Controller advice - Maschine

[turbo]

Hey gents,

I've been wanting to produce a little more seriously for a while now and have been using ableton. I don't have any controllers or keyboards or anything. And well, it's an uphill battle. I've been looking into getting a keyboard midi controller with pads on it, or possibly a maschine.

Now Ive watched plenty of videos on the maschine's work flow - and as alot of my projects ive worked on are pretty heavy sample based - it seems like a great fit.

I guess i'm just asking for advice, the maschine looks great, but is it worth the price tag?

How plug and play is it? Can I take it out of the box and chop up samples and be grooving instantly? Or is there a ton of manual mapping involved?

[basspenetrator]

it is quite intuitive and by watching videos you learn a lot.. i never really read the manual.
even if you dont already have some nice samples, it takes you about 10minutes to get grooving, i guess

and yes, it is worth the money!

[mostapha]

If you're planning on using it as a controller for Ableton Live, it's a complete waste of money. Buy something from Akai.

If you're planning on actually using the Maschine hardware to control the Maschine application and record its audio in Abelton…it's effing brilliant. It's a fully featured groove box that sends 16 stereo channels to a DAW at once with sample-accurate timing. What more could you want?

[turbo]

Well the more I research and watch youtube videos the more I can see it fitting into my workflow. I would use the maschine software and hardware to do sequencing and sampling and then record into live. It seems perfect for that application.

[photojojo]

Get it.

[mostapha]

Well the more I research and watch youtube videos the more I can see it fitting into my workflow. I would use the maschine software and hardware to do sequencing and sampling and then record into live. It seems perfect for that application.

That's exactly what it was designed for, and to my knowledge it's the best thing out there for doing exactly that.

My one qualm about it is that it's based on the form factor of an MPC while I like the 16-buttons-in-a-row format of the Korg, Roland, Yamaha, and Elektron groove boxes better because I'm a crappy drummer…but it's a small qualm.

[mr.raw]

I just bought one 2 weeks ago and I am chopping samples and making beats and I've yet to read the manual as not had too much time, but i plan on doing so.

Youtube vids are good and for me this guy is really good and showing how to lay some simple ideas down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWXkw...feature=colike

[turbo]

So i made the plunge last night and went for the full size maschine - I was contemplating the mikro - but the layout of the original sold me.

I already wrote a couple quick tunes, its amazing how fast it is to get rolling. I have it running as a vst for live.