my battery also died but before the charge indicator was introduced. i was told that there where so e bad batterys used in some early cirklons. i am doing backups regulary since then and check the battery status sometimes. but i am hopeful that this wont happen again soon. since i put in the new battery in it is stable
You are saying you confirmed the charge was 3V and then a couple of days later is was below 1V?
i remember reading that its possible that the battery doesnt site correctly in the socket draining it. maybe this was the case and moving the cirklon around displaced it. anyway not nice at all
There’s a used Cirklon v1 on Signal Sounds with the cv break out box right now.
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You can add a program change track value to a pattern. That should load the correct patches to your patterns.
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Peace good people,
Doing some Cirklon manual diving, which subsequently means adding Aux events for some of my instruments.
Today, I’m starting with drums and thought to run a question by those who tend to make electronic or experimental music, or tend to sequence entire songs on the sequencer.
To me, the ones that make the most sense for drum patterns are:
- Aux A - Random Velocity
- Aux B - Random Mask Gate
- Aux C - Random Delay
- Aux D - Undefined
I was thinking about Inter-Aux events, but I’ve yet to get this working, so I can’t say just how it may be interpreted in a track. This is the next test I intend to run.
What are some of the Aux Events you generally like to use of drum patterns?
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Yeah rand mask gate is the most used by far. It shouldn’t even be an aux IMO but a dedicated note property. I like to route knob A or B to the rand mask gate value .
Here’s something I do a lot, but first a setup tip:
My current set uses 12 tracks for an Analog Rytm all with p3 patterns and these are set up on page 2 starting at track 17 so I can use redirect auxes for each of them on tracks 1-12 (let’s call these “mod tracks”). This is because ordering matters. You can’t redirect to a track that has already done its thing as things are evaluated left to right. This gives me 8 auxes per drum track (or actually 7 I can use, since one is the redirect).
One thing I love to do is setup repeats on one of these mod tracks and just leave it muted so by default it does nothing. This essentially gives me a per-track fill that I engage momentarily by unmuting and then muting again. This of course also works with melodic tracks where you can really take advantage of the repeat events that increase or decrease notes. Hopefully this makes sense.
My style is built around live performance (I do perform with it) so this might not be natural or as compositional as some might like, but it’s fun as all hell. I seriously don’t understand why the Cirklon and Elektron products insisted on a global-only fill mode. It’s just such a one-trick pony when per-track fills (hold fill, press track) like the MPC2000XL had back in what, 99? But I digress…
The basic template of the mod track that is muted has been a really key thing for me. You can put anything you want in there like transpositions, a second sequence that plays with the target one, you name it. It can have a different length, whatever. For my “melodic” tracks I generally have anywhere from 2 to 4 of these mod tracks.
Another thing I do a lot is use accumulators to make LFOs that target CCs. Panning is a good one for hats since the AR are mono sounds (and also only has one LFO), it’s nice to have some left/right movement (but never all the way, because that’s annoying and gets lost in mono systems)
I love this question btw! Looking forward to hearing more!
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Some good tips there.
On thing: Cirklon’s Fill mode is per-scene and per-track, the idea being that for every pattern you can set up a corresponding fill pattern stored in the scene with it. Fills run in the background all the time so you can swap individual notes in a pattern during performance if you plan it that way. In that respect it’s almost a replacement for the P3’s “knob mask” mode that allowed you to use the two track knobs to do stuff like make patterns more dense or swap certain notes etc.
I agree fills could be more flexible… one of the things I like to use them for is to randomise some of the sound paramters - so depending how long I hold the fill button, the pattern progresses so far, doing progressively wilder things to relevant CCs.
Using mod tracks is definitely more controllable than fills though, nice one!
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I concure. These comments have opened my eyes to quite a few possibilities that I don’t think I would have otherwise imagined.
Appreciate the super detailed replies. I’ve bookmarked them for later.
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One of the biggest gripes in my current setup involves hardware and software integration. Now that I’ve finally wrangled my mixer’s routing, there is one last puzzle piece I’m curious to solve: integrating the MPC X SE, Ableton, and the Cirklon.
If you aren’t familiar with the MPC’s recent OS behavior, it will stop playback when recording hardware if it isn’t set as the master clock. I’ve been researching this on various forums, and Ableton Link is supposedly the connective tissue for timing between the DAW and the MPC, though I’ve yet to test if this actually works in practice.
One thing I’d like to avoid is jitter, recording and playback issues, as one might expect from Elektron’s workflow with an Octatrack or Digitakt.
This leads me to ask:
- How are other Cirklon users integrating Ableton with a modern MPC?
- If you also record into the MPC, does it affect the other hardware receiving clock?
- Or is this simply a shortcoming I have to live with until Akai decides to let the MPC play nice while slaved to an external clock?
It was suggested from the MPC community to use the MPC as the master clock (see thread: MPC Thread : MPC Live - MPC X - MPC One (Part 4) - #1408 by p01s3d).
But I wanted to get a vibe check from others who have managed to get these devices play well together.
(Sorry for nor being more helpful, but as someone who once had one of the new MPCs in the studio for a couple of weeks:)
The only instance in which I would accept an MPC as sync master over the Cirklon would be with the MPC3000/4000.
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No worries. My research led me to believe the same.
In all of my experience, Cirklon or not, DAW has to be main. Sorry I can’t provide tips about the MPC, but it seems unreasonable to me for Akai to expect to be main. I use Ableton to clock my Cirklon over USB and it’s flawless btw, no latency or jitter whatsoever (but that might be computer dependent).
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Older MPCs play nice with other gear. It’s baffling how regressive the newer models are, but are sitting on 8 GB of ram.
At these price points you should be able to ask it to make a cup of coffee.
Just want to make it a dumb tape recorder while synced by the Cirklon. Even the Push receives clock and will let you record into the thing in standalone.
Even has ADAT.
It’s not the worst problem to have. But yeah, I’ve noticed Ableton has neglible jitter when sending out clock. And it gets the job done consistently each time.
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I prefer to use accumulator masks to random masks, in this way I can emulare conditional trigs.
It’s slower to setup and takes 2 aux slots, that’s why we really need more auxes per track.
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The 5000 also has the 960PPQ resolution like the 4000 so it should also work without breaking the bank.
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that sounds great. i just found out a quite complicated way to do that it using additional tracks. can you explain how you do it?
Lokua, you don’t have any of this recorded for a set of ears, do you?
I can’t lie, I understood just a small percentage of this breakdown, but could probably connect these concepts better if they were heard. No pressure, of course.
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1- offset aux d rel
2- mask gate unless aux d is less/equal/greater than - active on the steps you want to mask
3- set aux d accumulator limit to taste ( I usually set acc limit to 3/4/5)
cool thing about this approach is that you can now random mask c.trigs or randomize the accumulator, as usual with the cirklon you can go wild with auxes.
The issue is that I end up spending an entire night just setting up complex aux events instead of making music 
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