Maschine Jam tune feature and other thoughts

I finally picked up a Maschine Jam and have found it be a very useful addition to my Mk3. I was surprised at how certain instruments when coupled with notes mode and the touch strips can yield some very happy accidents! Course for arranging beats the extra size of the grid certainly helps as well and it doesn't take much time to adjust to the buttons and layout when coming from a Mk3.

I only ran into a few caveats, nothing major really though, I found was that the tune feature only works with sounds and not with actual instruments. I couldn't find much else about it regarding any future option or exact specifications to allow it to adjust instruments loaded inside Maschine or not in the manual.

I was trying to work around this by sampling an instrument then playing back and adjusting the tune on the Jam for an effect but as others had mentioned (and I wasn't sure if this would pop up in my particular use case but it did) you can't play pads on one bank on one device and have another bank open on another, like a Mk3 for viewing, say a sampler, and play pads of another group on another device. It makes sense that it wouldn't work as it's still one copy of Maschine and both devices act as one unit.

Lastly is just the lights on the Jam's inactive buttons, not all of them are back lit even slightly like they are on the Mk3, which of course came out after the Jam, but if there is ever a firmware update for this to allow for adjustment and control that would be great when working in dark/dimly lit areas. If you press shift + midi you'll see what I mean, there is the ability for the lights to be backlight slightly and still have a brighter setting to indicate their status.

In any case it's been great to take old projects I made in Maschine and use the touch strips as channel faders to adjust multiple settings at once with one hand as well as being able to come up with entirely new scene combinations with the hardware with the push buttons vs the encoders on my Mk3, it's much faster and you can see what works and what doesn't quickly.

The only other caveat is I ran out of desk space rather quickly

 

I got creative with a kitchen unit

 

Thanks for the idea, hope your resting up good now from the surgery!

 

Yes thanks , sitting down a very secluded beach at the moment , not a soul to be seen
I did do the unit thing the other day , when I probably shouldn’t of , but I was fed up of resting
At least I can finally put my speakers on my desk

 

This is a known issue with older Komplete Kontrol and Maschine hardware. After installing one of the recent updates (a couple months ago), my KKS49 mk1 has numerous issues with incorrect button light states. Maschine Jam is from that same generation of hardware.

I wrote a detailed bug report here and got a response from NI that it's a known issue, and they're working on it:
https://support.native-instruments....ries-mk1-buttons-are-not-lit-correctly-en-us-