Who's rocking the Maschine? Any tips or advice to share?

[Mitton686]

Pick it up couple days ago. It been sick so far, don't know to much about producing beats but this is something I really want to get into. Oh and second time using it, force close wtf?

[Steve Zorilow]

Like anything, practice makes perfect. Don't hate educate, check some tutorial on Youtube & the likes, plenty resources.

Many DAW/prod concept & tutorial will also apply to Maschine to some extend, take your time, get your hand dirty and, most important thing, have fun!

[Mitton686]

Right on man! Thanks Ya I'm fackin pumped to make some bumpin beats!

[mostapha]

I enjoyed this: http://www.eqmag.com/BlogComments.aspx?id=111683

The guy's using an MPC, but everything he's doing is possible on Maschine, and in some ways it's a lot easier.

Direct suggestions:

• The only way you're ever going to get through that humongous sample library is to start building your own kits and saving them as groups.
• Learn the things that you can only do in the software.
• Figure out a workflow that works for you. My friend (who just got a Mikro) loves just playing beats and tapping record when he's in a groove. I prefer using the step sequencer and the swing knob.
• If you have a DAW, learn the routing b/t Maschine (as a plugin) and the DAW inside and out…really weird and interesting things can happen.
• If you don't have a DAW, don't worry about it. The effects in Maschine either sound okay to my ears or totally and completely suck…and the ones that totally and completely suck are largely unnecessary fluff designed to sell more of them to idiots anyway. It's completely possible to make a great beat on Maschine. If you listen to hip hop at all, you've heard tracks that were just a stereo track out of Maschine plus vocals done in a recording studio. D.O.A. was probably one of them.
• The exceptions are the reverbs and delays. NIs Reverbs and Delays all suck (except the basic non-T3 delay in Traktor). Learn to work without one and then buy a good one when you find a need for it…or record Maschine into a DAW and use the ones that came with it, because they probably suck a lot less.
• No, seriously…$150 pedals sound better than any of NI's Delays…and their reverbs sound like shit as soon as they're audible.
• The one thing Maschine can't really do at all is timestretching samples. If you record/find/buy/have a sample that you need to time-stretch, Audacity will do it and sound damn good for the price…but you have to do math. Basically, change the tempo first, then pitch-shift it.
• The keyboard mode is kinda cool, but it's very limiting. Sampling a synth sound like is done in the video linked above is fairly straightforward and simple in Maschine (especially if Maschine is hosting a soft synth) and yields much more "jammable" results, especially if you already have a chord progression.
• RTFM.
• No, seriously…NI's manuals are pretty good.