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).

So, we’ve established that the Cirklon is a labour of love, built to high standards and extremely well serviced. But why would you want one? If you’ve never played with one before, I’ll try and explain. Here’s a list of things the Cirklon can and can’t do:

Can do:

- create patterns by either recording live MIDI input or step sequencer style programming
- patterns can be either piano roll style with high resolution (called “CK” patterns) or rigid step sequences at a division of the master tempo (called “P3″ patterns)
- an individual pattern can have multiple “bars” (not necessarily one bar long) which can be individually different, chained together, transposed etc.
- patterns can contain up to four “Aux” rows which can randomise, grab values from other tracks, send out other MIDI values or generally alter the pattern or other patterns in a variety of ways
- there are up to 64 tracks, each of which can play a single pattern plus a “fill” pattern which will play when the Fill key is pressed
- each track is assigned an “instrument” which tells it is which port and MIDI channel to use
- “scenes” store all information about which patterns are played on tracks as well as tempo, key and other pertinent values
- scenes can organised into “songs”
- with a CVIO board and break out box, Cirklon can output CV and gate to control analog equipment

Can’t do:

- sample or or synthesise – the Cirklon can make no noise by itself
- act as a editor/librarian for synths/drum machines etc. although there is a rudimentary system for setting up MIDI CC# parameters for connected equipment so some editing is possible

The Cirklon does a number of things better than any other sequencer I know. It positively shines at creating generative, semi-generative or pseudo-generative sequences. What the hell do I mean by that? I’ll give you an example.

On Track 1, I setup a simple chord track. This is done using a P3 pattern, which can use Aux rows which can turn a monophonic pattern into a polyphonic one. Each Aux row can output an additional note to the main note in the pattern at an offset like +3 semi-tones. So it’s very easy to input a sequence of major/minor chords or whatever note intervals you choose. The beauty of this approach is that you can simply adjust the base note to transpose an entire chord. And because the Cirkon can force everything to a chosen key and scale, nothing ever sounds bum. Because these are the main chords of my mini song, I’ll set this pattern to run at a slow division of the main tempo so that each note (or chord in this case) lasts say 1 bar.

On Track 2, I setup a simple melody. Again, I use Aux rows, but this time I use them to grab notes from Track 1. Then I use another Aux row to transpose these notes and maybe a third Aux row to randomise one or two of the notes in the pattern by say +/-5st.

On Track 3, I could do the same again, but use different patterns or track lengths and different transpose values to make a completely different melody. Remember that all the notes in the melodies of Tracks 2 and 3 are being grabbed from Track 1. Or if I’m feeling adventurous, I could grab the notes from Track 2 instead. Nested grabbing!

I now have some chords and a couple of melodies. The melodies are complete generated by the chords set in Track 1. If I change those chords, the melodies of Tracks 2 and 3 will adapt and change. This is what I describe as “pseudo-generative”. There’s a ton of ways to elaborate on this. I could randomise some of the notes in Track 1, or use Aux tracks to change the tempo divisions of any (or all) of the tracks. Things can become complex, but there’s a huge amount of power here.

That is a single example of what the Cirklon is so good at. There are countless other ways you can create complex, randomized, poly-rhythmic or generative patterns and the results can be truly stunning. Of course all this complexity can be difficult to master. There is a lot to learn, but the Cirklon’s nice big screen, excellent manual and helpful online community mean that answers are never far away.

If you own a lot of vintage synths or a modular, the CVIO option would probably make a lot of sense. With 16 CV and 8 gate outputs which are totally configurable inside the Cirklon, it’s extremely powerful. Equally if you’re a software user, the Cirklon has six virtual USB MIDI input/output ports so your soft synths can be integrated into your compositions. Combine the two and you have a very powerful MIDI to CV convertor.

Conclusion

The Cirkon has very quickly become the centre of my setup. The timing is absolutely rock solid. I can only think of two sequencers I’ve used that felt this tight, the MPC60 and the Atari ST. Doubtless if you’ve got this far through the review, you’ve probably checked the Cirklon and it’s sobering price. The CVIO will bump the price up even more. Whilst it is expensive, it’s worth remembering that the Cirklon is many things. I sold my Edirol UM-880 MIDI interface not long after getting it as the Cirklon not only fulfils all the sequencing I could need, but also acts as a MIDI interface. I was also able to sell my dedicated Analog Systems MIDI to CV convertor: again the Cirklon took care of that. I even sold a few of the sequencing modules from my Eurorack modular setup (although I will probably reinstate these at some point).

In short, the Cirklon is a chameleon in the studio, but at it’s heart is a highly creative device which can interface with just about any modern or vintage electronic instrument. It’s complex, yet musically rewarding and built to a very high standard.

Frankly, I’m in love with it.

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. The Prophet 12 delivers two important things, and it does both with aplomb. The first is power. Twelve voices, each of which has four oscillators and a sub-oscillator, individual FM and AM on each oscillator, wavetables and patches that can be stacked or split into two, using six voices each. Dave Smith has delivered a powerful beast of a synth, no doubt there.

But that would mean nothing without the second vital ingredient, character. The Prophet 12 delivers this in several ways. One of my favourite is the Slop parameter in the oscillator section. This makes the oscillator tuning go all.. well.. sloppy. It’s great for adding analogue style tuning drift to the Prophet 12′s digital oscillators. The Evolver has a similar parameter but it’s so subtle it’s almost imperceptible. It seems Dave has fine tuned this in the Prophet 12 and it’s something I’d like to see on all my synthesisers. There’s also the Character section. Yep, there’s a whole section on the interface just labelled “Character”. This allows you to mangle the oscillators in different ways before going into the analogue filter section. There’s “Girth” and “Air” controls (essentially bass & treble), then there’s “Hack” and “Decimation”, which add digital noise and bit reduction. I found these two controls a little too harsh for any serious use other than the occasional special effect, but the last Character control is “Drive”, a soft overdrive circuit placed immediately before the filter and this one is invaluable. It really helps to add some warmth and subtle (or not) distortion to a sound, but because it’s pre-filter it’s very much controllable.

Moving on, there’s dedicated envelopes for filter and amplitude as well as two more auxiliary envelopes making four in total. There’s four LFOs too. There’s Dave’s usual Curtis-chip analogue low-pass filter, and also an analogue high-pass immediately after it. This is resonant, something new to DSI synths, although it doesn’t self oscillate. There’s four (yes four!) digital delays per voice and a tuned feedback circuit.

In terms of performance, you get five octave keyboard, mod-wheel, pitch wheel and two pressure sensitive sliders. These can all be accessed in the modulation matrix which has 16 assignable slots and 8 fixed slots. The list of sources and destinations is impressive. Notable inclusions are the ability to use oscillators as sources, and a new source called DC, which allows you to push some parameters beyond their normal limits by applying a DC offset to the controls current value. There’s also a very useable arpeggiator.

So how does it sound? Well, no doubt you’re listening to the above demo as you read this so you can make your own judgement. When it arrived here, the Prophet 12 had only three presets saved in it’s memory. Other than those three presets, I haven’t heard any sounds made by anyone else, so I started the process with no preconceptions about how it should sound. That’s a unique position to be in and I found that programming yielded unique and interesting sounds both when treated as a keyboard instrument, but also when exploring more drone-like textures by holding a chord via the sustain pedal or Hold button and tweaking knobs. Listen to the last 2m30s of the demo above for an idea how that can sound.

So in summation I would say that the Prophet 12 is a synthesizer in the “proper” sense: lots of knobs, lots of power, lots of character and lots of sonic potential. It is therefore, at least for this synth nerd, a lot of fun.

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

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.