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.
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.
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.
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.
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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