Circuit Mono Station: Unpredictability Where It Matters
Throwing Snow Puts Novation Sequence Synth Through Its Paces
There are two sides to Throwing Snow’s appreciation of Circuit Mono Station. The first is familiarity: as a user of the original Circuit, the London-based producer is already locked into the intuitive, screen-less workflow that Circuit Mono Station shares with its cousin. “Mono Station is really easy to get to grips with, because it’s the same workflow as the Circuit. But also, the top section is laid out like the Bass Station II. It’s very easy to swap between the two because it’s basically two of my favourite devices mashed together.”
This familiarity helps him when jamming and playing live, when he’s creatively zoned in to his machines. The movements to control Circuit and Circuit Mono Station are now programmed into Throwing Snow’s muscle memory; making adjustments to the instruments on the fly happens without conscious effort.
The second side to Throwing Snow’s admiration is almost contradictory to the first. An an artist, Throwing Snow thrives off Circuit Mono Station’s unpredictability in order to keep his creativity stimulated. Unlike a straightforward sequence synth, Circuit Mono Station has several functions that create creative variations in the behaviour of pattern playback, the arrangement of sequences, and the timbre of the instrument. Using these different pattern playback styles in combination with Circuit Mono Station’s paraphonic mode, he is capable of creating erratic, polyrythmical and trans-timbral sequences. “When the sequencer adds random notes together in paraphonic mode, it gives you something very interesting and unpredictable. Occasionally, I will sample one unique-sounding note because it sounds special. Other times, it might be that the entire pattern is really interesting, so I’ll keep the entire thing.”
Throwing Snow continues, “The paraphonic element of Circuit Mono Station has been really amazing for my creative process. It’s only now that I feel that the equipment has caught up to what I wanted to do!”
