I’d just cross-post from GS. My preliminary thoughts after watching some reviews online.
Unquantised recording (inherent in Novation products, i.e. 6 micro-steps) not true and you can hear the “snapping” to closest grid. It is a grid-based device after all but resolution could have improved by now.
For what it does, Novation could renamed it to Circuit Sampler for marketing clarity.
What were those MIDI out/through good for - if they can’t do polyphonic playback.
If you have the budget, consider to get the Digitakt or Deluge instead.
Otherwise, I think it has a place in the market as an affordable fuss-free, fun & creativity-through-limitation, carry-around sample box. Pretty good job Novation. Let’s wait for firmware updates.
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However, not sure how I feel that to keep certain functionalities such as:
Custom Chord Memory (exclusive to Launchpad Pro MK3)
Polyphonic Playback (excluded from Rhythm)
Sample from audio inputs (excluded from Tracks)
and Others
were deliberate design choices to make a consumer buy more than one product to gain those “common sense-why wasn’t it included” functionality. This is similar when Elektron released their electronic boxes in the early days. Product differentiation I get it. Well, at least Elektron enabled more functions progressively over the years.
Current form factor is great but there is room for improvement. I had secretly hoped for a Circuit Pro. Double (width-wise) the pads (maybe a tad smaller in size) with all the best functions and superior I/Os - This, I felt was an opportunity missed.
I actually preordered it right away from novation’s site. I like it. It’s a bummer that it doesn’t do poly, and doesn’t have an LFO (nobody talks about that ) but it has slicing
Honestly after the latest Digitakt update I would be tempted to buy the DT again, but I already had it so I want to play with Circuit too
People create bangers on a PO-33 so the only limit is you
I had all the recent years grooveboxes (Deluge, Polyend Tracker, Blackbox, Elektrons, OP1, OPZ, MPCs, Maschine).
I bought a Maschine+ when they released it and I’ve never used it as much as I thought. It’s fun but because it has EVERYTHING inside it and it’s super fast, I make a great sounding thing in 10 minutes and never get to finish it. It’s too quick
So I suspect there’s a fine balance between features/workflow.
I make music as a hobby to relax from work/life and for me it’s all about the workflow, because I wanna have fun while doing it.
Getting back to the Circuit. Although it’s lacking LFO, poly mode, etc, I’m sure you can spend some quality time resampling shit and making something you’re actually proud of instead of slapping a preset and calling it a day.
So yeah, I’m excited about it because it looks like a shit ton of fun.
Really agree with you here. Might be a bit silly or backwards but I love how these devices make me feel excited and more focused on the music rather than the endless plethora of sound tweaking and editing
I think they missed an opportunity to truly revolutionise the Circuit platform by including aspects of both the Tracks and Rhythm into one box. The sample support on the Tracks is rudimentary at best (no chromatic playback for example) while the Rhythm could really do with some synthesis, even a percussion-focused version of the Nova architecture.
One could see this as a similar splitting of powers as the Digitakt and Digitone, though with those boxes Elektron really pushed the envelope of what was possible for small boxes to achieve with samples and FM synthesis respectively. The Tracks and Rhythm seem to me like chopping a feature-packed product in half.
You can override both internal synth tracks right?
Can you help explain how you would go about sequencing an external drum synth/machine over MIDI?
If you have a bank of drums loaded on a synth like a jv1080 for example, can the circuit sequence each individual drum part?
Thanks @chaocrator
I think the original Circuit was a lightning in a bottle moment for them… the right complexity and the right price for beginners just when electronic music production was getting generally popular again. It was timed along with a synth YouTube boom, and we’ve since seen a bust, where many channels have stopped producing content.
It looks neat, but it comes with a lot of the same limitations that effectively make it unable to grow with you as you get more into the hobby and expand your setup, at least in my experience with the Circuit and CMS.
synth tracks have to use some synth patch anyway.
if i needed to use them for sequencing external gear without making any sound, i’d make a special silent patch for that.
muting the track in the (internal Circuit) mixer won’t work this way, because it does not only mutes the sound, but disables sending MIDI messages from this track as well.
it depends on target machine’s MIDI implementation, so there’s no versatile answers here.
what can’t be overridden is that each Circuit’s MIDI or synth tracks uses it’s own MIDI channel, and they can’t be overlapped, so you can’t get more than one track sending MIDI messages to the same MIDI channel.
all Circuit’s drum tracks are sending their messages on the same MIDI channel, but with fixed note mapping, so to sequence external gear with Circuit’s drum tracks, external gear should have configurable note mapping – but it’s not very common feature.
regarding JV1080 – i don’t know how its drums are organized.
You can also zero the track volume in the mixer without muting it, it will still send midi.
@FlexMundo Tracks is a good step towards a more elaborate setup I find. Like: step 1, Tracks only; step 2, Tracks + two synths (and you might stop here for a cool minimal setup); step 3, Tracks used strictly as a sequencer.
I went through that same process and had a lot of fun, but session and block management syncing became cumbersome when Circuit is no longer the master sequencer.
For example, if you add a Digitakt, suddenly you have a more capable sequencer, but the Circuit doesn’t play nicely with it, since a session or sequence blocks don’t nicely match up with projects/patterns like other devices.
) but it has slicing 
