Maschine: A Users Review

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Maschine: A Users Review

Although it’s pretty late for a review on Maschine, we feel that it will bring a good comparison to the previously reviewed MPC Renaissance. Plus, six months of experience of actually using the real thing should provide better perspective to the readers without getting carried away by the hype yet again.

In the recent years NI has proven themselves as one of the major driving force in the audio production business thanks to a range of stellar products like Reaktor and Kontakt. They’ve been very active at releasing new product (and killing older product lines much to the grief to their users) these days, and one of their latest products are the music production suites Maschine and its little brothers Maschine Mikro (which comes with cut- down hardware controller, but otherwise essentially the same).

If you own a MIDI controller or two, then you might still remember how you bought and opened your very first controller, plugging it to the computer and hoping that the drumpad on the controller will actually play the drumpad on your music software. Unfortunately that’s not how it does business around here – controlling plugins and DAW seamlessly using MIDI are supposed to keep musicians that doesn’t happen to hold an MSc in computer science from actually doing it. It’s cumbersome and tedious. But with Maschine, what you get is a hardware that’s specifically designed to work with one software i.e. it’s own, and it does it really well. Tightly integrated hardware/software approach is what Maschine is all about.

Opening the box, from the first look I must admit that in my opinion the hardware has a ‘very functional’ look – it kind of lacks nice curves and elegant finishing touches on its body. But the qualities are what I expected: the pads, buttons and knobs feels tight and solid, and the display LCDs (two of them!) are big. The sizes of the control are right as well – nobody hates it more than I do when an important function is too small for my finger to press. Personally I think the “note repeat” button could be better positioned as its too far from both the drumpads and the buttons for adjusting its parameters, but this is definitely not a show-stopper.

Contrary to how the hardware looks, Maschine is not just a drum machine. It comes with a full-featured sequencer, samples, and effects, so it’s indeed possible to write a track only using it.

Maschine has quite a capable sequencer. Important features such as quantization, copy/paste, undo/redo (and more) can all be accessed by turning and pressing knobs, pads and buttons in the hardware. The sequencer in Maschine is mainly designed to be used with the hardware however, and you’ll feel that editing the notes using your computer mouse feels rough and not as smooth as in your preferred DAW.

Also, the way Maschine utilizes patterns can be limiting – each group can only contain one pattern so layering multiple patterns from the same group is not possible. This is probably intended though, especially when you think of live performance as it keeps things simple.

It comes with about 6GB of sounds (drum hits, loops, oneshot samples, etc) and what I like about NI products is that they have this really nifty sample browser with categorization tags to easily browse your sample. Your own, imported sample can of course be tagged in the same manner too.

There are various built-in effects. Most usual suspects such as delay and reverb are there. Effects that can produce wicked sounds and are cool to have on live performances such as beat delay, grain delay and note repeat for stutter effect are also there, though the later is not technically an effect unit.

Other interesting features include internal and external sampling, loading external plugins and vintage engine mode which emulates the ‘gritty’ sound found in S1200 and MPC MP60, and can be set per sample.

Additionally, there is a button in the hardware that can switch between Maschine mode and MIDI controller mode, which (surprise!) turns the Maschine hardware into a generic MIDI controller. It comes with a few interesting MIDI templates such as for controlling Ableton Live and NI Massive.

However, there are a few inconveniences when using Maschine as a plugin inside a DAW. As Maschine’s transport control now follows the host, you have to pay extra effort of keeping track of the position of the host’s transport control when recording pattern in Maschine, as it could be affected by the position of the host transport control (e.g. when it’s looping or reaches the end of the song).

In addition, DAW can’t read patterns inside Maschine. So to incorporate the Maschine patterns you made into the complete arrangement in your DAW, you have to go through a few extra steps of either bouncing them to audio, switching internal scene manually using MIDI note, or export the patterns into MIDI notes and then set Maschine to respond to those notes.

Aside from a few potential improvements, I think Maschine are one of the best thing that I’ve ever used in some time. It’s easy to learn, the controls felt tight and responsive, and the software is quite stable – I’ve only had a few crashes over the few months I’ve been using it. And most importantly, it feels like using a real hardware as you can most of the time do anything without ever touching your mouse.

Most MIDI controllers on the market is designed to be as generic as possible for use with as many plugins as possible with varying degree of usability. So Maschine took the other way – it is designed to work with one software and do it well. For what it does, I’d say it works wonders.

– Review by Lolski

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