How do you cope with Maschine not having an "arrangement view" ?

[MyUsername]

Hi

I took some Ableton classes a couple months ago and also made full use of their 30 day trial. I liked the workflow of sketching out your idea in session view and refining the final edit in arrangement view.

But for financial reasons + dat hardware integration + free massive + a whole lot of samples right out of the box I went for Maschine (Full size, Mk. II) and I am struggling to adapt to the workflow.
Making a phrase for example and then some variations on that phrase is doable, but making a full song is a real tough challenge for me in maschine.

Some people said they pulled it off with ease, making a full song in maschine, maybe it's just not for me, or maybe I need a new perspective, I don't know.

[diezdiazgiant]

Just think of the scenes as blocks in an arrangement.

so like if I write a two bar loop I like, I'll keep it simple then duplicate across four patterns, lay those patterns out over four scenes, start play back of the scenes and tap in my variation or a fill or whatever.

Duplicate is your friend.

[crakbot]

Don't get frustrated..lol

I am an Ableton user and got Maschine and I know exactly what you mean. Maschine can seem really clunky, and it is. But you can learn it and once you do, it's pretty easy.

I do think it works best inside Ableton though. Maschine isn't great for full song unless you are doing specific genres.

[beisi]

You could consider ignoring the scenes, for me the best workflow that I have found so far is:

1) make loops in maschine standalone focussing on the main idea of the track and a few key variants
2) setup maschine as VST in ableton, make external instrument tracks for each maschine group
3) drag all maschine midi into ableton session view clips (doesn't take as long as it sounds) for each ext inst track
4) map out the basic song structure in session view, make a few more loop variants as needed within the ableton midi clips
5) arrange/add fx etc as per normal ableton arrangement view

You lose a little flexibility when you start to mess with the midi in Ableton, but by that stage chances are the bulk of the song idea is already done in Maschine anyway. Maschine is after all a 'groove box', make the groove then leave all the other heavy lifting to a DAW. For me Ableton is the DAW of choice because of the how quickly you can figure out how a song should hang together in Session view.

The only thing that is a little tricky is getting the channel routing and drag midi export right.

[BiggChev]

I had a similar "problem" being as how I'm from Cubase and Acid Pro background. What I did find helpful was naming my scenes and patterns, be it alpha numerically or whatever (ex. Intro 1, Intro 2 etc. verse 1 V2 V3, build, outdo) Naming each group is helpful too, that way you know exactly what you're looking at.

Duplicate, Duplicate Duplicate!! so helpful. Once I've got say a 4 bar pattern down, I duplicate it, make some variations (add on or strip back some stuff) Once I've done that I name them accordingly as to where I see them in the scope of an entire track.

with 1.8 the colour coding is pretty helpful as well. You can colour code sections to know which "blocks" go where and what each scene represents in your song.