Squarp Instruments Hapax Polychronic Performance Sequencer

[blipson]

@jemmons, @thetechnobear

I’ve looked into Pyramid in the past. As I recall, it does polymeters (flexible time signatures), but not polyrhythms (flexible tuplets or irrational rhythms). By 7:4, for example, I mean “seven in the space of four,” not “seven beats per measure where the 1/4 note gets the beat.” As another example, you could think of 7:3 as a septuplet played against a triplet.

I wouldn’t even bring this up, but the Hapax does totally flexible polyrhythms via elasticity, so I think it’s an incremental ask, not a request to add a new feature. The Hapax expresses polyrhythms in percentages, which is sweet. Human players, though, learn tuplets (polyrhtyhms, irrational rhytms, whatever you prefer to call them) by learning to count them out, which requires ratios. You can’t nail some of the most common rhythms with percentages, let alone tell a player to play this bar at 14.285714% of the speed of the previous bar.

I can do this stuff easily in software, but I’d pay the $1k for a physical box. I’m working on an iPad app, but I’d take an off-the-shelf solution any day.

[thetechnobear]

Incorrect, pyramid explicitly supports both polymeters and polyrhythms.
I know , as I’ve had to explain the difference quite a few times

edit:
pyramid manual section which explains this:

Pyramid Manual | Squarp instruments

and a couple of images from said manual showing difference !
(obviously manual goes into more details)

[blipson]

Cool, then I must have missed it when I scoped out the Pyramid some time ago, but if you mean the section on “irrational rhythms” at the link posted above, that looks so convoluted for something that can be so straightforward compared to the Hapax and the Pulsar Buddy. I should have said convenient and natural tuplets of all varieties, where you just set the numbers and go. Currently, you set the percentages and go. I’m really hoping it’s just a short step to using ratios instead of percentages.

@thetechnobear: this isn’t about teaching people what polyrhythms are, but about being able to sequence polyrhythmically in a fun and musical way.

[thetechnobear]

as I said, hapax does not have ‘explicit’ polyrythm support (for reason I also talked about)

but you can ‘implement’ polyrhythms on any sequencer that has sufficient resolution in placement and length of note.
so is achievable with the hapax with its ability to zoom in, and uTime… the triplet grid ‘helps’ this as well (for certain signatures) … even if its not as easy as it is on the pyramid

but hey, none of this is rocket science

[blipson]

This isn’t just about achievable, but convenient and straightforward enough for real-time, performance sequencing. I mean where you can keep track of what’s going on in your head, just like the rest of the Hapax. The elasticity percentages seem so close.

[thetechnobear]

yes, but its also about what percentage of users want/need the feature … and not overcomplicating things for those that are not interested in it (which is likely a fair majority) … and this is an area the pyramid ‘fell foul of’
(but of course, Squarp now know this so could likely ‘avoid’ the same pitfall)

but hey… none of this is up to me
its for the Squarp devs to decide,
they know how to do it (as shown by the pyramid), so if there is a demand from users - Im sure they will consider it, and how it would fit into the hapax workflow, and what priority it gets over the (many) other feature requests they will be receiving !

but for now, as I said upfront, this is one of the differences between the Pyramid and Hapax … and it was a deliberate choice.
(there are many others you’ll find , once you get into the details

edit: oh something i forgot to mention, which relates to your request.
when I talked to Squarp about polyrhythms , they were very much of the mindset that track elasticity was a way to get (some) polyrhythms - so Im sure they will be interested if this could do with ‘tweaking’ e.g. to express as relationships of tracks.

[RhythmDroid]

my God they are about to conceive a child with serious issues
.
.
.
.
I just realized my avatar would feel right at home in that room

[GovernorSilver]

@christianlukegates

You don’t have to work this way if you dont want to, obviously. But really its a lot less complicated in practise than it may sound. FWIW tho you can rename each bank, so you always have a visual/text prompt in the corner of your screen telling you what’s what

I didn’t say I didn’t want to.

I’m more likely to use the Octatrack’s oft-overlooked feature - the Arranger. It can support up to 256 Patterns from any Bank that is in the Project, and automatically switch from one Pattern to another, so I can use my hands to do something else. It also has REMs where I can put in notes to remind me what Patterns are for what and stuff.

An Octatrack Project can contain up to 8 Arrangements. If I go with one song per Arrangement, that’s 8 songs in one Project. Realistically if play a solo set live, I’m not likely to plan for 8 fairly structured songs - more likely 4 or less, and the rest being improvisations… which may include manual selection of Banks and Patterns.

I only used the Arranger once - at the Octatrack workshop in Milwaukee several years ago. I have a lot of exploring to do with it before I have a better idea of how Hapax might fit into my setup as a complementary piece of gear.

[JES]

@blipson: I know this is the Hapax thread (and I ordered one so I’m in), but I have a Five12 Vector Sequencer and can confirm it does polyrhythms well.

Like all hardware sequencers, even though it is brilliant, it has other limitations. But it can do that.

[Tchu]

@bibenu

If they’d called it ‘Dual Project’ or ‘project transition’ or something other than ‘2 projects’ it might have been less confusing.

But they did call it Dual-project architecture in their description pages.

Hapax sequencer | Squarp instruments

[MatthewAllen]

I have been using the arranger almost exclusively for the last couple of years. And while I very much love using it and its workflow, having something dedicated (like the M8, OXI, or soon, Hapax) has made a HUGE difference for me in workflows. The arranger is closer to the M8 workflow than the OXIs, and I am assuming after all the vids and manual reading, that the Hapax is going to be more similar to the OXI, but on steroids.

[Tchu]

@chapelierfou

And I see people coming saying “but you can add probabilities, conditionnal trigs, etc” to vary your patterns. I know that, but I don’t like it. I’m a control freak. Or let’s say, a slightly traditional composer.

Let’s not put Conditional Trigs in the same category as Probabilities. You have full control over Conditional Locks.

[Stone262]

8 patterns per track seems to make sense from the pad layout, and like someone else already said, using multiple tracks per midi channel is a way to increase the pattern count for a given instrument… then again across the dual projects.

First thing that crossed my mind when I was reading about it was whether you could set pattern start and end points in the sections/song/arrangement mode. I.e., pattern 1 bars 1-4, then pattern 1 bars 5-16, pattern 1 bars 30-32 etc. Then you would have any combination of the 32 bars as sub patterns.

[HBIII]

How are the screens on the hapax? One of my gripes with the pyramid was that the screen was soooo soft it got scratched just by looking at it wrong. My finger would accidently touch it and there would be a scratch.

I am thinking about getting some screen protectors for this just in case… would you mind letting me know the exact size of the screens technobear?

[JES]

Thanks for your very detailed video. As a Linnstrument user, I’d love to see more on MPE. But maybe I’ll figure it all out myself when it arrives.

[pzoot]

I wouldn’t even bring this up, but the Hapax does totally flexible polyrhythms via elasticity, so I think it’s an incremental ask, not a request to add a new feature.

Maybe a quick solution (if not already in there) could be to add a Shift+Turn function to get the elasticity % to snap to integer ratios

[jemmons]

Yeah, it’s worth remembering that Electron sequencers are just trackers dressed up as step sequencers. And the M8 is a tracker dressed up as a gameboy. So they share a fair amount of lineage there despite their radically different form factors and UI.

At its heart, though, the Pyramid is a different thing — a MIDI sequencer. Meaning: it’s a way of recording, arranging, editing, and playing back a big long list of MIDI events. As is the Hapax (and, I assume, the OXI from how people are talking about it?)

Some things are going to be easier on tracker-type sequencers (p-locks/per-step-FX, program changes) and some are going to be easier on MIDI-type sequencers (chords, modulation over long periods, queueing and syncing up with time code). Sounds like you’ve found a way to merge the best of both to level up your workflow

[bwo]

Curious about how hard you can push the drum mode, like can you more or less treat it like a stack of digitakt midi tracks? lock notes perstep and CCs and stuff all while in that mode? Chords? I find myself often more inspired in an XOX mode but I would likely use the pianoroll type stuff for longer evolving things. Can you jump between views, like looking at something first as part of a drum pattern and then break it out into a pianoroll? Also curious about some of the implications of using CV as a note input method and how that would combine with chord mode or other modes and how note quantization works with it. Looking through the manual I didn’t feel like I had a clear answer to some of these questions.

[mbillz]

Is the Hapax class compliant? Like, can I plug it into an iPad and sequence it?

[blipson]

Yes, I see that thanks, and I also see that Pyramid can do polyrhythms, too. The issue for me, in a performance sequencer, is how easy it is to do in performance real-time. Only this new Hapax can do that via simple changes to elasticity (though that doesn’t appear to be modulatable), and it’s not “discrete” rhythms or ratios, but this “continuous” percentages type deal. I’m thinking if there were a mode that changed elasticity to number of pads per beat, then turning a knob would change a track from 16 per beat, to 7 per beat, to whatever-per-beat so that you just see a simple numerical readout on each track, it just wouldn’t be a percentage. It’s then up to the user to manage track length and tempo so that the tuplets playing against each other output the notes that you want to have playing against each other.

I do this all in my own software sequencer for real-time performance sequencing of arbitrary numbers of tracks, and it all just works and hangs together just fine, so I know it’s desirable. It’s made for live-coding (not popular on these boards), and I’ve failed to create a working hardware input alternative to a computer keyboard so that it’s become more of a composition tool than a performance tool. You can practice live coding for performance (and people do that), but—as everyone in a thread like this will agree—doing it in knobby and buttony hardware is a lot more fun.

ADDED:

@pzoot

Maybe a quick solution (if not already in there) could be to add a Shift+Turn function to get the elasticity % to snap to integer ratios

Exactly.