As computers become more and more powerful, and music production software move towards the software domain, the usefulness of hardware music equipment is largely its immediacy. Whilst software has given users the opportunity to twist, mould and tweak sound with scientific precision, sometimes it all feels a little too scientific. Many forgo the computer for the hardware mpc or similar, embracing its unified nature and workflow advantages and accepting the smaller feature set as the lesser of two evils. But does it have to be one or the other? Native Instruments doesn’t think so- and their new hybrid intrument maschine is out to prove itCan the maschine do better than a standard Digital Audio Worklstation and a few sample libraries?
At first glance the Maschine hardware looks familiar. The 4×4 16 pad design is highly reminiscant of the akai MPC series, and NI has cleverly decided not to try and reinvent the wheel.
people tend to sway towards using Akai’s MPC pad feel as the industry standard by which all others are judged, but rather than ape them, Maschine’s pads have a feel all of their own.
The pads are hard blocks of translucent rubber which are very firm and hardly depress at all. The solid nature of the pads means that they’re sensitive all the way to the edge, with no floppy corners, and due to the firmness are extremely sensitive. Every rotary encoder is infinite motion, smooth and have no dips or click points. This which gives a lot of control.
Unfortunately, placing the eight main rotaries directly under the screens creates Maschine’s only real interface cockup. It does render it quite tricky to watch the screens when adjusting controls as your hands tend to obscure them. Of course, there’s always your computer’s screen, which is a strong argument as to why the Maschine hardware doesn’t feature adjustable screen angles either- in practice it’s just not an important feature.}
The software/hardware integration is absolutely spot on, too. The software interface is basically just a better resolution version of what is displayed in the hardware displays, and 99% of your work on Maschine can be done without taking your eyes, or hands, off the hardware.Psychologically this is a great stpe forward, you genuinely feel like you’re using something tactile .
Maschine ships with a very decent 5Gb or so of sample library content. On the whole this content is excellent quality. The focus with the sounds is variety and usability rather than pristine sonic quality. But nothing that can be solved by importing some of your own drum loops and samples
All in all this is a great bit of kit for electronic musicians and as the software gets updated by native instruments we can expect more and more excellent features to be added. My advice? Go get this now!