Novation Circuit Tracks: Groovebox Sequencer With Synth Tracks, MIDI Tracks And Drum Tracks Electronic Music Making

Product Information

Each pack can be separately selected from a menu and given its own pad color, allowing various pack genres to be organized by color and pad location. You can also sidechain instruments, which is great, and there are plenty of settings to choose from here.

But it is also quite useful if you want a small DAWless setup to play with a couple of synths, since it has dedicated audio inputs to match each of the MIDI tracks it can sequence. This wealth of connectivity options allows the Circuit to control and interface with almost any type of gear, thus letting the Circuit act as a DAWless brain and master sequencer for a whole setup. For melodic sequencing duties and flexible hardware control, this is one of the best devices on the market.There is a family of them and when they are all run together you get more hands on capabilities then any daw for jamming. The 32 pads are used for sequencing, performing, and menu selections, with their default mode providing a 16-note scaled keyboard and a 16-step sequencer for the selected track. For backup, patch and sample management Novation developed Components for the original Circuit, and it’s since been adopted by all of Novation’s current instruments. The simple pattern chaining system from the original Circuit is carried across here, allowing users to connect up to eight 32-step patterns. But what grinds my gears here is the fact that there’s an unused row in the mixer page that could have been used here.

My home set-up: The Novation Circuit Tracks, surrounded by a Korg Volca Bass, the 1010music Blackbox, a small Launchkey Midi keyboard, and a Yamaha mixer. I do like the Circuit Tracks, but one thing that bothers me is of the 8 tracks 2 of them are essentially useless if you don’t have any other synths to use with it and given it’s often recommended as the best beginners groovebox (I bought one as my first hardware synth) a lot of people don’t. It prides itself on screenless ability however it can use the Components browser based or standalone app to explore the synth engine on screen, load samples, create patches, generate MIDI templates and backup projects. Novation Circuit Tracks is an agile groovebox for creating and performing electronic music without resistance.

Knob Layout: While the Circuit’s sequencer and all-around workflow can be fantastic for beatmaking, the macro-based knob layout can be a challenge for live situations.

Concerning your comment on the (monophonic) patches, you should be able to hear whether a patch is monophonic or polyphonic. The inputs feed their own channels in Circuit’s mixer so benefit from level and pan control as well as sends to the effects. In the studio I primarily used my Circuit as a sequencer for other synths, stealing the two polyphonics tracks from the inbuilt sound engines. To enter music, you can choose scales which “knock out” notes that don’t appear in those scales, or have the pads act as a pseudo keyboard with “black” and “white” keys.

Maybe a Rhythm+tracks combination could be a satisfying combo, still pretty portable… Which makes us regret the fact two devices were released instead of 1 !