DAW with the DEEPEST Maschine Integration

Its rather simple compared to yours.
its a Maschine midi track and a Midi track and essentially you open the Maschine group i included, which sets up the midi routing, and then select the kit you want. the midi you punch in with your pads will be played in maschines arranger. this inclueds the chords and arp data.

I have been looking to do this with Maschine and Logic Pro for years now and it is impossible becasue of the limits set when Apple limited logic pro to Audio Units. Instead i was limited to using Audio only with Logic pro from maschine which was fin but made precision hard when it came to note and groove placement. I Really wanted to use the maschine workflow to make music, but the maschine appliation in standalone mode has so many liitations and literally renders a lot of paid third party plugins useless and worthless. NO GOOD!

You dont by chance have a controller editior template for launching and recording clips or scenes? or is the one that comes included already set up perfectly for it?

 

BPM changes work just fine, Maschine follows host BPM, no reason not to.
Mixed time divisions don't tho, at least if you plan to have the MIDI inside Maschine, if all the MIDI is in the Host then it works fine.

 

no, what i am saying is IGNORE the maschine plugin, its now just an instrument inside of Ableton. The ableton sequencer is the only thimgs recieving midi data writen to it... so no maschine wont see the time signature changes but yes you can inside of ableton, make bpm and time changes and have the music reflect that ish.

 

My template has custom CE/midi cc mappings for all the controllers I use in this workflow :

APC40mkii - controls 8 instrument tracks with each having 4 song layers (midi gates). Controls for all 8 track volumes, arp on/off, arp velocity

Kontrol F1 #1 - controls the 4 song layers each layer having up to 4 melodies/chords. ‘shift’ mapping controls 8 samples in Egoist.

Kontrol F1 #2 - controls the 4 drum layers kicks, snares/claps, hats and perc. ‘shift’ mapping controls 4 samples from Serato sampler, 4 samples from ADSR sample browser, 4 midi layers for Rizer, and 4 samples just as Ableton clips

Push2 - not mapped used as Ableton controller

Maschine Studio - not mapped, exclusively used to browse/ swap NI samples and kits


As you can see the breadth of my template goes well beyond just Maschine . However i am working on a Maschine only version that has all 16 pads mapped to a drum rack and out to separate midi tracks so you can multi pitch sounds and samples from the NI kits. I’ll share it on the forum when finished

The factory mappings are ok but too vanilla for my needs .

 

I hope better integration is on the horizon. Akai just announced this: https://www.akaipro.com/newsflash-ableton-live-integration

 

Humm... Looks similar to the legacy mk3 / studio integration but turned up to 1000% with the advantage of a touchscreen and with a nice GUI and awesome visual feedback...



I dont see myself buying a standalone to then control Live, the two things seem like complete opposites to me but it sure makes the devices a lot more versatile, especially Force, it's now a more interesting solution to me. Hat's off to Akai.
If they dont abandon this integration thing like NI did and keep improving it I might consider switching over, well see...

 

Definitely food for thought, but I don't see myself purchasing either yet as there's a lot of basics like time signatures that leave a lot to be desired still to my knowledge. I'm assuming things will only get better with it, hoping NI follows suit and fleshes out their integration with various DAWs. Partnerships and integrating with existing workflows is going to be a theme for 2020 within audio it seems. The competition and capability is definitely rising with AKAI. Hoping NI will really deliver on the software front going forward.

 

IMHO common sense would dictate that the more accomodating and versatile your products are the more reasons people have to use them.

 

As for Akai I don't get what they are doing. MG/CMP don't either... start at 35:53. Force dropped $600, I think that means discontinued in the near future.

 

But who is buying a standalone to control another software running on a computer? Seem crazy to me. Have they sorted the song mode on the Force? They should focus on that instead.

 

I would rather see NI fix the issues with their software first. We are almost in 2020 and no signs of any improvements to the arranger.

 

Not sure, but added value like that undoubtedly helps to move units.

I would like to think that there's enough people working at NI to focus on more than one feature. I'm expecting a lot from Maschine 3.0, and I think most users are. It'll likely fall s

 

Somewhat of a weird poll IMO, because of that I didn't vote. Heck, the poll is by definition a bit unfair I think because most people will favor their own DAW anyway no matter what.

But most of all... when we're talking about controlling the DAW then I suppose it determines on control scripts or other ways of support.

Yet when it comes to actually playing with Maschine (so: using it to actually produce sound) then I think there's no big difference at all.

Once you have Maschine loaded and you set up a nice group ('kit') then all you have to do is click the mixer section, click on the IO icon and on the last (master) channel (positioned on the right and probably named "A1") you'll notice the top strip stating "Off". Change it to "Drumkit" and you can play your kit straight from within your DAW, get ready to pull up your (step?)sequencer. This is even (somewhat) easier on the Maschine itself: press 'channel' then select 'Group' using the white button on top of the left display. Then select 'Input' using the white buttons above the right display. Now you'll find the 'key mode' in the lower left corner of the left display.

For me this completely does away with the impression that Maschine would be some kind of blackbox, it obviously isn't.

 

feel the same ... i used to use Maschine integrated into Ableton with multi channel setup

when i set it up as 1group per track in S1 (8 is plenty for me), got all the MIDI routing sorted (saved as template), i found it was great for tracking and comping Maschine's patterns on the S1 arrangement screen. For example, S1's 'lanes' let you track out all associated preset or user patterns from Maschine, then effortlessly comp between them all for your arrangement. S1 also has a comprehensive %swing system that allows fairly accurate matching of swing settings on Maschine and S1. (i track a Maschine pattern into S1, then adjust the S1 quantize grid by % until the grid lines up with the Maschine generated MIDI notes on screen)

hands down my favourite Maschine/DAW combination so far

 

Nice. Presonus by far had the best year out of any DAW maker.

 

A bit offtopic but do you guys use the "Extract to Chord Track" function? I find this very peculiar, never saw it in any other daw and I am curious to how well it works at guessing Chords changes in Audio.

 

haven't used it much in S1 as yet but seems to work just as says it does

 

Hi I use Maschine in standalone as it works best sometimes I use Cubase and my expirense is very smooth but in order to directly record Maschine to audio in Cubase I have to use UR12 card/very cheap and I have studio room working with low budget UR12 and sound is fantastic while direct sound from Maschine mk3 is little specific... maybe we can say that it's sounds Analogue, it has a lost of warmth in sound and in couple situations I recorded mk3 output to UR12 and vice versa. Also I find that Maschine will easily sync with almost every DAW and I use that feature a lot because I play with my brother. Maschine is amazing but Cubase as DAW is in my opinion best and here is why. You as user shoosing your workflow no workoruund simply you can open plugins or instruments in more than 20 steps so it's all depends how user will adapt to apparently hardest DAW but it's not. I used FL, Reson and I like to use Ableton but with Maschine I don't feel that I have to and winer in most CPU friendly is Bitwig. Sync is seemles even with Reaktor, I played on YouTube thinking, it it easy than sudenly a lots of folks asked me how I did it and I tryed to explain but honestly it is easy, I spend less then 2 minutes to figure it out by myself. I didn't use Reaper, I just tried Sonar but for me it was just more of the same, Cubase. For me having Cubase is perfect match with Native Instruments, always have been and still is. Can't wait to buy + I think that my music income will be high in Q3 or 4, I need that better quality build Maschine . This Maschine changed my music life and I hope that it have that positive impact on you too. Honestly I do my music live on Maschine then I need any DAW just to do argument faster and that's it , for me difference between DAW's is minimal and it has nothing to do with quality of sound

 

Sorry I don't to bother anyone but Maschine is a music tool for it's self but when controlling the DAW you can map some funtions while Nektar P1 works seemles with S1 and pretty any other DAW through special coding and I'm not talking about Nektarine, NO P1 works without mouse for real from the start to finish but again it is individual and many finds mouse most powerful tool and it so cheap that you can buy couple of bags and not worry about life span. Shortcuts Nektar have superb solution that can do everything but I would rather have Maschine with more features from request tread. As for mixing best results are when you avoid ear fatigue so mix smart very quickly same applyes to master and till I bought MK3 every DAW was lacking fast expression under inspiration I tryed PUSH 2 and there are much better solution for only screens but Maschine is a king. AKAI is a superb but firs you have to hunt down all samples to be sure that you doing quality music and for me it is extra work, I can make any sound with eny sinth because I like it and Maschine with internal instruments is still better than Electron. I was so in disbelief when I heard Elektron sound, it is so tin even tiner than Arturia Mashines, you always need something to boost the sound to ad gain so I don't mind laptop but if that is a new feature than great but it still does Mk3 job but with good quality build encoders finally. Now PC I'm spearing income to become + user. Still missing costume chords to pads but ok workoruund just take a little more space on HDD and in tearms of replaceing projects to another particion or HDD it wlafes with Maschine I never had any issues. NI win this round and I have feeling that it will stay like that...just imagine level of stress when AKAI can't start up. OMG my friend almost exposed.

 

Please don't get me wrong, I like S1 and many of my Musician friends using it and when I seat to do something in S1 it it apsolutley familiar place and I'm Cubase user, it is same apsolutley same features. But compared to all other DAW internal plugins only Maschine with Variation Mode have something similar to CUBASE old now much improved MESH VST, it is audio sint, and all new features in S1 I had it 10 years ago but of course I don't use everything just because I can, Studio room I don't use but I realized that I can filter sounds with combination of output and studio signal and record what I hear. S1 is great DAW compared to Logic Pro difference is only that Logic can handle real time audio and overload message but it is so robust that is standing on the edge on stupid and professional while S1 is definitely Pro DAW but I saw everything on Cubase many years ago. Ableton resolve view best, best presentation everything else is avarage but Im not Cubase fan I just meat Cubase as only solution in 90' so I always tend to look for better and I didn't find it and that doesn't mean that it is best because Art is in us, in you no in DAW's but when Maschine came it was actually mutual, I made my thoughts to music naturally fast and when I was not focused just playing with Maschine I got great results and I recommend to everyone to make music in Maschine untill need for freedom explodes than any DAW is good for audio ... Maschine only is still gives apsolutley amazing results but it is really hard to finish everything in Maschine, I menage to finish couple tracks and hey they ecoed across the planet and I'm glad but I have no patience to go Maschine only if I add S1 wow it is infinity and we need simplysity.