Review: NI Maschine

What is Maschine? Check out our unboxing video and see for yourself...

Billed as a “Groove Production Studio”, it is a modern piece of music-production kit that looks a bit like the classic Akai MPC:

Whereas the Akai MPC is quite a separate thing from your computer (with its HD containing sounds that are fired through its independent outputs) the Maschine doesn’t have any physical sound outputs. Instead, it has a USB connection (and MIDI I/O).

Maschine’s developers – NI – are infamous for their unrivalled futuristic music software and so it should come as little surprise that all of the actual sound and processing in this package is done inside your computer via the bundled software.

The hardware device is wonderfully compact and light; looking great when you switch it on with its orange LEDs pulsing out of its dark metal shell. The included 5 GB of sounds are a good place to get started, and you are limited in the amount of sounds you can use only by the size of your HD.

The Maschine software is a thing of beauty, and gives you everything you need to sample, edit and play drums:

Those used to programming drums via a keyboard will instantly discover a new tangible, exciting world of performance when they get their hands on Maschine that MPC users have been enjoying for years, but in real time with no latency.

As mentioned in the unboxing video, the Maschine has transport controls. Obviously, its start, stop rewind and record buttons are designed primarily to get a beat loop up and running, but everything on the Maschine interface can also be hijacked as MIDI controls – so you can use the controls to navigate your sequencer via bundled templates. This feature will be of particular interest to anybody also looking for a DAW controller. Whilst Maschine doesn’t have faders, it’s an interesting alternative to having an MPC, a hardware mixer and a hardware controller all on the same desk.

Most functions can be activated from the controller itself so you barely need to even touch the mouse when producing. You can see the beats on the screen, so you will end up using the computer for quick deletes and quantisation edits. You begin by setting up the amount of bars and a tempo, and then smashing the pads. In control mode you have eight groups, so you have eight drum palettes to work with at any one time. You can load in an entire group of drums or just individual sounds. It’s easy to delete the sounds you don’t like by holding down the delete key and hitting a pad. Each group comes with a demo pattern to show you what the palette can do, and there are tons of different patterns pre-loaded to edit. You can switch up patterns on the fly too, which is superb for live performance. Musicians will have a ball with Maschine on the stage.

The effects of Maschine have been widely praised and for good reason – they sound solid. Whilst effects essentially do the same thing on any software, the character of Maschine’s effects are notably colourful. They play to their strengths - they’re pure digital and not cheap attempts at replicating analogue. They hurt sound big time, and can be used solely as an effects plug-in, should you wish.

So what about the downers of Maschine? I just love having this thing hooked up to my MacBook Pro – I don’t want to cuss it. I was going to say that if I had to aim a criticism at Maschine it’s that, at the time of writing, it doesn’t bounce loops down to REX files. It’s easy enough to render your multisampled loops into a single loop native to Maschine – incredibly easy in fact with the superb slicing tools – but the lack of REX support is a shame. Considering that Maschine is software based, and that REX is totally possible on it, I was hoping that NI would add functionality in a future update. And you know what? Just this second, Native Instruments added REX support in a new 1.1 update. So … I guess there is very little downside.

To sum up – Maschine is a badass piece of German engineering perfect for the modern music producer. It's the Audi R8 of the music-production world.

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