Connect the supplied AC adaptor to the USB port using the cable supplied, and plug the adaptor into the AC mains. This will ensure that the internal battery becomes fully charged.
Connect the main outputs to a monitoring system (powered speakers or a separate amplifier and passive monitors); alternatively plug in a pair of headphones if you prefer.
Long-press the POWER button , and the grid will show the boot-up display for approximately two seconds:
After initial boot-up, the display will change colour from pale red to bright green sequentially from top left to bottom right, indicating Pack loading.
After boot-up, the grid display will change to something like that shown below:
We’ve preloaded 16 demo Projects into the memories to give you an idea of how Circuit Rhythm works. Press the Play button
; you should hear the first demo Project.
If they’re not already lit, press the 1 button , to select Track 1 and Sample
; Circuit Rhythm is now displaying Sample View for Track 1. In this View, the two lower rows represent a bank of samples that may be triggered with a tap, while the two upper rows – the Pattern steps - show the progression through the Pattern. Press the 2 button
to trigger samples and enter steps on Track 2. Note that the sample pads of Track 1 are coded orange and those of Track 2 are yellow. The Pattern pads are pale blue, but turn white as the “play cursor” moves through the Pattern.
In Sample View, you can scroll through banks of samples using the ▼ and ▲ buttons : you’ll find that each of the first six pages represents a genre kit made up of 16 samples. Each kit has twelve percussive sounds and four melodic sounds. Bank 7 comprises additional melodic and harmonic sounds, while Bank 8 comprises 12 melodic loops plus four drum breaks.
Sample triggers may be entered at steps by tapping the dim blue pads that occupy the top half of the grid. A step that contains a trigger will be lit bright blue (or pink, if the step contains a flipped sample). To remove a trigger from a step, tap the corresponding pad again.
On Circuit Rhythm, various tracks use different colours for rapid identification: this principle applies throughout most of the grid Views. The colours are (approximately):
Press the Play button to stop.
Later in the manual, we explain how you can choose the sound you want in your pattern, and how you can manipulate the sounds in real-time.
When you press Play for the first time after powering on, the Project which Circuit Rhythm plays will be the last one used when it was powered off. The factory demo described in the previous section was loaded in to Memory Slot 1.
To load a different Project, you use Projects View. Press Projects to open this:
There are 64 memory slots, arranged as two pages of 32. Use the ▼ and ▲ buttons to scroll between the pages. Each pad corresponds to one of the memory slots. The pad’s colour indicates the slot’s status:
* See paragraph on “Customising Session Colours” on Changing project colours.
You can select a different factory demo to listen to and play around with. You can jump between saved Projects while in Play mode: the current Project will complete its current Pattern before the new Project starts. (But if you hold down Shift while selecting a different Project, the Project currently playing will stop immediately and the new one will start.)
Tip
Projects loaded when the sequencer is not running will play at the tempo used when the Project was saved.
Projects loaded while the sequencer is running will play at the current tempo. This means that you can recall different Projects sequentially with the confidence that the tempo will remain constant.
There’s nothing special about the slots containing factory demo Projects: you can overwrite these if you wish: you can always re-load them from Components.
You don’t need to be in Projects View to save a Project you’ve been working on. If you press Save , the button flashes white; if you press it a second time, it flashes green rapidly to confirm the save process. However, in this case, your work will be saved in the last selected Project memory, which will most likely be the one that held an earlier version; the earlier version will be overwritten.
To save your work in a different Project memory (leaving the original version unchanged), enter Projects View. Press Save; both Save and the pad for the currently selected Project will flash white. Press a different memory pad: all the other pads will go dark, and the selected pad will flash green for a second or so to confirm the save process.
To make identifying Projects easier, you can assign one of 14 colours to any of the pads in Projects View. See “Changing Project Colour” on Changing project colours.
Tip
If you’re already familiar with producing music using hardware, you can probably skip this section! But if you’re a novice, you may find it useful.
Once you’ve experimented with the factory demo patterns for a while, you will probably want to create a pattern from scratch.
Select Projects and select an empty memory slot (a pad showing dim blue). Now press 1 to enter Track 1’s Sample View. When you press
Play, you’ll see the white pad (the play cursor) progressing across the 16 Pattern steps:
You won’t hear anything just yet.
Note
On Circuit Rhythm, Patterns are 16 steps long by default. This can be changed to 32 steps for any or all the eight tracks. This topic is explained in “Step Page” on Step page and 16/32-step patterns.
For simplicity, the discussion in this section uses 16-step Patterns as examples.
To build a beat, first tap sample slots 1 or 2 (slot 1 is pad 17, slot 2 is pad 18) to select a kick drum sample, then tap* steps to add triggers to the pattern. To make a basic hip-hop drum beat, add kicks on the steps seen in the picture below (1, 3, 8, 9, 11 and 14). Now press play to hear back your beat.
*Many of Circuit Rhythm’s buttons produce different behaviours depending on whether the button is “tapped” (half a second or less) or “held”. In this case, a holding a step pad will arm the step for a sample flip: this feature is discussed on Sample flip.
You can select a different sample while the Pattern is playing by pressing a different pad on the lower two rows: you can use any of the eight sample pages.
Now add a snare drum to other steps in the sequence in the same way. Press 2 to enter Track 2’s Sample View, then press sample slots 3 or 4 (pads 19 or 20) to select a snare sample. Tap steps 5 and 13 as seen below to add snares on the 2nd and 4th beat of the bar.
If you want to delete a drum hit, just press its pattern step pad again: you can do this while the sequence is playing or stopped. The brightly lit pads tell you where the hits are.
To add a melody to your beat, you’ll need to use Note View. First, press 3 to enter Track 3’s Sample View and select a melodic sample from the last four slots of the bank (Pads 29 – 32). Now press Note
to enter Track 3’s Note View. You’ll now see that the bottom 16 pads have changed to represent a chromatic keyboard, with “white notes” on the bottom row and “black notes” above it. Press the pads to trigger the selected sample at different pitches. Use the ▼ and ▲ arrows
to scroll through higher and lower octaves. Pressing ▼ and ▲ together will reset the pitch to the default octave.
The root note of the default octave is ‘middle C’ on a standard piano keyboard.
To enter notes into a Pattern, you may either tap a step to add the last played note to the step, or record your playing in real time (this is termed “live record”). To enable live record, press the Record button so that it lights red • – while live record is enabled, notes that are played will be recorded to steps. You can go back to Sample View at any time and change the selected sample – it will play back at the pitches chosen for each step.
You can press Note a second time to enter Expanded Note View. In this View, the sequencer steps are replaced by a second chromatic keyboard, which triggers samples one octave higher than the lower: