Maschine Plus / DI Box / stage usage

jay4nexus

Hello

I’m looking for some recommendations about the usage of Maschine + on stage : I use Maschine + in several bands and I can’t know in advance if sound technicians will have stereo DI boxes or even if they will have a stereo bus for me. Most of the time, tech guys consider Maschine + as a keyboard and they expect Maschine + to have a Left/Mono jack to sum the left and right signals when you only plug your cable into the left line out socket, which is not the case unfortunately.

When I had just a couple of projects, I used the « Stereo utility » plugin effect to « convert » projects into mono, but it’s not very convenient especially since I now have much more projects.

I was thinking about buying a stereo DI box of my own, that could either output stereo signals, either sum input left and right channels into a mono output, so that I can handle the stage situation in an easy way. Would any one have a model to recommend ? I’m looking for something not too expensive.

Or would you recommend another way to manage stereo/mono output for Maschine +?

Thanks a lot

Jerome

tetsuneko

Radial has DI boxes which can optionally sum stereo input feeds to mono. I suppose other manufacturers have similarly featured stereo DIs as well?

D-One

Doesn't your band send a technical rider before hand? The tech in charge should confirm they have everything your band needs.

A Stereo channel or (2 monos hard paned) is not a lot to ask for even in very small venues, unless your band has a ton of instruments/players. It's not the job of techs to decide for you if forcing mono on a stereo instrument is good enough or not, it's up to you.

If you often play in places where the equipment sucks that bad then I'd say forcing mono is probably the least of your concerns - In such case i'd look for a reaktor patch that sums stereo to mono and only use one cable, put the FX on the master of every project and just enable/disable according to your needs or have 2 versions of each project.

Theres probably some user mono patch here for free:

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/2154/m-standalone-optimized-reaktor-content-from-the-community

As for 2 mono or 1 stereo DI anything will do really, just make sure it has the minimum features, attenuation, GND/lift, etc..

If the venue has DJ Sets you can also just connect your M+ to the available DJ mixer via Jacks-to-RCA, this can simplify and circumvent some incompetence of a non-tech guy doing an audio tech job (common in small bars and such), or lack of available "busses", this way theres not much thinking since the DJ Mixer is something they are used to having anyway and gives you the bonus of whatever fx and features the mixer might have, it eliminates DI's and you can even use the mixer CUE and route things to separate channels on the mixer using the headphone out of the M+.

jay4nexus

Hi D-One

Yes, we do send technical riders, but we don't always get what we request and we have to deal with it (I'd say it happens on 30% of the gigs). I actually use this reaktor plug in to force my project to output in mono

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/reaktor-community/reaktor-user-library/entry/show/14563/

The thing is that I have more and more projects + I also play the guitar or sing, so I thought using a DI box would save time on my sound check rather than activating / deactivating the effect on the project. For the moment, no DJ on our venue, but thanks for the advice, I'll make sure to connect to DJ set if there's one next time.

And thanks for the link to the M+ reaktor stuff, I'll definitively play with them :-)

tetsuneko

Radial has DI boxes which can optionally sum stereo input feeds to mono. I suppose other manufacturers have similarly featured stereo DIs as well?

jay4nexus

Yes, looks like this kind of stereo DI box with channel sum feature is what I need. I'll check the different manufacturers. Thanks.