I am considering a Hapax sequencer as I’m genuinely sick and tired of midi issues with my PC & DAW. I’m a drum and bass & broken beat producer from the 90’s so need the Hapax to control the following;
Akai S6000
Akai CD3000XL
Roland XV5080
Korg Triton
Ensoniq MR
Novation: Drumstation-AStation & Super Basstation
Clavia Nord Lead & Nord Lead 3
Waldorf Pulse
Studio Electronics ATC1
Sherman Filterbank
And if it could do all that and even control my DAW that would be a God send!
Could anyone shed some light on how well the Hapax works with 90’s samplers & romplers? Also, what are the pros & cons of controlling your DAW with the Hapax?
I’m a newbie with these types of sequencers but my goal is to get back to having the same kind of fun I was having with my old Atari Ste & a couple of samplers without latency, jitter, updates, crashes, poor drivers, getting in the way.
i sequence my “new” MPC One with Hapax and it should work basically the same for an old school Akai as I understand it. You just get Hapax sending MIDI on a given track/channel out and program the Akai to receive on the same channel IN. the new MPCs are great because each track in there can have a unique MIDI channel so, depending on how you configure Hapax (esp. now with the virtual cables, which i haven’t tried yet) you have at least 16 discrete drum programs/plugins/keygroups to run from Hapax. I don’t know exactly how the old Akai samplers allocated MIDI across different sample programs/projects but my understanding, for example, is when slicing up breaks each slice can be assigned its own MIDI note value, which really should be all you need to get some hectic jungle bizness going with a chopped beat.
with the gear you listed, that looks like a minimum of 10 Hapax tracks but would probably want to dedicate multiple MIDI channels to the Akais or the polysynths if they’re multitimbral. someone more experienced with the new virtual cables function would have a better idea how that might impact the final routing though
i use usb midi from hapax to DAW and route from there to my hardware midi interface which has many 5 pin din plugs. then i just hook those cables to hardware as i would have if i was only using a DAW to sequence. some like to buy a midi router that directly converts usb from hapax into many 5 pin din busses. usb from hapax now has 16 midi busses, each containing 16 midi channels so you can hook up a lot of gear over that single usb cable! and with the bandwidth available on usb from hapax theres no danger of overloading with too many midi commands. but if you can stand it, i would recommend using your DAW as the extremely capable router that they are these days.
the only ‘drawback’ i can see to controlling your DAW with hapax is setting up sync between them which has some people pulling their own hair out. i personally have not had many problems but it was a small challenge to get right the first time i tried it. see the few threads where people complain and then later figure it out. at the moment we are waiting for some convenience fixes from hapax but essentially audio sync works and provides the tightest tempo sync ive ever experienced between hardware and DAW. i dont recommend using midi clock to send sync from DAW to hapax honestly.
hapax by its self is the most advanced hardware midi sequencer that is still a pleasure to use in my honest opinion. the learning curve and visual feedback and elegant layout creates a much less stressful experience than any competitor honestly. stick with it until you get it, its very worth the result.
if you are using a pc running windows, they need help usually to optimize performance. mac not so much. if pc, check this thread out:
i understand optimizing a pc tends to be a lot of steps for a music focused user. i dont relish these steps either, but once you have a handle on them, windows computers become a much nicer environment to create music in. and of course if you have a monster machine these optimizations become less important.
im seriously considering a mac mini m4 these days i must say however! but i do love making a windows machine work well, AFTER the process is over lol!
if the DAW is Logic Pro, as far as I know, Hapax will have to receive sync from Logic and cannot be the clock itself (Apple apparently disabled Logic from receiving external sync several versions ago)
i would not sync a daw to hapax. thats never going to work well in my opinion. audio (cv pulse) sync from any daw to hapax has never failed to produce a very tight sync as i mentioned above.
when the op says ‘control’ a DAW i assume he meant control parameters of the DAW and to send midi note and controller commands to plugin synths and fx etc. which hapax does very well and presumably could be done using logic just as well.