Workflow Challenges When Exporting Arranged Sections/Scenes from Maschine to DAW

holymakorony

Hi everyone,

I wanted to start a discussion about something I’ve been struggling with lately: exporting fully arranged tracks from Maschine to DAWs like Ableton Live. Specifically, I’ve arranged a couple of tracks with tons of scene and section variations, but when it comes to exporting the arrangement, I’m finding the process really frustrating.

Right now, Maschine only allows you to export the master, groups, or individual sounds. This is fine for quick exports, but if you’ve spent hours carefully arranging sections with lots of variations, it’s incredibly difficult to maintain that structure when trying to bring the project into Ableton (or any other DAW). The only option I’ve found is to export individual sounds or groups, and then I have to rearrange the entire track again from scratch in Ableton. As you can imagine, this disrupts the creative flow.

My Workflow

•I generally use Maschine to arrange my tracks, build out sections, and create variations.

•I usually want to add additional elements like vocals, bass, or guitar in Ableton Live.

•Unfortunately, the export process in Maschine doesn’t let me preserve the arrangement I’ve built in Maschine, which results in a lot of lost time rearranging everything in Ableton.

Thanks ☺️

Davin

Hi,

I completely agree that the export to DAW workflow is poorly executed. And while clips was an improvement for staying in Maschine, it remains somewhat stiff and a constrained workflow when adding automation, etc. These are the big reasons why I - and I think many people - drifted away from Maschine: great for generating ideas, loops, and an outline of song, but once you need to refine the arrangement it's really frustrating. And the reality is, if you're making music at the computer, there are so many options now where going from ideas to arrangement is frictionless. Also, to be fair, Maschine isn't a DAW and was never intended to be a start-to-finish platform.

In any case, if you are committed to Maschine, I found the best way to work was to organize before and during export. If you work in Ableton Live, create a folder in the Maschine Exports for the track with sub folders for the sections. As you export by scene, drag and drop into the section folders. Once you've done this, you can easily drag the files into Live's Arranger and transpose to new audio tracks via holding ctrl or shift (can't quite remember the key) while dragging. The next problem is that if you have added a new element in a group from the previous exported section it will change the order of the samples when dragging into Ableton, so what was on track 4 will be on track X. I never tried this, but maybe a workaround here is to give each group or element a number so that they can be sorted by number in Maschine exports before dragging into Ableton. That way the track number can be preserved.

Since learning that Maschine 3.0 is in development I have been waiting patiently for it to drop. I spoke quite a few times in these forums about switching to MPC, but the truth is that all these platforms have their own workflow issues and frustrations so switching only adds another new workflow to learn and time not creating. I had learned Maschine quite well for my purpose and really hope the 3.0 brings certain changes. If it doesn't, it really is no longer practical for my purposes outside of being a sample library. While I would like to be less focused on the computer screen and more on a piece of hardware, I have to admit that I have been more productive with only my MacBook running Ableton, and a Launchkey.

Best of luck!