Perfect Dawless Workplace

Just finished my final DAWless workspace. I know the journey will never come to an end, but this is a milestone for sure and finally a setting that is REALLY DAWless. If you’re like me and you don’t do gigs and live jams but want to make whole songs, then I really recommend putting a HAPAX beneath your Elektron gear. Because everybody was praising the Elektron sequencers to the moon, I thought that was not something to change. But with the HAPAX, everything changed. It’s pure fun. Absolutely the best product on my table and the real brain of the whole combo.



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This is actually beautiful. :heart_eyes: LOL

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Nice, I have that same desk in black. Pricey and some minor moans about it but it’s especially great if you have a few rackmount bits.

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I mean… it looks good for YouTube… but wait until the kids and the dog get in there :grimacing:

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Can confirm the Hapax is a winner. I’ve put together a small studio in a similar manner.

Squarp pretty much knicked the best bits of the Elektron sequencer & merged it with Ableton’s clip launcher. Add in instrument definitions so you know what every CC, NRPN etc is for your gear & it’s damn near perfect.

I’m more into hybrid workflows rather than DAWless ones, but this still works as a DAWless rig.

Points for the cable management & nice diagrams too.

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I find more and more that I don’t like sitting at a desk trying to make music. Just a personal thing. But that’s why making music with a few smaller devices is so appealing (say, a DT, ST and S-1) to me. I can move that stuff wherever I want to play easily. That’s at least a big part of the “DAWless” reasoning to me, not needing to sit at a desk for hours.

All that said, those are a couple of beautiful (and pricey!) setups

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Oh wow, this looks amazing! I’d love to hear some tunes from that sweet DAW-less rig. Got a link? I’m sure it sounds as smooth as butter on a hot pancake!

-Daniel

I admire the clean set-up and graphs! Looks great, even with a white desk.

Hapax looks like the perfect dawless daw if that makes sense.

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look cool &clean! personally i’d get that huge screen out of my face :slight_smile:

My kid would have covered that space with marmalade before I even had a chance to take the picture!

Beautiful setup though and thanks for the diagram, really useful :+1:

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I’ve got 4 of them… but the room is a forbidden zone :wink:

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Love that silver faceplate on the Hapax!

Awesome setup too!

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Love the diagrams, very elegant - something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now as I’m also rocking a Hapax and I keep trying to ‘refine’ my setup and then inevitably make a silly change to a midi channel on a piece of gear for some unknown reason, which then breaks all of my previous material.

Part of my problem is that I’m obsessed with being able to play my stuff live, so the best layout for the studio is not usually workable for quick and easy transport and stage setup/teardown.

Can I ask, how do you mix on DAWless? I started a separate thread trying to understand mixing and the gist seemed to be that you needed a DAW, wasn’t ideal to do it just on hardware. So do you have some unit that handles mixing, or you just use your ear and be done with it?