“There are 32 sessions slots,” he explains.
As Burke notes, the sessions themselves can be used to expand things even further. However, these patterns can be chained together to play on the fly, meaning that longer sequences can be created. Within each session you have just eight patterns available for each sound, each of which is capped at 16 steps. If you’re familiar with Novation’s Launchpad then Circuit quickly becomes second nature, but it’s equally the kind of thing a complete novice could get working in 10 minutes. To record notes, you use the dedicated button while playing, or dial in notes to one of the 16 steps manually, and it’s easy to duplicate patterns too. The velocity-sensitive pads can be used to lay out beats, melodies or chords, with notes locked to whatever scale is chosen from the selection.
When you switch between functions, the pads give you colour-coded feedback as to what’s going on, so you know instinctively if you’re in the drum sequencer or the pattern select screen. There’s a sessions page where you can access up to 32 saved tracks, and within each session you can build up loops using the two polysynths and simple four-part drum machine. Most small synths and drum machines have sequencers, but the engine running inside Circuit is best compared to a very basic version of Ableton Live. “The Launchpad’s grid as a musical generation tool had so many possibilities, and we wanted to convert that potential into a real, standalone creative instrument,” Burke explains. I wanted a different approach to generating ideas.” The solution was to take inspiration from Novation’s grid-based Launchpad controller, add some control knobs, a built-in speaker, a filter and dedicated controls and create something that anyone should be able to use no matter what their ability. “That process usually does the opposite of inspiring. “The real influence came not directly from other hardware or software, but from producing music and wanting to have inspiration to write music that wasn’t just ‘load another plugin’, or ‘flick through a few gigs of samples’,” Novation product manager Olly Burke explains.
#NOVATION CIRCUIT GROOVEBOX FLSTUDIO SOFTWARE#
It’s billed as a both a groovebox you can use to make a tune in minutes and a device designed to inspire creativity, but the company also seems very aware that those moving from software to hardware might give up because hooking everything up is more difficult than loading up Ableton. It squeezes two polysynths, a drum machine, sequencer, mixer and effects into a device roughly the size of an iPad, giving the user everything they need to make a basic track in one device.
Novation’s Circuit is clearly inspired by what the company’s Japanese counterparts have been doing over the past few years, but it also rejects the idea that these small music-making devices need to be rooted to a decades-old design philosophy. We can make hardware synths and drum machines cheaper than ever now, but for the most part they’re shrunken versions of devices that existed decades ago. While these devices satisfy our retro-fetishistic urges, they’re also something of a missed opportunity. Roland, Korg and Yamaha have all released devices in recent years that look to iconic devices from the 1980s, allowing people to partake in the legacy of these companies without having to source expensive originals on the second-hand market. If there’s one thing that unites most of the current generation of compact and affordable synths, it’s their focus on the past.