Circuit Tracks: Learning the basics

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 pre-loaded 16 demo Projects into the memories to give you an idea of how Circuit Tracks works. Press the Play button ; you should hear the first demo Session.

If it’s not already lit, press the Synth 1 button ; Circuit Tracks is now displaying Note View for Synth 1. The two lower rows – the synth pads – is the “Play Area” where notes may be triggered, while the two upper rows – the Pattern steps - show the progression through the Pattern. Press Synth 2 to view Synth 2’s Play Area and Patterns. Note that the notes of Synth 1 are coded violet and those of Synth 2 pale green; when a Pattern step that includes a note is pressed, the pad corresponding to the note changes to white. Similarly, the Pattern pads are pale blue, but turn white as the “play cursor” moves through the Pattern.

Now press the Drum 1 button: the displays for the drums are very similar to those for the synths. The two upper rows are the Pattern steps and the two lower rows are one of four pages of percussion samples: you can select the other pages with the ▼ and ▲ buttons. You’ll find that each page represents a kit. Drums 1 and 2 are kick drums, 3 and 4 are snares, 5 and 6 are closed hi hats, 7 and 8 are open hi hats, 9 through 12 tend to be additional percussion, and 13 through 16 are melodic sounds.

On the Drum tracks, 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.

You’ll also have noticed by now that the various tracks use different colours for rapid identification: this principle applies throughout most Circuit Tracks Views. The colours are (approximately):

Press the Play button to stop.

Later in the manual, we explain how you can choose the synth and drum 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 Tracks 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.)

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.

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. Now select Drum 1 in Note View. When you press º Play you’ll see the white pad (the play cursor) progressing across the 16 Pattern steps:

You won’t hear anything just yet.

To make a “four-on-the-floor” kick drum, select a drum sound you like from sample slots 1 or 2 of a kit using the two lower rows of pads: the selected pad lights brightly. Then short-press* pads 1, 5, 9 and 13 on the two upper rows as shown, and press Play:

*Many of Circuit Tracks’ buttons produce different behaviours depending on whether the button is “short-pressed” (half a second or less) or “long-pressed”. In this case, a long press on a step pad will arm the step for a sample flip: this feature is discussed on Sample flip.

You can select a different drum sample while the Pattern is playing by simply pressing a different pad on the lower two rows: you can use any of the four sample pages.

Now add a snare drum to other steps in the sequence in the same way by selecting Drum 2 in Note View and choosing a different drum sample; snare drums are mainly in sample slots 3 or 4 of a kit.. You can of course, have hits from Drum 1 and Drum 2 on the same step if you wish. Adding further drum hits on tracks Drum 3 and Drum 4 is the same process.

If you want to delete a drum hit, just press its pad again: you can do this while the sequence is playing or stopped. The brightly lit pads tell you where the hits are.

Now you can add synth notes. Press Synth 1 to open Synth 1 Note View. The lower two rows represent a music keyboard, the upper two show you where you are in the sequence. When Play is pressed, you can see the white pad progressing through the steps (and hear any drums you’ve already programmed).

With all scales (see Scales) except Chromatic, the grid display looks like this:

The “keyboard” is two octaves, with the “paler” pads representing the root notes. While the Record button is lit, anything you play in either of the Synth Views (Synth 1 or Synth 2) will be recorded to the steps in the pattern.

When you’re in Note View for one of the synths, The ▲ and ▼ buttons alter the pitch range of the currently selected synth keyboard, by one octave each time they are pressed. If you press both ▲ and ▼ together, the keyboard resets to the default octave for the Patch.

The root note of the default octave is ‘middle C’ on a standard piano keyboard.

Tip

For a conventional piano keyboard, select Scales and then press Pad 32 (the bottom right one), which will light brightly. This gives the keyboard Chromatic scaling, and the layout differs from that in the other scales:

Chromatic scaling offers all twelve notes in the octave; to accommodate them, the keyboard “size” is reduced to one octave.