Voodoo Ray/A Guy Called Gerald - Novation Circuit version

video upload by Guinan

"Time for the first British acid house hit and another Hacienda favourite. The Manchester act A Guy Called Gerald blew up the Manchester music scene with his 808 and 303 tour-de-force. He's still making excellent music ‪@AGuyCalledGeraldTV‬ #voodooray

Everything you hear was programmed into the Novation Circuit and played ‘live’ straight out of the headphone jack into my phone. No extra effects or outboard gear are used during playback.

The ‪@IsotonikStudios‬ sound pack RB 303 by Yves Big City got me thinking about how capable the Novation Circuit could be for a blast of acid house. I hope this attempt gets close to the flavour of the original. • DEMO - RB 303 - Novation Circuit Pack by Y... [posted here]

‪@GyuBeats‬ has done some great video breakdowns of the track and is obviously a fan. Big thanks as he helped me track down some of the original samples. • Why Does VOODOO RAY Still Sound Fresh Today?

I also found the following website which is a fantastic resource of patterns for 303-soundalikes. It just had to be called Acid Tabs….. https://acid-tabs.com/303_patterns.ph...

I hope you like the track – drop a comment if there is an 80’s or 90’s track you’d like to see a version of.

Synth nerd details;
The 808 sounds are a mix of samples from Isotonik and a pack that is sometimes free called 808 From Mars.

The vocal samples are from a surprising source of an old comedy routine from Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. The ‘voodoo ray’ sample is actually cut from a snatch of Peter Cook saying 'voodoo rage'.

A key part of the track is the excellent singing of Nicola Collier. I didn’t have a singer to hand and I wasn’t going to impose my dulcet tones on the world. The ‘singing’ is therefore played on the Arturia plug-in ‘Augmented Voices’.

I hope it fills the gap for now and doesn’t detract from the overall track.

All samples are edited and positioned on drum pads then sequenced/played on the Drum 4 track of the circuit."

Voodoo Ray/A Guy Called Gerald (Circuit Tracks & Rolands Version )

video upload by Guinan

"'Say Hello To My Little Friends'…..

Something a little different again. This is a reworking of one of my earlier videos but with an 'acidic' twist. At the time there were comments wondering how it would sound with Roland synths rather than my attempts at recreating the sound using the internal synth engine.

I couldn’t resist the challenge, so the Circuit Tracks has some company in the form of a Roland T-8 and S-1 Aira. The T-8 is a drum machine based on a selection of classic Roland sounds, but it has the added bonus of a very good TB303 emulation.

The Roland S-1 on the other hand is a 4-voice recreation of the classic 80’s synth, the SH-101. An awesome synth in it's own right it's a great partner for the Tracks to use with one of the external MIDI tracks.

Both of these Roland originals were an essential part of the classic Acid House sound and the track, ‘Voodoo Ray’ so this seemed a natural Circuit Tracks project to rework. I’ll keep a separate playlist of any tracks with external gear to keep my main playlist Tracks only.

For this video I’ve copied the patterns across to the Midi 1 & 2 tracks, hooked up both of the Roland individually to the MIDI Out and Thru (setup in Advanced Setup to be individual MIDI Outs). Each of the Roland boxes are then fed into each of the Audio Inputs so they can be panned, level altered and have effects applied individually. Each of the Roland boxes are not using their own sequencers but are just being used as slave MIDI synths playing the patterns sent via MIDI from the Circuit Tracks. T-8 bass was set to MIDI Ch3 and S-1 to Ch4 to match the default channels for these tracks."