Beat making On Native Instruments Maschine 5

MASCHINE, Native Instruments' brand new groove production studio is the next milestone in NI history. The unparalleled integration of hardware and software found only in MASCHINE is your launching pad for creating pattern-based music with an incredibly fast and fun workflow.

The first of three whopping announcements from Native Instruments to arrive to Gearwire studio through the old news-pipe was the release of MASCHINE at Winter NAMM 2009. MASCHINE is a modern groove production studio that must be screamed when its name is spoken! Easing and speeding the processes of beat creation and arrangement, MASCHINE dream teams an advanced soft sequencer and sampler with a heavily functional controller, capped off with fluid workflow.

Designed with drum machines and grooveboxes in mind, MASCHINE's step sequencer handles everything from spontaneous beat making to focused multi-timbre arrangements. It combines familiar step sequencer operation with realtime polyphonic recording.

The MASCHINE controller included with the system is almost like a limb of the software program, adding the tactility of real instrumentation. It contains 16 pressure-sensitive drum pads which were built to provide both excellent response and mighty durability. These pads, which illuminate to display visual sequences, are joined by eight rotary encoders, a wealth of buttons and two high-res displays, meaning your computer mouse and keyboard can sit these sessions out. Everything you need to control MASCHINE is right there on the control surface. It's such a nice surface I bet you wish you could control any MIDI compatible music gear with it. Well guess what . . . YOU CAN!

With a high-resolution sample engine under the hood, MASCHINE is a versatile virtual instrument that accurately represents intricate drum kits, percussion loops and multi-sampled polyphonic instruments. Automatic sample mapping, beat slicing and note repeat sweeten the deal. MASCHINE's realtime recording and resampling capabilites let you take any signal, external or internal, and capture, map, sculpt and transform it without interrupting musical flow.

Even if your sound library is a bit slim, MASCHINE will fatten it up with virtual shelves full of drum and instrument sounds that cover a wide range of modern and electronic-dependent styles. There are about 10,000 individual sounds overall, so you've got a lot to work with. A browser that works with categories and concise metadata brings this overwhelming amount of samples to an acceptable level of whelming.