Arturia Spark. Anyone played with it?

[Andrew Tarpinian]

On Aug 14, 2011, at 4:16 PM, K9 Kai Niggemann wrote:

> 
> On 14.08.2011, at 15:53, Gert van Santen wrote:
> 
>> The " problem" (or at least the thing I don't like) is that you *have* to use a computer with the controller - so no stand along music-bar jam fun.
> 
> I looked into it, and the computer part also turned me off. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a "Tempest" though...
> 
>> 
>> OTOH, it does look a lot more intuitive than Maschine (which I own as well).
> 
> How does that fare? I am kinda hoping that with a Maschine I might be able to combine the best of Ableton with the best of MPC, would that work? It probably would mean that I'd need to recreate everything I have in Ableton now (120 tracks and nearly as many scenes for a show with 10 tracks so far), but I really really miss the track-mute functionality of the MPC... it just works so well. If only the MPC (2000, original) didn't have that 128 file limitation...

Maschine is basically an MPC+, but far easier to use if you mostly work in the computer domain. MPC's for me have always been a pain in the ass because of having to move files back and forth with the computer. That said, I guess you can say it's a little soulless, but that's going to be the case with any "controller," except maybe the monome. 

Side note: the new plug-in feature is cool, but I was having trouble to get it to jive with how I wanted to work. I wanted to have a few pads trigger different synth notes from say Massive. Problem was it seemed you had to have a plug-in instance for each pad to have each pad play a different note. You could put a plug-in on one pad and then go into the keyboard mode to play whatever notes you wanted, but you could not assign different notes from the one plug-in instance to different pads in your main pad grid. Maybe I am missing a way for this to work.

Anyway, are you talking about using just maschine instead of ableton to play live? You could certainly do this, but I think you would loose a lot of functionality. It depends how complex your tracks are I guess.

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