This is one of the most disappointing pieces of music gear I've ever purchased. I will be returning it. Let's start with the good, the idea of a no screen work flow is great, and Novation did that very well with the original Circuit, but they are riding that fame to the next generation with little improvement to show for it. The hardware design is nice, albeit a bit cheap to have a plastic top, and I am a fan of the rechargeable battery design, even if its only 4 hours long.
Now here's why no one should bother buying this. Is this a toy or a tool? Well, its not a toy... but it is a bad tool. It's a lot of fun for about an hour or so but the second you want to do something useful, everything about the system falls apart and your staring at youtube videos trying to find a clunky work around.
The Novation Circuit tag line should be "there's a work around for that".
We are sitting in a golden age of grooveboxes and yet the Circuit Tracks has a 10 year old synth engine, requires a computer for any synth modeling, and only has TWO available synth tracks and you can't change those sounds in different clips within a project. In a project, you are forever married to just two sounds with no changes.
Oh but there's two midi tracks? No, there are FIVE midi tracks, two of which don't actually have any functionality without external synths. There's no reason you couldn't have four synth tracks here EXCEPT for the fact that Novation would have had to build something new and not just re-shell the original circuits brain into a new box (lazy). But lets make a song anyways... oh wait, your patterns have to chain in order, even the original circuit did this better, but there is a work around! You can use the "new" scenes function... that also triggers in order, but you can build the scene from clips out of order, you just have to plan ahead. And THAT is where all the "amazing workflow" gets flushed right down the toilet. For everything they did right in the work flow, they break it with really bad work arounds for their lazy engine porting.
On to the drums, the drums are monophonic 1 shots that novation does NOT want to be played like notes, because that would eat the bottom line of the equally pitiful Circuit Rhythm. I didn't say CAN'T be... because there is a tedious and horrible work around where you can manually tune the one shots via the velocity page (why is it there? I'm betting that it was an oversight). So it's obviously possible for Novation to let us play the samples on a musical scale, they chose NOT to allow us to do something so useful. Also, those four drums tracks, they are all the same midi channel, so they aren't actually tracks, they are one drum grid that allows you to mute and fx four groups. The drums section of the Circuit system is arguably more limited than most basic drum machines, even the Volca sample lets you have polyphonic samples and playable scale (after a firmware upgrade).
So what happened? Well, I think this product got hyped to the moon. Then Novation dumped a ton of money into youtubers and reviews (I'm looking at you Ricky Tines... you know this is a bad product) and was able to sway opinions because it does LOOK slick. But what it really is is two half baked Circuits that even when put together ($800) you still don't get a professional tool. It's just a pretty but shallow system that fails where it counts most.
| 商品尺寸 | 21 x 24 x 4.5 cm; 780.18 克 |
|---|---|
| 制造商 | Novation |
| 型号 | NOVSYNTH11 |
| 保修说明 | 3 year warranty. |
| 商品重量 | 780 g |
