Maschine

[Andrew Tarpinian]

Wow, this thing is superb. It's one of those pieces of gear that just  
flows beautifully. The way the controller is set up is really  
intuitive and how it interacts with the software is so smooth. I spend  
most of my time working with the controller but when I am doing  
something that requires more refinement in detail I look up and it's  
all right there on the screen immediately ready to edit.

The internal drum sounds are great, the instrument sounds are nice but  
don't see myself relying on them to much. Except for the basses and a  
bunch of raw waveforms that are pretty useful as the maschine has some  
nice sound shaping tools, filters, envelopes, fx. Speaking of effects  
they have some really musically useful stuff in there, pretty awesome  
compared to what would come in a regular hardware groovebox, basically  
fills my needs for a track.

The sampling is pretty sweet, since all my gear is already hooked up  
to my computer soundcard is so easy just to enable sampling, move over  
to a synth play a part, edit and incorporate. It is so fast it's  
crazy. One not so great thing is (as far as I can tell) it seems like  
it can only see two inputs of my sound card at a time and I have to go  
into audio prefs and select which sound card input I want to pull  
audio from, easy but takes you out of the flow when you need to switch  
synths.

I'm not crazy about the flat display, it would have been nice to have  
an MPC display you could angle. Plus because I am viewing it on an  
angle I can see the internal lcd masking and it's a bit uneven/wavy  
and can be distracting to my artistic eye : P

Also, and I hope it comes with the next version, they should really  
integrate Kore with this thing! Let me have a kore rack running with a  
bunch of synths that I can map to the pads. Please. I saw something  
about about midi sequencing improvements in the next version but I  
don't know if that's just for external or internal also.

Still have more to learn and go through on this, but within an hour  
and only looking at the manual at a few things I was making music, and  
it's fun. Right now it seems like it's the best of all worlds and I  
want to just sit and make tracks, screw daw's.