HAPAX REVIEW!
I’ve had my Hapax for nearly 2 years now. It was purchased for centralized sequencing in a hardware setup, replacing a Deluge (which I love but lacked certain features I needed).
Firstly I will say: in my opinion, the Hapax is the king of hardware sequencing.
The more I use it, the more I realize how much thought, care, and attention to detail has gone into it’s creation. It’s deep. Complex. Configurable. Yet simple. Logical. Usable.
Everything just makes sense, fits. The greatest compliment I can give it, is this:
It seems to vanish. When you’re using it, it ‘gets out of the way of itself’, and allows your ideas to flow. It enables a flow state, where you’re unaware of the device itself, and just creating. In my opinion, there aren’t many devices that achieve this level of transparancy.
Understand, that it takes a while to master. It’s bursting to the seams, in terms of features, and tricks, to improve your music and your experience. You’re not going to learn it in a day. It’s a life-long relationship, as the Hapax opens itself up to you and you connect with it.
If I try and describe everything that it does well, this review will be too long. I’ll touch on one little thing that I love then, as an example: Automation (and Instrument Definitions).
An ‘Instrument Definition’ is a little text file you create on your computer, with a list of CC’s and their associated names. You put these on the SD card. Now, when you press the automation button, you’ll get a list of your synths (or drum machine or fx etc) modulatable parameters. This enables a truly wonderful workflow, that goes like this:
You press the Record button (a nice and clear red button). You play notes or turn knobs on your synth.
Everything is immediately recorded and will play back. It just works perfectly. There’s more though. Far more, if you dig deeper.
The Hapax detects which knob you turned, automatically takes you to that automation lane, which will say ‘Filter Cutoff’ etc. You now have so many options it’s amazing. You can interpolate the data or not. You can change the PPQN (amazing for thinning out data, and ensuring that you can send many, many lanes of automation to your synth… the Hapax can automate 64 lanes, per Track! Insane!)
There’s more. You can create points by tapping pads, move them up and down using the encoder. You can zoom into any area (or the whole pattern etc), hold the ‘All’ button, and change the Min, Max, and Centroid values of the automation. I cannot explain how good this is. How easy, quick, and amazing it is to have this level of sequencing power.
Let’s talk about FX. There are a whole host of amazing FX, addable as modules, of which you can have up to 7 per track. There are too many to go into here. I’ll touch on one which everyone can relate to hopefully. LFO’s. The obvious use case, MIDI CC LFO’s, just works perfecly and that alone would be enough to make me happy.
However. When you click on the ‘Destination’ encoder, you’re presented with a stunning list of destinations: Any CC, Pitchbend, Aftertouch, Program Change, Velocity, NRPN, CC Pair, CV Out. Those are great. Then scroll down and realize you can also select as a destination, ANY PARAMETER OF ANY OTHER FX YOU HAVE LOADED ON THAT TRACK.
I cannot overstate the genius of this… it’s out of this world. LFO’s modulating LFO’s, modulating arpeggiators, chance, euclidean, harmonizers, swing, randomizers… and a ton more. The possibilities are staggering.
Build quality, and looks, briefly: Tank. Absolutely solid. Looks and feels premium. The 4 mode buttons are coloured, red, green, yellow, and blue. The rec button is red, those 5 buttons are the only splashes of colour when the Hapax is off. It screams seriousness, with a hint of playfulness. You quickly realize the colour-coding of the mode buttons helps your brain navigate easily. Dear God, why can’t other devices be this well thought out?
The one thing I changed (and highly recommend) was replacing the main encoder with a very large, metal, finger indented encoder. This is well worth changing out as the main encoder is too small in my opinion.
I have to mention the ‘Polychronic’ aspect. Basically you can load and play 2 projects simultaneously, for a total of 32 tracks playing. This gives you many options that other devices do not have or don’t do easily. Aside from the obvious one, of being able to ‘DJ’ one song into another, a track at a time if you wish, it also allows you to simply copy and paste stuff from one project to another. This is huge, and saves a huge amount of time in the long run, when creating and updating templates and so on.
Is it perfect?
No. Of course not. Nothing is. It’s certainly getting there though. There are things I think should have been implemented from the start, extra things I wish it did, I have a long list (I’m a demanding user and I want the moon-on-a-stick as my lollipop). However my list is shrinking as they improve it.
One last thing. The people at Squarp are very friendly and responsive, really I cannot say enough positives about this. Updates have been slow in coming, which can be frustrating, however, I’ve come to realize this is deliberate. When they update it, they tend to add a good amount of stuff, all of which is VERY well thought out and implemented. They seem committed to making THE BEST POSSIBLE SEQUENCER EVER, and have been slowly and steadily achieving this goal.
My eye has occasionally wandered. I’ve looked at other sequencers, wondering if they match up. Some look good. However, there’s always some sort of annoying limitation… 8 CC’s per-track or something similar. Sod that!
The Hapax has changed the way I’ve made music, for the better.
Long may it live!