Small Town Boy/Bronski Beat (Circuit Tracks version)

video upload by Guinan

"Feeling a bit of 80’s nostalgia ('Stranger Things' anyone?) I thought the time had finally come to try and give this classic electro-pop anthem the Circuit Tracks treatment. Released in 1984 (40+ years!) it’s too easy to forget how ground-breaking the song (and it’s subject) was in the political climate of the Eighties.

The song itself is a simple but almost perfect pop song. It was programmed on an MC-202 Microcomposer and is reputed to have started life as an electronic disco version of the Sex Pistol’s 'Pretty Vacant'!

Yamaha DX7 is used heavily on the track (notably the presets ‘Harp1’ and ‘Bass1’), and additional Sequential Pro-One, Memorymoog and Linn drums. I managed to simplify the arrangement to program everything and the vocals into a single Novation Circuit Tracks. Everything you hear is being played and recorded live from the Tracks.

I'm pleased at how close to the spirit of the original I managed to get this time. I hope you enjoy the track and it brings back some memories for you too."

"More details for synth nerds
BPM 135
I don’t own a DX7 (sadly!) but the closest thing I have is emulation. The repeated ‘Harp1’ DX7 line (and the ‘Marimba’ break) was sequenced on the Tracks MIDI 1 and sampled as 4-bar loops from the internal MicroDEXED emulator in an M-Vave SMK-37 Pro keyboard. Each sample was then triggered (like a drum sound) at the required point in the song using the Drum 3 track.

The vocals were stem-separated from the original track in Logic on a Mac and divided into 8 bar loops. If you listen carefully you’ll hear some artifacts and ‘phasing’ and a couple of jumpy edits but it does the job until I can find my own Jimmy Sommervile. I could only squeeze in 9 of these sections in the sample memory so a couple are repeated to fill in gaps (sorry!) These were then played on Drum 4 (again – sequenced in place of drum samples).

This only left 2 sample drum tracks (Drum 1 &2) to fit the pared down Linn drum patterns onto so the snare (Linn bass drum/snare and noise sample merged) alternates with the bass drum pattern on 1 to use one track and leave Drum 2 for hihats and percussion.

The bass and pad sounds are both Circuit Tracks patches to emulate the originals. The Circuit does a great job of simulating 80’s digital synths (that’s where its roots lie anyway).

The tracks breakdown is then as follows;
Synth 1 – Bass
Synth 2 – String pad
MIDI 1- top ‘Harp1’ DX line – sampled and played on Drum 4.
Drum1 – Linn bass and combined BD/Snare/noise sample
Drum 2- Linn hihats and percussion.
Drum 3 – sampled ‘Harp1’ and ‘Marimba’ 4-bar sections.
Drum 4- stem-separated vocals.
The main thing that got lost along the way is a top lead synth line (again sounds like DX7 to me) - maybe I'll add that for a future alternate version. Also - the tempo on the original is a bit slower at the start - I couldn't do that easily either.

I added internal effects from the Tracks as required for each track. Everything was then combined into Mixer scenes for each section and played back as a chain. Little left for me to do then other than press ‘play’ and tweak the mix.

Fire away in the comments if you have any questions. Thanks for listening."