how to launch maschine scenes from reaper

Maschine as VST in Reaper 4. How do I tell the Maschine plugin to launch a certain scene in a certain point of the Reaper project?

I'm just beginning with Maschine, have got it for just a few days. Not that familiar with Reaper either. I can now create scenes, but have no idea how to program their succession!

 

At the top left corner of the scene arranger in maschine go into the drop down and click scene midi settings.

Choose either program changes or midi notes, and then you can trigger the scenes. Midi notes are easiest for most programs to use. After that you just need to send the midi notes from a midi track to the maschine plugin and it will trigger your scenes.

You can record this as a performance in your daw to play back the same every time.

 

Never even tried this yet. Thanks for bringing it up. I think this may be the best way to avoid some of the limitations of Maschines song mode too. In your DAW you can trigger the scenes in real time and record it. You can rewind and edit or replace your scene triggers. You also get tempo automation/mapping etc. Just wish they also had a way to automate mutes and solo. I am going to give this a try though and use midi mode to do the triggers.

 

yeah, it works really well man, especially if you want to set your pads to send midi and trigger scenes that way, or from your keyboard.

 

Thank you! Even I managed to do this. I set the scene midi settings to midi notes and created a midi track in reaper with reaper's virtual keyboard, the track sends midi to the maschine track. Midi note c-1 triggers scene 1 etc.

Now is there a way to program the succession of scenes inside maschine, e.g. to tell it to play 8 times scene 1, then one scene 2 etc.. ? I'm really just learning this.

 

No way to do that, but you could do it by triggering them via midi in reaper. Currently no scene loop settings, one of the things many of us asked for when we first came to maschine. Hopefully in the future.

 

Okay. Something very odd I think - you need external to automate scene progression. Didn't expect that.

Now I had some success in reaper. If I run the song all the way from the beginning the scenes fold out just as expected. But if I want to edit something in the middle, the scene just doesn't start at the right point. I have to let the whole previous scene to play out if I want the scene I want to edit to run from the beginning. It's really annoying, If i want to loop a verse in reaper to edit it, I have to start from the pervious bridge section and let it play until I reach the verse which will loop. If I put the cursor straight to te beginning of a scene in reaper, maschine will play the scene beginning from whatever point.

I guess the midi notes always tell maschine which scene comes next. It will always play through the current scene before going to the next marked by a midi note. In this way it becomes next impossible to edit a song with a maschine instance. There's no real synchronization.

How do you do this?

Can I even tell maschine that I want it to run the selected scene from the beginning, when I hit play in reaper? This way I could manually synchronize it every time I edit a part in the song corresponding to a scene. Now when I move the cursor to a beginning point of a scene, the scene starts from somewhere in the middle.

EDIT: Okay, now I don't get this. Looping in reaper just doesn't seem to go together with maschine. Even If I get it to run the scene from the beginnig in the right point by letting it play a couple of previous scenes, the 8 bar scene goes from its end 8.4.4 to 6.1.1, not 1.1.1 when the selection containing the scene area starts to loop.

I'm just trying to edit the maschine scenes to match the vocals in a reaper track...

 

You should be able to edit particular scenes the way you are trying to if you do two things:

1-In Maschine set Scene mode to "Retrigger" (with the hardware press "Scene" and switch retrigger to on)
2-In Reaper mute the midi signal that is going to Maschine - now you can select whichever Scene you want Maschine to play and that Scene will start at the beginning of the scene and loop.

You will need to unmute the midi when you have done editing and most likely switch retrigger off if that is how you recorded your arrangement.

There is a kind of sneaky way you can do this by routing midi out of Maschine and back in to sequence the scene changes . Pretty much the same idea saintjoe hooked you up with in Reaper but using Maschine to sequence the scenes instead of Reaper. It's very much a workaround though - almost exactly the kind of complicated thing people buy Maschine to avoid - but I'll think it through and try and write out a useful how to in the next day or so in case it's helpful.

 

I put the retrig on and muted the midi track. No success. The scene still doesn't start from beginning where I want it to. When muting the midi I did find out that maschine wants the scene to start from 6.1.1, because it loops the selected 8 bar scene from the beginning of the song, and the point where I want the scene to start is 22.1.0. The scene is synchronized with reaper so that the 8 bar scene starts in 1.1.1, 17.1.1, 25.1.1 etc...

Now I'm in trouble because in the song the scene would start in 22.1.0. Can I get maschine to understand this without always running the song from the beginning?

 

I'm not sure exactly what you want to do, but you can change the scene sync mode, by default it is on "scene" but you can make it smaller, or make it "off" so that you can trigger the scenes however you wish without it having to wait for the scene to complete.

Retrigger will let you hit the same scene repeatedly without having to play through the whole thing.

 

I don't think I can manage to be more precise. I want a scene to start in a certain point in a timeline of a song, a point that isn't divisible by the bar lenght of the scene.

I put the scene sync off, and managed to do this. So: success, at least partially. Now when I loop an area corresponding to a maschine scene, the scene plays from the beginnig.

Overal I want to program scene succession and to synchronize maschine with (reaper) daw. When I point the cursor of the daw in some point, I want maschine-plugin to play the scene from that precise point, not from any other.

The sychronization is only partial, of course, because I have to always start from a point where the scene begins (can't pick a spot from the middle). This is anyway better than starting from the previous scene. I still think that this hinders my workflow. But I can go on now, many thanks!

How do you manage with vocal tracks and maschine? How do you manage to put scenes together? A machine, which doesn't allow sequencing a whole song hardly sounds like a modern groove production environment...

 

Got yeah...yes, since Maschine isn't a linear sequencer, you can only tell it "when" to play a specific scene, but you can't just randomly start it in the middle of a scene.

 

Maschine is not a digital multitrack tape recorder and is not meant to be. It is not designed for tracking vocals.

Though Maschine does not have a dedicated linear song mode, you can create a song in Maschine stand alone by arranging the scenes in the order you want. If you want a scene to repeat you have to duplicate it and you can again arrange the order in the arrange area. You can also name the scenes to get your head around it. Refer to the manual on how to do this. It is a bit more cumbersome compared to other workstations in this regard and lacks some features like tempo mapping and song automation though.

 

I know. I meant, that eventually many tracks will have vocals. How do You manage this? So you just duplicate the scenes... not that handy - makes endless amounts of scenes if they are short.

I ran into another problem with launching scenes in reaper. Maschine scenes sometimes seem to miss the first beat of the scene. Odd. Someone must know what I did wrong. Ever happens to you? Everything runs just fine until in the middle of the song maschine dropps one beat and music just falls apart. I've tripple checked that the scene launch midi marker is in the beginning of the bar...

 

The beat dropping thing hasn't happened to me before. One thought is there might be some latency happening somehow with the midi routing. Try setting Scene sync to 1/1 and placing your scene launch midi note a couple of beats before you want the scene to change and see if that helps.

I've had a go at explaining how to sequence scene changes from within Maschine but I think it might end up a bit drawn out and it's a kind of different topic so I'll start a new thread.

 

I think the beat dropping was just an annoying bug. Got rid of it by rebooting everything.

It's hard to see Maschine as a potent evironment at this point... Maybe I just thought of it as a nonlinear wonderland. I think I got stuck in sequencing scenes and ended up with an akward workflow that will push me towards linear sequencing or maybe trying Ableton. I'm a bit afraid that Maschine is going to just gather dust here...

You can still share your workflow on integrating maschine with DAWs enabling linear tracks like vocals.

 

advantage of triggering midi scene

So what would be the advantage of launching scenes from reaper via midi? Correct me if I'm wrong, but in vst mode, cant you still control scenes from the actual hardwarre and just trigger the scenes that way?

And also, do you know if there is a way to play and restart group individually instead of globally for the whole song?

 

it all depends on how you use the scene mode
With scene mode set to "off" and triggering scene changes from a midi track within my daw I can trigger in the middle of a scene.
1 scene /1 bar with scene 4/bar 4(fills)