jayhosking wrote: ↑10 Sep 2018
cognitive wrote: ↑29 Aug 2018
The Arturia Keystep arrived today. ...
So far, the Arturia is exactly the Circuit companion I had hoped for.
Hey, cognitive, just curious how this pairing has been holding up. I'm picking up another synth with no keys and may want to grab a controller with sequencing features. I don't know of any alternative to the Keystep. How are you faring with it?
Hi Jay,
The Keystep is, so far, right on the money in pairing with the Circuit. I currently have no complaints, nor would I really want to change anything about it.
I have that live house show coming up in a couple of weeks and being able to play certain Circuit synth parts live with the Keystep instead of pads is going to really expand what I can do musically.
With two Circuits, my current setup is that I send the Keystep into one of the Circuits that has a good bank of synth patches, aside from the ones stored with the sessions. This Circuit #1 has sessions (songs) that have "room" for live performance. A cool thing is that if you mute a synth in the Circuit mixer, it is still playable from the external controller. You're really just muting sequencer data for that channel. So at any time in a song, I can hit mute on a synth and then dynamically play that synth.
Back to that cool bank of synth patches in Circuit #1: Circuit #2 has songs that are arranged in a more "Circuit-like" way without the intent to play one of the parts live. Now I can play Circuit #1 as a dedicated synth along with whatever is going on in Circuit #2. I have a couple methods to do this: 1) I can mute all channels in the Circuit #1 mixer, then select a synth patch I like from the channel I intend to play. Quite a few pad and button presses there, and not really that quick. 2) I can pick an empty session, then select a synth patch. Either of these methods are okay, but involve some finger dancing. So I like method number 3) I have a small number of blank sessions, but each with preset "good" live synth patches selected in both synth 1 and 2 channels. This way, with a single session select (and maybe a Keystep midi channel select) I get to my bread and butter synth patches on Circuit #1 to play along with Circuit #2.
Anyway, this is fun stuff, and a big part of the fun is the way the Circuit is so configurable for whatever flow for live performance I want to do here.