A word about Maschine...

Semi offtopic - I received NI Maschine a little more than a week ago and feel compelled to say something about it. It's awesome. I wanted it sooo badly I'd fall asleep thinking about it. While at home I'd wait near the door, jumping from one foot to the other like a little kid who needs to go to the - well anyway, I was jazzed, to say the least. And I have to tell you, that excitement was not misplaced.

Maschine is fun. Seriously, this rig brings the party. I like making music on it and I like the music I'm making. I don't think there's a higher compliment you can pay a product than that, hm? The hardware / software integration is well thought out. It comes with great sample content, great effects, and a drop dead sexy control surface that begs to be played. This is one of the rare instances where an advertising catch phrase turns out to be true - you really can "get lost in the flow".

UPDATE: I think, based on some comments on Reddit, that I'm misleading people into thinking that Maschine is a Reaktor oriented thing or strictly a MIDI control surface. Not at all. It's an integrated hardware / software workstation similar to an MPC. This video series from NI will give you the lowdown:



Resource usage is not super light so pay attention to the system requirements; if you run it on an older system, expect to make some compromises, like lowering the per-group polyphony. I'm looking forward to the 1.1 update to address drawbacks like the missing MIDI out from the software's step sequencer.

Here's how Maschine relates to Reaktor - you can run it as a MIDI controller, and edit the layout with this included software:



Using the generic template in the Maschine controller, you can open up just about any software that receives MIDI and start using it. The pads send note on and off, so boom, right out of the box you can create basslines and rhythms in third party software. You don't need to load the full Maschine software to do this - just hit shift-control on the hardware to switch into controller mode. Because of this design, Maschine used as a pure hardware controller is not resource hungry, and you won't notice any RAM or CPU cycles going missing if you use it with Ableton Live or FL Studio in this way.

At the moment I'm experimenting with ways to integrate it with Reaktor and the ParamDrum specifically - when you send MIDI to the Maschine hardware, the specified pads or buttons light up so you can do some interesting visual feedback.

Expect to see more about Reaktor and Maschine here in the future!