? 1 kick. 1 snare. 1 crash cymbal. 1 closed hat. 1 open hat. 1 half-open hat. 1 tom. 1 floor tom. That’s it.
People make fun of Ringo Starr’s minimal drum kit and even he had more pieces than that.
And I am no Ringo Starr. I mean that as self-deprecatingly as possible.
There is a strict limit of 64 samples in a multisample instrument on my sampler so I take a full multisample kit with 3 velocity layers and brutally cull it down to the smallest usable number of instruments/velocity layers so that it is under 65 samples and still meets my needs. That usually means around 20 “lanes”. Could I get it down to 16? Probably. Down to 12? Maybe? Down to 10? Ehhhh… Down to 8? No.
I work around this by… keeping my Pyramid and using it for writing drum parts. What do I do with the parts after that? I’m glad you asked.
No MIDI file import
I love how easy it is to both get the MIDI files from a Pyramid project and to import MIDI files to a Pyramid project. But how to get those parts from the Pyramid to the Hapax? The same way I work around the lack of composite feature: I play the drum track on the Pyramid, into the Hapax, and record it as a poly track on the Hapax (because Hapax drum tracks aren’t useful for me). It’s not an ideal workflow and (like a lot of what I’ve spent a couple years learning on/from the Pyramid) it isn’t anywhere near as nice as working the Pyramid.
I love running my Pyramid via USB battery power
I totally get this limitation but that doesn’t make me miss it 
But what about everything else?
Well, that’s the thing… it’s twice the price and it’s 4 times as nice. Hapax does SO MUCH more than Pyramid and does SO MANY things better than Pyramid. Other than the items above (and a couple I’m surely forgetting), Hapax is better in every way. If I had written down my list of things I wish were different about the Pyramid, Hapax checks off all or nearly all of the items on that list. The pads/key entry, multiple projects, gapless saving, maths, more ports, algos, no micro-USB, I really can’t list them all. That’s why I ordered the Hapax a few days after it was released. The sum of its parts are so much more than just “better” than Pyramid. It’s a different category of device and most use cases wouldn’t have any of the problems I have moving from Pyramid to Hapax. I can’t even remember my full Pyramid wish list because I’ve grown so used to having the power of the Hapax, I’m already taking it for granted. If none of the missing features are ever added, it was and is still more than a worthy upgrade for me.