Backtrack

Backtrack is a haptic accessory built for the Happy Pixels team, designed to let DJs feel loop and beat-match cues through their hands instead of watching a screen for confirmation.

the brief

Happy Pixels came to me with a specific problem: their controller software could detect a beat-matched transition with high confidence, but the only way to tell the performer was a visual indicator, which meant looking away from the crowd and the decks at the exact moment it mattered least. They wanted that confirmation to arrive as a feeling, not a glance.

industrial design under pressure

The enclosure had to survive being gripped hard, dropped on a stage, and gigged for hours without the haptic driver overheating against skin. I settled on a low-profile aluminum shell with a floating internal chassis, so the actuator is mechanically decoupled from the outer casing — it isolates the haptic pulse from incidental knocks and stage vibration, so what you feel is the intended cue, not the sum of everything happening on the truss above it.

Backtrack talks to the host software over class-compliant MIDI, so it drops into existing DJ rigs without a custom driver — the firmware just maps incoming MIDI CC messages to distinct haptic patterns for loop-in, loop-out, and beat-match confidence.