Maschine Studio Questions (from a Newbie)

[youngregin]

Hey Guys,
I just got a Maschine Studio for Christmas...I was wondering if anyone had any best practices for doing beats from start to finish...or am I just not giving myself enough time to master the workflow? I've gotten frustrated and wanted to drop what I've done into Reason 8 to finish it up, but I'm resisting because I want to make myself learn the joint, since it's not a cheap piece to cop.

Another question: Has anyone experienced an instance where they would load a sound in a pad, and wasn't able to play it on their midi controller? I've been having that issue with a few sounds that I've tried to load and it really slows me down or even kills the momentum because I'm trying to figure out how to load the sounds to make it playable on the midi controller and not just the pads on Maschine Studio.

Any tips you guys have would be great. I'm trying to get this thing down pat...

 

[JBlongz]

The biggest hurdle you need to overcome is how to structure a complete song. You start with loading sounds. Drum kits are loaded as groups, and the factory groups take up all 16 pads. Maschine sees each sample as a separate track in a group. So, full group has 16 sounds or instruments. I usually separate drums from instruments/sounds by keeping them in separate groups.

Next is patterns. I make separate patterns for intro, verse, chorus, and bridge for each group. Thats most of the work there.

Scenes is what you use to organize the patterns so all the intro pattern play at the same time (same for verse, chorus, etc.) Once you have your scenes differentiated, you can arrange in order to the structure of your your song. Is verse two exactly like verse 1? Then copy the scene. If it's slight different, copy the scene anyway and create a new pattern for that scene where in the group you think is necessary.

As for factory sounds not loading, make sure you use Service Center to install any new updates. Before 2.0, I experienced this with some expansions, especially DropSquad. I had to go to the directory settings for that expansion, change the folder to some random place, then change back. This should have been fixed a long time ago.

Don't give up on Maschine yet, it has one of the fastest workflows I've experienced since Ableton...I have used every major DAW out there, and still own most of them. There are many hidden gems in maschine that are not well advertised. The studio hardware makes it very easy to reach. Just post any workflow questions here and I'll try to help when I have time.