Just last Wednesday morning, I was absolutely sure that stem separation was nonsense. Nobody would ever need to use it for making music. Sure, it’s useful for learning and analyzing other people’s tracks, but as a real tool for creating new music? No way.

Then I watched a video by Gray Contrast. He’s a huge fan of the Novation Circuit Tracks, takes it with him on train trips, and creates entire tracks straight on the device recording it from the stereo output — no fussing around recording individual tracks. The sound in the video was fantastic.

My first thought: I must be doing something wrong. I’ve never gotten such a clean sound from any groovebox. That’s true. But even I can fix my messy sound if I record everything separately and mix it in a DAW. Gray pulls a clever trick: he runs his track through a stem separator, processes the resulting stems, then does mixing and mastering.

This is almost the perfect workflow — something that used to be available only on devices like the MC-101 or Digitakt (and a few others, but that’s not the point): play the whole track live, record it, separate stems, then mix and master in your favorite DAW.

The Circuit line feels like it was made for exactly this process. Except for one thing: recording only through the stereo output. It’s almost heartbreaking — such a great device, but only really useful for live shows or complicated studio setups.

But AI has saved us all. Now the process goes like this:

  • Record the output of your Novation Circuit Rhythm to your phone, MPC, or through another interface into your DAW;
  • Open the recording in Logic Pro, MPC, or similar;
  • Use a stem separation tool to extract individual tracks.

From there, you can do a decent mix and mastering. It won’t be perfect — AI can introduce artifacts, and drums still come as one file — but it’s a live performance recording. The imperfections are balanced by the vibe and energy of a real live take.

Depending on your genre and goals, this mix can go straight to mastering and distribution. For melodic techno or other mainstream styles, it might sound a bit rough around the edges. But for more underground genres, it’s just right.