Maschine setup with Traktor

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Maschine setup with Traktor

Hey guys! Just started experimenting with adding a maschine to my live setup. Just a couple questions for other people that might be doing the same thing.

First off what do you sequence when using it? I’ve found that live drums usually the only thing that I can accomplish while playing with two other tracks.

Do you finger drum any parts? I’ve found for myself that finger drumming doesn’t quite come out that well even with quantize on so I’ve only been programming and step sequencing my loops.

What genres do you use it with? I’ve found that maschine doesn’t not work well with much else besides tech house and techno. Progressive house and some more melody driven tracks don’t sound well with too much percussion.

How do you setup your banks for playing? For starters I’ve just made myself a project with 8 banks of the included drum kits. I feel though I’d be better off having separate banks for each type of percussion i.e., one for claps, snares, high hats, etc.

One last thing too, do you have any FX or other devices on each bank? Compressors, limiters, etc.

Thanks!

2

You should subscribe to DJTT they just came out with this gem, DJ ENDO also has a Maschine Traktor setup you should check out.

3

I’ve read and watched quite a few guides on using Maschine with traktor but they seem to focus on using it as a controller and not a live sequencer live how Richie Hawtin used to use it. I’m more or less looking for help on how to setup the Maschine groups with samples and what not.

4

I’ve done that. What do you want to know? Just how to do it?

I usually had a couple groups of samples/stabs (obviated by the remix decks) and a few groups of drum kits. I put a kit per group because it made more sense to me that way, but I never got too complicated with it…a nice-sounding 808 and 909…and a couple more.

I tended to use the step sequencer because it was so easy to draw-in rhythms. I’ve also finger-drummed things, and you need to know 3 things about it:

  1. Don’t go past your capabilities live unless you’re willing to look dumb.
  2. Rudiments.
  3. Turn quantize OFF. Something that’s a little out of time sounds live. Something that’s moved 1/16 or 1/8 back because you were a few ms late sounds terrible.

What I did came from watching Hawtin videos, mostly. And, yeah…the track has to have space for it or it will just sound bad. If the song is too thick, you can’t fit more in it. I used it most to eliminate annoying breakdowns more smoothly than just cue-pointing through it.

As far as processing, I bought Solid Mix Series and usually ran Maschine through the bus comp. I’d also use Transient Master mostly to bring back the attack/decay controls that were on the 808/909. But, IMHO, turn its limiter off and just maintain your levels. TM’s Limiter sounds like junk, but if you run Maschine like your’e supposed to, it sounds amazing and you can just boost it as your last step (yay 32-bit float internal processing).

Along those lines, the #1 lesson about Maschine is TURN EVERYTHING DOWN. Literally everything in Maschine is too damn loud, and it clips and distorts like that’s its job. Like (I think) everything NI makes, Maschine’s noise floor is functionally nonexistent, but there are a LOT of places it can clip (sample outs, group outs, master outs, and all of the sends, at least).

Whether you’re using the Solid Bus Comp (I think it’s good), Maschine’s Limiter, Maschine’s maximizer, or some other compressor/limiter/maximizer…it doesn’t really matter if you hit it peaking at -32 or 0…if you get the gain reduction you’re looking for and set the makeup gain correctly, it’ll sound right…just like pretty much everything in modern digital audio.

The Maschine samples (if your’e using factory ones) are recorded pretty darn well, so any other effects you add should be because you have a reason to want to change the sound. I don’t think I ever EQd them, but I occasionally used either a gentile HP or LP filter.

Honestly, though…I’m not sure it’s all that necessary with the Remix decks. I’ve been using my Maschine as a “poor man’s” F1 since I came back (haven’t bought an F1 yet). I’m downloading some of the remix sets NI has put out to play with, but it’ll probably end up with what I used to do with Maschine…some stabs/fx sounds…and a “column” or 2 of drums should take care of what I used to do with Maschine’s drum programming. I never did get great at finger drumming breakbeats, and the straight rhythms I used the step sequencer for were simple enough that 1 Remix deck could hold all of those patterns (made in Maschine and bounced as loops) with each of a couple kits…and still have plenty of space left.

Even if you wanted to play a whole song, I think the Remix decks can do it similar to the way Maschine could step through scenes…just not stepping through Scenes. Think of each one as 4 groups with a bunch of patterns. The bonus is you can do whatever processing you want in Maschine, bounce to audio, and not have to deal with the computational overhead of your processing or synths.

Also, being able to drag a patern’s audio from Mascine straight into a Remix deck is pretty cool.

5

Thanks so much Mostapha! You really answered a bunch of my questions.

I’ll def try it with quantize off. Makes a lot of sense as to why things came out kind of weird.

I’m going to def try and use transient master. I’m pretty sure I saw in Chris Lieblings setup he uses that too.

I’ve found the same thing with the levels in a lot of the kits. Some samples were way too loud and some of them not enough. When I setup my kits I lowered all the samples to keep them at about the same level.

I think I’m going to stay out of using effects in Maschine. Ideally I’d like to figure out a way to bring maschine in as a live input into traktor while also externally mixing it. From what I gathered I think I need an audio 10 and I only have an audio 6 currently.

As for the remix decks I don’t really like them that much because I feel I don’t have that much control over everything. I much rather be able to step sequence my loops rather than having a static loop loaded.

Thanks again for your help!

6

On osx you can use either JACK or Soundflower to route audio between programs. I’m not sure what you’re on or whether it negates traktor scratch…or if that matters to you.

I’ve never been big into effects, so I just used a second sound card (like the built-in one) to send audio to the mixer.

And I like the remix decks, at least in theory, because most of the patterns I made were predictable and straightforward anyway. Plus, I’ve liked being able to rip something out of a track just to layer parts of the same song to change the structure.

If you’re doing more complicated things, that absolutely makes sense.