Maschine for making drum breaks and playing a synth along with traktor?

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Maschine for making drum breaks and playing a synth along with traktor?

So I am looking into getting a Maschine or Mikro to start to produce my own drum breaks and possibly play synths along with tpro2 and use the effects in maschine inside my mixes. I currently have an S4, an X1 and a Midifighter. Would Maschine be able to integrate seamlessly with my current setup. I honestly need to find a mapping for the x1 as it is not in use anymore. What I want to know is will a maschine allow me to “play along” with Traktor doing things like playing some drum breaks on the fly or maybe some sort of synths or horns…also how much more would I need to really produce a full song. And would the mikro be as useful for what I’m trying to do as it is 300 dollars less. I did use the search, but the majority of the topics were on mappings, I’m more interested in a Maschine as a production tool/instrument…I don’t really know anything about production yet so if the maschine is the deep end of the pool let me know a better solution for a beginner.

Thanks much,

Mike

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nobody has any insights for me…

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Yes, maschine would be able to integrate seamlessly with your current set up. If I were you, and based on your statement, I’d save up and purchase the full maschine as your looking to add drum breaks and effects ontop of traktor. With the mikro, you only have one knob and to really use the full power of maschine, you need the knobs for modulation.

I would say that the maschine is good for beginners and pros alike, it is an advanced drum maschine and full of power. Dive in if your serious about production, the maschine is all you really need.

I am now just getting into my maschine after owning it for 8 months, it was a bit intimidating but I have crossed that barrier.

Maschine = Power

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I’ve only just got my Maschine synced up to traktor, and it works, but not quite as ‘seamlessly’ as I’d hoped. It takes a bit of fiddling to get it in time and in sync once you press play, I think I’d need a hell of a lot of practice with it before using it live. Fun though.

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Thanks for the inforamation yall, I think I am going to get the Full Maschine…on hooking it up to traktor, how much fiddling would it take on a windows based system. also, can I plug it into my s4 and have the audio come out of the s4 to my speakers, if not what do I need to get to get going with my speaker setup…thanks again for the replies

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I’m not sure about Windows, I’m on a mac so it is a bit easier setting up.

I would think you’d need a midi cable to connect the maschine to traktor so you can run the effects through eachother, or you could just use the usb cable and maschine software as standalone. Either or work.

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you dont need a midi cable if your running them both on the same maschine

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Thanks for the replies all. I have another question… right now I have a pair of Xone XD-53 headphones and I go out of my s4 into a nice set of logitech 2.1 computer speakers. a few questions on speakers
A) Would I need to get a better set of speakers for production?

B) What would be a good set?

C) Would I be able to run them directly out of my S4 or would I have to get some sort of mixer?

  1. What would be an appropriate mixer for this if it is necessary? Why would I want some sort of mixer if I don’t immediately need one…

Thanks in advance

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Hey man, just letting you know as far as I know Maschine doesn’t have any “effects” inside of it (I believe you’re referring to effects as in like Traktor has Beatmasher, or echo freeze, etc). Maschine is a heavy production tool, and when you use it with your DJing rig (which I don’t see why you’d use it with your setup as I run the same setup as well) the only thing you would be doing it with would be redundant thus rendering it useless.

If you’re just going to use it for production that makes sense. However spending that much money on it just to make loops for transitioning i’d suggest saving your money and checking to see if someone has like Cubase L.E. or like Ableton Lite (either get them free or pay like $100) and just use your mouse to create the loops you’d like.

The only time I can see it working extremely well for you is if you choose to perform live and play the drums live like Jeremy Ellis did in his videos promoting the Maschine, and doing that during the transitions. Just keep in mind that until you get into the big leagues if no one is seeing you do that shit live (i.e. you’re behind the DJ booth and going nuts but no one can see it) or you’re at a house party so they won’t appreciate it. And also its a lot harder than it seems, cause I definitely tried it, and its by no means easy - however I’m sure that if you really put time and effort into it you can get it.

Just my two cents.

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As for this part man, i’m not going to type everything out as the answers are already all over these forums - you have to use the search function. And read.

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Maschine and Traktor are not the least bit redundant. They only are if you’re not using Maschine for live production work.

What you want to do is definitely possible, but I have no idea how to do it on Windows. You need something to get the midi clock between them and possibly something to get the audio between them…but if all you want to do is play beats along with your Traktor set, you can just give Maschine it’s own sound card and run it to an input on the S4…assign it to a deck, and pick “Live Input” as the deck type. I’ve done that, and it works very well, though if you’re using real sound cards (as opposed to virtual sound cards like Soundflower or Jack) then the latency gets to be an issue very quickly if you’re planning on playing anything live.

As far as playing live goes…I don’t see the point. If all you want is drum pads attached to samples, sync’d to a midi clock…I’d probably get an MPC over Maschine. But I like simple. And just triggering samples is far to simple to be worth the hassle, even for me.

On Windows and especially with the S4, I’d go ahead and give up on any aspirations of sampling into Maschine in real time or using Maschine’s effects on your Traktor audio…it’s a hack at best and kind of requires other software, since Traktor can’t use volume controls while in external mixing mode, and Maschine can’t take input from other controllers (other than a basic keyboard).

I figured out how to do it using Ableton as well…but I wouldn’t trust it at all in a live situation.

If you used a real mixer, it’d be a lot easier. It’s just one more reason that I think these all-in-one DJ consoles are a fad. They’re not adaptable enough.

Now, I have done it with all controllers just routing Maschine’s audio into Traktor to use as an extra deck, and it was brilliant. You could do that fairly easily. Well…you can on a Mac. I assume it’s possible on a PC, but I have no idea the specifics of how to do it.

I’m going to run an experiment some time this week of running Traktor’s audio into Maschine and using Maschine as both a groove box and a mixer. It’ll be weird, but I’m convinced it’ll work. It might even be a lot of fun, though I can’t see it appealing to too many people.

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Keep in mind that with ASIO drivers, you can only use the soundcard for one application at a time. I’m not sure if Maschine has specific audio routing capabilities beyond what Traktor has, but if not you’re going to have to use something like Asio4all and/or Virtual Audio cable; having done this on my former windows setup with Traktor and Ableton, I can’t recommend it given the latency (granted this was on a 5 year old laptop, but even on my desktop it wasn’t much better). Keep in mind that most people doing this routing (at least professionally; like Richie Hawtin) are on macs and Soundflower works a hell of a lot better for routing audio than any windows equivalent I’ve found. YMMV.

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Soundflower really is brilliant.

If Windows can’t let multiple programs access the same sound card, and if there’s no simple way to route audio between programs at virtually 0 latency…that’s a hardcore reason to switch to OS X right there. I don’t even think about it anymore. The worst thing that’s happened along those lines to me in years is only having 16 channels to do it with.

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You don’t need any external cables at all for syncing everything up, dubspot did a nice guide for doing it (Check at the bottom of my post). So for playing along with your S4, you need to route it into a channel that you don’t use on the S4. This could be Deck D, and then you just put the deck into Direct Input inside traktor. If you want to take fully advantage of the mixing abilities, I don’t know how that is done, but I can imagine that you need to aggregate your soundcard somehow or buy and extra one and cable it into the Input Channel D on your S4.

The showstopper for you right now is not having another soundcard and/or not running it on a mac.

I think most people doing the live part with Maschine is doing it in Step sequencer, to make it a bit easier and then add some swing to it. The hard part, is to make it sound natural and that is where your practice and preparation lies within. Usually helps to put compression and some light fx on your master out of Maschine to make it blend better with a mixed and mastered sound.

Two DJs mastering all this are Dubfire and Richie Hawting, you should have a look and see if it is something for you.

You can have a look at them in a live set here:

Boilerroom.tv performance - Dubfire
Boilerroom.tv performance - Richie Hawtin

Setup guide from dubspot:
Here

I hope this helped a bit :slight_smile:

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http://www.traktorbible.com/en/t2_maschine_ks4_win.aspx
This is the tutorial for syncing Maschine with the S4 on a Windows machine. I haven’t gone through the setup yet so I don’t know how well it works. I’ve read that the midi clock drifts a little. There are plenty of effects in the Maschine software and the effects could be limitless with the addition of VST’s. I’m planning on syncing everything up at some point but whenever I sit down to do it I just end up playing accapellas in Traktor and beats on the Maschine beat matching by ear.