NI Maschine Production System @ Sweetwater.com...

Music production enthusiasts are growing in number. Interestingly, producers who have made their mark for decades have nothing to fear...until now. The mainstay of most producers in urban music has been the sought after pieces of hardware including Akai MPC and the SP1200 sampler. Amazingly the company known as Native Instruments has created something called the Maschine that is a hardware unit coupled with a software interface that emulates the sounds of these two music production hardware icons!

I have been put in the wonderful position of trying out the unit alongside a new Akai MPK 25 midi controller as part of payment for music services rendered recently. My take on the product is that it blew me away!!!

Image via Wikipedia

Akai MPC 2000

Once setup I was literally able to use the unit with the standalone software to make my first instrumental template in minutes. The GUI cross references sounds (.akai MPC sounds are readable!) that are made into patterns. Those patterns are contained on each of 16 velocity sensitive pads. In addition each pad has the ability to change to keyboard mode where the MPK midi controller came in to play for chord and melody creation. Next, I created something called scenes from the interplay of the aforementioned patterns, which are linked together to ultimately arrive at a finished song arrangement.

Simple enough, but the best part is when the NI Maschine is instantiated inside a DAW for use as a plugin. Only in plugin fashion can Maschine read .rex formatted loops or have complete control over the drag and drop nature of the created pattern audio or midi data! Unfortunately, the MPC does have one leg up for now through the NI Maschine's lack of timestretch functionality. Timestretching is a second process that I had to do inside the DAW (Pro Tools 9) then dragging the stretched audio back into Maschine's software to load on one of the pads. I briefly got to chat via the NI forums with one of the chief administrators who assured me timestretch functions will be made available this year! So stay tuned because this year could be interesting indeed.