NI Maschine?
Anyone have any experience with the maschine? If so, how good is it as a tool for live performances? How can it be used in mixing and the likes? Sorry if this is a stupid question or has already been covered I’m just really interested in this piece of hardware and can’t really find that much info on it.
its a good performance tool, but it has its flaws aswel. I sync mine with traktor in order to add elements/loops to mixes and stuff, more to do live remixes than to play my own productions live.
why maschine is a flawed live tool.
-no timestretching
-no sidechaining (can be an issue with bass/kick)
-no ability to seamlessly load different tracks*
*What i mean by this is say you have one project open, your playing a track live, and you want to go to the next track. you have to stop the music, wait for the next track to load, and start the music again. this leaves a big gap of silence between songs, unless you sync it to traktor, and switch over to traktor with some “filler” while you load another track, but then you have to reset traktors midi clock every time you load another project, to make sure its in sync properly. Not very practical.
Id say maschine on its own, is good for adding “live elements” to a set, to make your DJ set more interesting, but as a live tool on its own, its not very good. Ableton is much better.
+1.
Filter is the an to go to with questions like these, and I agree with everything he has said.
I love my Maschine, but i’d only use it to create tunes at home, or drum out a beat somewhere else - but never in a live performance.
How hard is it to switch from creating live beats on a Maschine to using it to control Traktor?
not very, just shift control to enter midi mode and its done, but still, thats the easy part, it still means you have to have traktor open, have the “filler” ready in traktor, set it all up, beatsync it and whatnot, if you only have the 1 laptop it also means you either have to have both traktor and maschine squished on your screen which is hardly workable, or alt tab between the two, which can become frustrating. and then on top of that, on the mixer, you have to fade to traktor, then load the next maschine project, and spend about 40 seconds to a minute waiting for everything to load properly, and then reset the midi clock and make sure every thing is in sync. by the time youve gotten everything lined up properly, youve easily wasted 2 minutes between tracks, which isnt very practical.
i still use maschine out at gigs sometimes, i allways use the midi controller itself, but as for “maschine” as the hardware/software combo, i only tend to use it to add certain percussive or synth elements to my set, or basically to sort of replicate the “sample decks” on the S4 on my own setup. and once in a while, i might play 1 or 2 songs live from maschine, but its more hassel than its worth IMO. i definately wouldnt reccomend using it to play a full live set.
Maschine does however come with an exelent Ableton template, which works quite simmilar to the APC, and for certain things, i think its even better than the APC, with feedback on maschines dual screens for certain things. and since you can easily drag and drop audio and midi from maschine into anything, its quite easy transfering a whole project or several projects from maschine into ableton. plus then you can sidechain, and seamlesly switch between “projects” in ableton, since everything from all your projects will easily fit in the one ableton set file.
Im not too familliar with ableton, i have it, but have only used it on the odd occasion. At the moment its not even on my computer. Im more of a “traditional sequencer” kinda guy, like reason or logic. but for a live setup, ableton + maschine would be a killer combo. you wouldnt even have to use the maschine software itself, just whatever you make in maschine, drag and drop into ableton as a seperate clip, or use maschine as a plugin. you would definately “fix” all the downfalls of maschine this way.
Maschine is still great for production, and for getting ideas down real quick, but its pretty flawed as its own standalone live tool, and still has its flaws as a production tool aswel. Lets hope they fix these things in a future update 
What id love to see also, is kind of like what they did with serato and ableton… “the bridge” if they could do the same sort of thing with traktor and maschine. I mean NI already make both the interfaces and the software for both, they just need to figure out how to make them work together.
I run maschine as a VST through ableton, synchd to traktor at gigs,
I have traktor running as normal as channel A&B on the S/Card and then i have ableton running from Channel c, (i have a 3ch mixer) and i use maschine to create the odd beat, or clap, and then switch to midi mode to play off one shots
And as the post above says, you aready have to have your filler ready, thats why i have a faderfox, thats there for track selection, track skipping, cueing etc.
with a few tweaks this setup oculd be the ultimate live tool!
i use maschine sometimes at gigs. second macbook, sync to S4 via midi cable, own channel on the mixer & your’re ready to spice up your tunes live..
You can use the Maschine as a lightweight, single-channel version of Ableton.
It’s good for playing drum patterns and samples, and (soon) driving VSTs.
For more involved live stuff, however, I’d use my APC40 w/ Ableton, since it handles loops better, has multiple channels, sidechaning and so on.
So for spicing up a DJ set Maschine is awesome. For live PA Ableton is better.
no ones mentioned this already but i just turn the thing into a midi controller
i use the 16 pads for cue points in decks a and b and if i press a button it switches to decks c an d
That’s an awful expensive midi controller if that’s all you use it for. That’s why I asked how hard it was to switch between using the Maschine as a Maschine and using it to just control Traktor. If I had one I would more than likely use it as a Maschine at home, and a midi controller with the occasional Maschine functionality live.
I only use that set up when I’m doing thing live gigs…I actually use the software and production value it has when I am not out. Kind of like the bold statement
i do that aswel, accept i have one page for cues A/B one page for cues C/D, a page for play/pause/pitchbend/sync, and then use shift+control to switch between that setup and maschine mode, but sometimes its a little overwhelming, and a little impractical 