Sequentix Cirklon mini review

Like the P3 before it, the Sequentix Cirklon is a fairly niche piece of musical equipment. It’s a MIDI sequencer (with options to expand to CV outputs for modular / vintage connections). And that’s it. No sounds, no samples, no effects, no audio inputs or outputs. Just MIDI and CV.

If you know anything about the Cirklon then you probably know that it has somewhat of a cult following. Cirklons are hand made by Colin Fraser in small batches. There is a waiting list to buy one and second hand units tend to go for new prices because customers can skip the queue. The build quality of the Cirklon is extremely high. A month ago, the LCD backlight failed in mine and because it had happened to two other users as well, Colin switched his LCD suppliers because, and I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him here, “a 1% failure rate is not good enough”. He repaired and upgraded my LCD free of charge and even offered me a choice of colours (I chose black of course). Read more

Dave Smith Prophet 12 mini review

For the last week, I have had in my grubby hands, a Prophet 12.

After it arrived one Wednesday morning mid April, it sat boxed in the corner of my studio for the rest of the day taunting me whilst I finished my work. I would have got no work done for the rest of the day had I opened it there and then!

That was one week ago and I have spent that time exploring every sonic meandering path I could push the synth along. Why just a week? Well that’s all I had, during which time it was my pleasure to make as many patches as possible and I hope you will see a good number of these in the factory presets when it’s finally released.

I guess the first question is did I like it? That’s easy, yes I did. I’ll try and explain why. Read more

Shiny new things

Stuff that caught my attention from Musikmesse:

Korg Volca analogue grooveboxes – Korg are continuing their much welcomed analogue revival with a trio of grooveboxes. If you shut your eyes and listen, they sound great. The disappointment for me is that they are made for the fingers of 3 year olds. Just watch the guy in the video try and play a lead line 1:25. Perhaps as they did with the Monotron, Korg are testing the market for analogue grooveboxes. I’m holding out for a full-sized analogue Electribe at some point in the future.

MFB Dominion 1 analogue synth and Tanzbär drum machine – MFB have certainly been busy lately with not one, but two flagship product announcements. Both look pretty impressive. The drum machine in particular seems almost unrivalled. Fully analog, 16 instruments, impressive sequencer (different track lengths for each instrument – yay!), bass & synth included. It’s hard not to be impressed with the specs for just 840 Euros (around half the price of a Tempest). The Dominion 1 synth is no slouch either with just about anything you could want from a mono synth – 3 oscs, waveshaping, ringmod, FM, a ton of patch points etc etc. Built in power supply too. It seems like MFB are upping their game with build quality.

Doepfer A-127 Triple Resonance Filter – Amongst a flurry of other new modular parts, including the limited edition Dark MAQ16/3, Doepfer announced the A-127, a very reasonably priced triple resonant filter bank or resonator. Any modular nerd worth their salt has drooled over the Cwejman RES-4, which seems to be the holy grail of resonators but their price and (lack of) availability means they are made of unobtanium. Analogue Systems do the RS-360, but these are often avoided due to power and racking compatibility issues. Doepfer to the rescue it seems.

Waldorf Pulse 2 – This one seems to be slipping by largely unnoticed. The original Pulse was quite a monster so it’ll be interesting to hear more of this in the months ahead. Personally I’m not sold on the Blofeld form factor at all, which probably makes this a no-go for me, but I imagine it will sell well.

Nord Lead 4 - I’ve never owned a Nord Lead. It’s always been on edge of the radar. Somehow it never quite drifted centre enough. The forth iteration looks pretty sweet though. Amongst the most interesting additions are wavetables and the variation buttons, which allow instant, or clocked, recall of patch variations, changing multiple parameters at once. I guess I’ll have to wait until the Nord Lead 7 comes out for these to be cheap enough to take a punt on.

Oh yeah, and the Prophet 12 picture? Well, that’ll be explained in a future post, but let’s just say it looks mighty fine in the flesh ;)

Live electronica: inSpiral

Oh I know, it’s been ages right?

Here’s a little jam to see us through these times of austerity (in posts that is). It’s the first jam featuring the mighty Sequentix Cirklon on sequencing duties. I was a big fan of the P3, Cirklon’s predecessor and the transition between them has been easy. I’ll save the details for another post suffice to say that the Cirklon exceeded my expectations. Happy chap me!

Featuring:

Sequentix Cirklon
Elektron Octatrack
Dave Smith Tempest
Moog Little Phatty
Dave Smith Evolver
Kurzweil PC3
Eurorack Modular
Akai S5000 with Boxed Ear Mighty M5 samples
Eventide Space
Eventide TimeFactor

Studio planning

I bought a new A frame keyboard stand a couple of weeks ago, and the inevitable tear-down and re-build of the studio led me to rethink the layout a little. Everything is back up and running now so I put together a little connection diagram using Plogue Bidule. The Bidule patch doesn’t do anything, it’s purely for reference, and it’s pretty flowing cables. I’m throwing it up as I find these things fascinating so maybe someone else might too (or perhaps I’m just really good at procrastinating).

Left side with solid connection cables is audio. Right side with dotted cables is MIDI.

Anyone else do this kind of thing? If so what apps do you use for layout?

Live electronica: Nostalgia for Infinity

Yet another in my series of live studio jams. It’s been a while since the last one as I’ve been busy sampling the Macbeth M5 which you can hear in action as the main melody in this piece.

Here’s a rundown of what’s doing what:

Mixed on a Soundtracs Topaz 24ch mixer.
MPC60 and Sequentix P3 sequencers.
Drums: MPC60 and Dave Smith Tempest.
Bass: Moog Little Phatty.
Melody: Akai S5000 loaded with Boxed Ear‘s Mighty M5 Macbeth M5 sample library.
Pads: Kurzweil PC3.
Sci-fi noises: Eurorack modular and Dave Smith Mono Evolver Keyboard.

Some minor mix tweaks after recording.

Kudos to anyone who can spot where the song title is from.

Akai MPC 60 mini review

An MPC60 came up for sale round the corner from where I live. One thing lead to another and it’s now sitting at Rozzer HQ. You might know that I’ve owned an MPC in the past, a 2500 to be precise. I really enjoyed having it, they’re amazing machines – lots of fun to write on, limited enough not to be daunting and with enough connections round the back to serve as a userful centre sequencer for a good amount of other gear.

I was curious to see how the older MPC60 compared. The most obvious limitation is the 1.5Mb (oh yeah!) of RAM. This allows for about 26 seconds of mono sampling. This doesn’t concern me too much but is a major point when considering which MPC to get. The other limitation is how you get the sounds into the MPC. The modern MPCs come with flash cards and USB connections so getting a file from the computer into the MPC is no big deal. The MPC60 however is a little trickier. Essentially it can’t be done, just resample the audio through the audio input (which is mono btw). There are workarounds, apps that can read and write to MPC floppy disk (if you even have a floppy disk on your computer) or you can use ZIP disks if you have the Marion SCSI board installed in your 60.

Apart from these obvious limitations, I’m amazed how little has changed in the MPC operating system over 20 years (ignoring JJ OS for a minute). The sequencer is much the same. There are some features I miss from the MPC2500 (track mute from the pads is probably the biggest) but there are also some very cool features that have been lost. I’m amazed that someone at Akai thought the Edit Loop function and the Echo mixer weren’t useful enough to keep in the new lines.

Much is made of the 12bit sound. It definitely has warmth, and samples glue together nicely, but the real winner for me is just how solid the sequencer feels. There is some evidence that the MPC60 sequencer is more robust than the 2500/1000. Check out Innerclock Systems very indepth Litmus tests on the subject. Of course numbers only go so far, these things should be judged by ear. To me the MPC60 feels like the most solid sequencer I have ever used so, despite it’s limitations, I’m going to declare it a keeper.

Oh and it’s also the damned best looking MPC ever made (we’re talking about the Mk1 here, the Mk2 looks like a cash register). Expect some MPC60 flavoured Boxed Ear freebies soon.

Sampling the Macbeth M5

Boxed Ear Mighty M5 Demos by Boxed Ear

I have been busy, super busy.. :)

Boxed Ear is a project I’ve been working on for some time. It’s a sample company and our first product is the Mighty M5, a Kontakt sample pack made entirely with the mighty Macbeth M5 synthesizer. The M5 is a huge synth, both physically and sonically. Sampling it has been no small feat, but I’m immensely proud of the results.

The M5′s sound is characterised by its full, rich bass, crystal high end and distinctly analog tone. Even the raw waveforms sound gorgeous with no filtering or modulation. Huge basses and leads, luscious pads, electric pianos, drums, one-shot effects, and crazy modular bleep and bloops are all included in the pack.

In short, this is an amazing sounding sample pack from an amazing sounding synth. Mr Ken Macbeth himself has endorsed the pack, something I’m immensely proud of.

Do please check it out and let me know what you think.

Live electronica: White Globe

Another in my series of live studio jams. The idea being to capture the raw groove of a song in realtime. All these songs will be further edited, overdubbed and generally mangled to form either an EP or an album, but I thought it would be interesting to post the initial song sketch as it happened.

This is also the first video to feature the Dave Smith Tempest drum machine, not in a huge capacity, but the real analogue drums really add something.

Dave Smith Tempest: Drums (through 1176 compressor)
Korg ER-1: Drums
Moog Little Phatty: Epic bass!
DSI Evolver: Melody 1
Suzuki SX-500: Melody 2
Eurorack Modular: Bleepy melody
Eventide Space: Reverb
Eventide TimeFactor: Delay
Kurzweil Mangler: Distortion

All recorded via the Soundtracs Topaz to Presonus Studio One. Some minor tweaks and a couple of edits after recording.

Live electronica: rozz3r – Waiting for a Storm

Another live jam from the lab.

Korg ER-1: Drums (through 1176 compressor)
Moog Little Phatty: Bass
Suzuki SX-500: Melody 1
Yamaha TG-33: Melody 2
DSI Evolver: Melody 3
Eurorack Modular: Crazy blip sequences
Eventide Space: Reverb
Eventide TimeFactor: Delay
Kurzweil Mangler: Big dubby falling delay

All recorded via the Soundtracs Topaz to Presonus Studio One. Some minor tweaks and a couple of edits after recording.

I still haven’t found a better camera angle.