Welcome to my site dedicated to my two biggest passions: guitar and electronics.
All projects and built devices you will see on these pages are fruits of these two passions. This site is also a kind of design diary, you can see how my builds evolved through years.
I consider each new project as a challenge and really enjoy solving technical problems, achieving the goals and when that happens, pushing the design even further. I simply disagree with a common sentence that everything has been already invented and the history is is only spinning around.
Guitar effects electronics area lays often beyond (or under) the "book" audio electronics, so there's still much to discover, especially with getting cheaper and common modern techniques, such as digital microprocessors. Personally i'm trying not to be devoted to one particular technique, i like to use the technologies that give me the best performance and features i need. There's a place for the tube and a place for the microprocessor.
"Take the best from what they offer, combine them and use to create something new."
That would be my motto.
Other areas of my interest are aviation, space expoloration, physics and astrophysics. You might find various projects related to these topics, too, especially aviation and flight simulators.
The site is split into a few categories:
- Pedals - things that i build more or less regularly,
- Lab - experimental, usually one off special designs,
- Museum - things i have built in the past,
- DIY - as the name implies, do it yourself project, pedals, amps, little useful gadgets etc.
Why HEXE?
As with many of my pedal designs, this name is a hybrid of a few meanings. The symbol of the region where i was born is a witch on a broomstick, mainly due to many old folklore legends about witches having their sabbaths on the peak of the nearby mountain. The word "Hexe" in German means "a witch" and sounds close to HEX. Digital techniques and the use of hexadecimal system plays a huge part in my work. So, in the end the name is a mixture of "where i'm from" with "where i live" and with "what i do" :).
Piotr Zapart
