Please help me with a category error

tashley

I am a relative but not complete newbie, and have gotten my head around Access, Kontakt and Komplete Kontrol and been building tracks in Logic using various combinations of stuff from Komplete packs.

When it came to the drums in particular I felt that pads rather than keys was the way to go to lay down tracks. So I watched a bunch of How To videos about Maschine and then bough a MK3.

Turns out that the packs with a grid of lozenges logo (such as Backyard Jams and Elastic Thump, London Grit etc) can be loaded via Maschine's Browser and from the get go the patterns can be played and interacted with on the pads. Also the instruments appear in Bank A of the pads and can be individually triggered and played and then shifted over to Keyboard and Chords modes if required. All good.

But I wanted to use Butch Vig and Abbey Road etc and these seem problematic. Classified as Instruments rather than Groups, they behave very differently. Loading for example AR 60's Drummer> Early Soul for example, gives me just one active pad, bottom left, which plays one kick. Pressing Play doesn't play a pattern and using the Keyboard and Chords modes gives me access to individual kit instruments on the pads, and I can use Octave up and down to access more.

With Battery, if I load for example 41st Kit I get one sound on one pad and that then maps with no pitch change to all pads in Keyboard and Chords Mode.

With Butch Vig> Candyassed I get a pattern on the bottom left pad in pads mode and then individual instruments in Keyboard and Chords mode. Same sort of thing with Drum Lab. The synths in for eg Analog Dreams behave just like this too.

I can find no references in the manuals for the drum products for Maschine and there are one or two articles online showing how people have successfully midi mapped certain drum instruments to the pads but it seems you can't get the patterns into Maschine in the same way you can when you load one of the 'lozenge logo' Sound kits.

Which to me seems to be a) not what I expected (my bad but pretty easy mistake to make IMHO) and b) not the 'intuitive' that NI claims NI to be.

Where am I going wrong? Is it so crazy to expect what is basically a souped up drum machine to play drums kits and patterns?

I am - as you can see - extremely confused. And that was before I googled 'using Maschine with Logic' to find the the two barely know each other and have to be quite intricately introduced before they get along. And there was me thinking that they'd be tightly integrated like Logic and my S88 are.

SO now TBH Maschine is kind of a Delphic brick on my desk.

Help? Please?.....

LostInFoundation

Well…you already got it quite correctly.

The way you describe things is how they work: expansions (“lozenge logo kits”) have one sample loaded in every pad (or, in some, an instrument that you have to put in keyboard mode to play), while instruments load on a single pad and then have the different notes/sounds mapped in keyboard mode.

The instruments that also contain patterns (like Butch Vig) must be played on different octaves: the single sounds are mapped on lower ones, while pushing a key (or pad) on an higher one will play the pattern.

The difference between them in practice is having to push the keyboard mode button or not.

If it really doesn’t click with you, you can always resample the instruments and put their individual sounds one for each pad in a new group

D-One

You def not stupid, your expectations of how it should all work better together are quite common and normal.

Basically, NI never made any effort to make it easy to use their own Drum Instruments in Maschine, their products are often 'disconnected'.

TBF There are not many reasons to use Battery instead of the built-in Maschine Sampler, mostly because the Sampler is fully integrated into the software/hw - Battery does have a couple of extra features like round-and-robin for example but all its kits are also available as Maschine Kits/Groups.

Now for other Drum Instruments that don't have Maschine Kits/Groups it gets trickier, and it's all much worst.. They are basically the same as any other Instrument instead of being integrated somehow. You can MIDI Map them to use Pad Mode, but then you also have to Map the Audio if you want multi audio out for fx on individual hits and such, this can be overcomed with a bit of work and then saved as a preset/kit but it's quite a PITA.

LostInFoundation

Well…you already got it quite correctly.

The way you describe things is how they work: expansions (“lozenge logo kits”) have one sample loaded in every pad (or, in some, an instrument that you have to put in keyboard mode to play), while instruments load on a single pad and then have the different notes/sounds mapped in keyboard mode.

The instruments that also contain patterns (like Butch Vig) must be played on different octaves: the single sounds are mapped on lower ones, while pushing a key (or pad) on an higher one will play the pattern.

The difference between them in practice is having to push the keyboard mode button or not.

If it really doesn’t click with you, you can always resample the instruments and put their individual sounds one for each pad in a new group

tashley

Thanks for that. So it seems that I'm not stupid after all but that the way the system works is pretty counter-intuitive. Those 'how to do everything in Maschine' videos make it look so fun and easy but in fact it's a PITA!

D-One

You def not stupid, your expectations of how it should all work better together are quite common and normal.

Basically, NI never made any effort to make it easy to use their own Drum Instruments in Maschine, their products are often 'disconnected'.

TBF There are not many reasons to use Battery instead of the built-in Maschine Sampler, mostly because the Sampler is fully integrated into the software/hw - Battery does have a couple of extra features like round-and-robin for example but all its kits are also available as Maschine Kits/Groups.

Now for other Drum Instruments that don't have Maschine Kits/Groups it gets trickier, and it's all much worst.. They are basically the same as any other Instrument instead of being integrated somehow. You can MIDI Map them to use Pad Mode, but then you also have to Map the Audio if you want multi audio out for fx on individual hits and such, this can be overcomed with a bit of work and then saved as a preset/kit but it's quite a PITA.