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  • Maschine Accessibility
  • The Arranger

The Arranger

The Arranger is made up of two views: the Ideas View and the Arranger View.

Scenes

Once you have created a few different patterns, you can add them into Scenes to create different arrangements. The Scene Button is immediately above the Pattern Button in the Pad Mode Zone.

When you press the Scene Button you will be moved into the Ideas view of the Arranger. This allows you to organise patterns into scenes without you having to think about how things will end up being used within a song.

Creating and Deleting Scenes

This is very similar to how you create and delete patterns:

  1. Hold down the Scene Button and press Screen Button 1 to pin it. This will free up your hands for later.

  2. Within the Helper, navigate to the Pad Zone and you should see that Pad 1 is assigned to “Scene 1” and Pad 2 is assigned to “New Scene”. All of the other pads have no assignments.

  3. Press Screen Button 5 (Create) then check the Helper—you should see that Pad 1 is still assigned to “Scene 1”, but Pad 2 is now assigned to “Scene 2” and Pad 3 is assigned to “New Scene”.

  4. For now, we only want one scene, so tap Pad 2 and Scene 2 will be selected.

  5. Press Screen Button 6 (Delete), which will remove the selected scene – don’t worry that you will hear “Delete off” when you press this button.

  6. Check the pad assignments in the Helper again. You should see that Pad 1 is still Scene 1, Pad 2 is assigned to “New Scene” and there is no pad assigned to “Scene 2” because you just deleted it.

Adding Patterns to Scenes

Now that you know how to create scenes, it is time to make them useful. Each scene can contain a number of patterns, but it is important to remember that a scene cannot contain two patterns that were created in the same group. For example, you could not have a scene that contained one pattern from Group A (your drums) and two patterns from Group B (your bass).

  1. Tap Pad 1 to select Scene 1.

  2. Press the Group A Button so that you can add one of your drum patterns to the scene.

  3. If you previously pinned the Pattern button, you can just press the Pattern Button now and inspect the Helper to identify which patterns are assigned to which pads. Once you have identified the pad that contains the pattern you want to add to the scene, just tap that pad. If you did not pin the Pattern Button previously, do it now by holding down the Pattern Button and pressing Screen Button 1—you can then inspect your patterns, as described.

  4. Press the Group B Button and add a bass pattern to Scene 1.

  5. You can hear the results by using the Play, Stop and Restart buttons in the Transport Zone to play the selected scene. In Scene Mode, these buttons will allow you to audition each scene as you build it.

  6. Go back to Scene Mode and create Scene 2.

  7. Select Scene 2 by tapping its pad then go back to Pattern Mode to add a different drum pattern and bass pattern to the new scene.

  8. If you want to make a copy of the selected Scene press Shift + Screen Button 4 (DUPLICATE). This can be useful if you wanted to add more patterns to the new copy in order to create variations. For example, you could add another instrument to Group C, make some patterns with the new group then add some of these 3-group patterns to copies of Scene 2.

  9. If you add a pattern to a scene then decide you don’t like it, you can delete the selected Pattern: just select the pattern then press SHIFT+PAD 9 (CLEAR).

  10. You can turn Screen Knob 2 (RETRIGGER) to toggle retrigger. When “on”, the next Scene that is selected will be forced to play from its start.

Sections

If you hold down the Shift Button and press the Scene Button, the Helper will announce “Section” and you will be moved into the Arranger View of Maschine’s Arranger.

In this view you can create a structure for your song by creating song sections. Each section contains a single scene, but several sections can contain the same scene. For example, you could have something like this:

  • An Intro section containing Scene 3

  • A Verse 1 section containing Scene 1

  • A Chorus 1 Section containing Scene 2

  • A Verse 2 section containing Scene 1

  • A Bridge section containing Scene 6

  • A Chorus 2 section containing Scene 2

  • An Outro section containing Scene 8

This example shows that scenes can be used in more than one section, but don’t have to use all the scenes that you have created in your final song arrangement.

Creating and Deleting Sections

This is very similar to creating and deleting patterns and scenes:

  1. Pressing Screen Button 5 (or pressing any pad assigned to “New Section” in the Helper) creates a new section.

  2. Turning Screen Knob 2 allows you to choose the scene for the selected section.

  3. Pressing a pad that is assigned to a section will announce either “Empty Section”, or the name of the scene that has been assigned to it.

  4. Screen Button 6 deletes the selected section.

  5. Screen Button 4 duplicates the selected section.

  6. The buttons in the Transport Zone will now Play, Pause and Stop playback of the entire song so that you can audition different arrangements as you create, edit and delete sections.

Practice arranging your song by assigning scenes to sections until you get a song structure that you like.