Native Instruments Circular

The central display in Circular’s Play page provides easy access to some of the sequencing options while also being hypnotic to watch.

NI’s Circular offers a dizzying range of creative possibilities.

Designed by Frank Elting (the mind behind three of NI’s popular granular Kontakt instruments, Straylight, Pharlight and Ashlight), and with sound‑design input from the Most Human Colors, Samuel Estes and the Solos, NI’s Circular comes from a stellar team. It also boasts an intriguing concept, UI and feature set. So, is Circular going to help you keep your musical world going round? Time to explore...

Circular Tour

Let’s start with a brief summary of Circular’s main features. In essence, Circular provides a four‑layer, sample‑based sound engine for use within Kontakt (full version or Kontakt Player). It ships with some 9GB of sample data which suggests the 168 included sounds are deeply sampled. The sounds themselves are derived from a wide range of sources including guitars, music boxes, prepared pianos, tuned metalwork, various brass instruments, vocals and a range of synths, some familiar and some processed to give a more unusual sonic flavour. The individual sounds are very classy and easily good enough to make the sonic cut in even the most demanding of musical contexts.

From these source sounds, the design team have built around 250 presets (Kontakt Snapshots) divided into Atmospheres and Sequences. You can, of course, build your own Snapshots based upon the included sounds and, rather wonderfully, you can also load your own (single) samples into any of Circular’s four sound layers and then make use of the full sequencing, effects and modulation options the engine provides.

A four‑layer sound engine is a familiar virtual instrument format but where Circular gets interesting is in the features it combines to trigger, sequence, modulate and process those sounds. This is also where things get pretty deep and, while there is a lot of instant gratification to be had from the supplied Snapshots, I think it’s fair to say that Circular does require you to dip more than a toe in the shallow end if you want to fully appreciate what it is capable of. Space precludes a comprehensive description here, but I’ll try to summarise the main elements before exploring one or two of the more interesting elements in more detail to give a sense of what’s possible. Hold on tight...

Circular...