sea of stars (wip?)

from 2025-11-10
by hexeaktivitat

listen

thoughts

playing around with the hapax and its midi effect modules, as well as blueprinting a process for taking a small solo piano piece and building a more electronic ambience out of it.

really liking how the midi echo works on the hapax, it's not effective to emulate things like dotted eighth delay (it works but it doesn't have the same vibe and the vibe is essential there), but just as a general delay smearing it's really nice to have. I threw some lfo on the velocity but from looking at the resulting MIDI in ableton, I think the hapax snapshots the velocity at note on and doesn't update it when generating arps / echoes from that initial note on

the process I'm blueprinting involves making a very simple bass figure to set the harmony bed and rhythm (in this case a simple i v i' v, arpeggiation, which isn't the most inspiring but at least it's a clear way to divide the bar and more interesting than straight 4s or 8s). after that, putting together an incredibly simple motive and expanding it out with a bit of variation. the math (conditional trig) on notes is incredibly powerful, letting me set 4 bars and make some small changes to create an 8 bar pattern without needing to duplicate and extend.

I then PROMPTLY ignored the short melodic phrase in favor of smashing the notes into a big long generative bit by taking the notes used per bar and using those as the fodder for the arp, but I can imagine that it wouldn't be terribly difficult to take the melody I built out and transform it into a slower, more drawn-out version of itself.

I don't know if the resulting effort is "good" in terms of interestingness but it feels like the elements of a pretty solid basic process to start working with.