Hard Industrial Techno in Maschine Plus

SGFM
SGFM Member Posts: 1 Newcomer

Hello machine friends

I have a general question.
I've had my Maschine Plus for about a year now and so far I'm really impressed. I love the workflow, I love the sound of the internal synths and especially the quality.
I myself love and produce Hard Industrial Techno and I would be interested. Does anyone have any experience in this genre?

Is it possible to make a complete, well-produced track on Maschine as good as finished?

Are there any effect tips / limiter/compressor

I have a lot of my own samples in my user folder but on top of that I discovered the expansions "Raw Voltage" and "Void...." for myself.

I also have a mono Kobol expander synth connected which I think you can get some pretty cool tunes out of.

What would be your tips and tricks, should you produce a similar direction.

Wish you all a nice day and a good producing. :)

Best Answers

  • LXNDR_BE
    LXNDR_BE Member Posts: 116 Advisor
    Answer ✓

    Hi,

    I'm not into HARD Techno, but Dark Hypnotic Techno.
    My tip for a Techno MixDown you can find here ⇒ https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/35777/maschine-techno-mixdown-made-easy-tips
    Important is the summing of signals in the MixDown - your Kick&Rumble Group should be the loudest at -6dB or even less .. all other elements are below the volume of the Kickgroup.

    Also the Expansion "Body Mechanik" has some real good EBM/Industrial sounds.

    And yes, you can produce whole Tracks within Maschine, I did this with 2 Techno-EP's that got signed to Labels.

    You should use something like https://a1audio.alexhilton.net/a1stereocontrol to control your stereowidth, especially on the Kick/Bass below 160-200Hz all Mono (it's free)
    Put a graphical EQ on every Group, (Ozone 11 EQ from NI, wich is free or TDR Nova, wich is also free)
    Shaping the EQ-Curve per group is important to get all elements in their place on the "stage"

    Hope this helps a bit, greetings from belgium

  • tribepop
    tribepop Member Posts: 176 Pro
    edited November 14 Answer ✓

    Welcome fellow industrial music producer 😜.

    I use the M+ exclusively in a DAWless setup to make industrial, glitch hop, breakbeat, drum n bass, and hip hop so I’m probably qualified to answer this.

    Here’s some info I copied from my response to a Reddit post a while back that is helpful regardless of what genre you’re producing with in Maschine:

    Tip #1: Regardless of what DAW you use you should prolly be used to working with the concept of busses.

    So in my Maschine project, I have individual groups (e.g. Drums, Percussion, Bass, Leads, Vocals/Samples, etc.) and I also create new groups that act as a bus for related groups. There are no sounds in these groups, only effects at the group audio level. So I have a “Lows” bus that has a compressor, Saturator, and EQ at the group level to help glue the sounds together better. I then route the individual groups (e.g. Drums, Percussion, Bass) into my “Lows” bus group.

    I then do the same and create a “Leads” bus for leads and keys/guitar type sounds with brighter sonic qualities and route the corresponding groups into that bus. The audio output for each individual group should point to its corresponding bus group and the audio output of each bus should point to master or to an insert group (if needed). You can create as many busses as needed and can choose to send whatever groups tot want, I just chose to have groups based on sonic qualities (e.g. lows, leads, etc.).

    I recommend creating an insert bus group that every other bus routes into so that you can apply group level effects on the master (e.g. tremolo effect for lofi vinyl effect). Working with busses also lets you have a better view of the levels coming out of every stage prior to hitting the master. This allows you to see which combination of groups is taking up so much headroom as opposed to solo’ing individual groups.

    An example signal routing would look something like:

    Sound 1 (Bass synth) -> ‘Bass’ group -> ‘Lows’ bus -> ‘Insert FX’ bus -> Master

    Tip #2: Sound collection curation

    The next thing involves building up a sample library of useful sounds. Regardless of music genre you should spend significant amounts of time curating your sound collection (do this when you want to work on something but aren't necessarily feeling like writing music). Anytime you get a new sample pack, go through each sound and copy it over to your master sample folder and get rid of ****** you don't need. Do this with all of your synth presets as well. Nothing will kill productivity faster than having to browse through hundreds of sounds you will never use. All of your favorite producers and artists spend large amounts of time on sound selection and curating their collections. You should also come up with a folder structure for your samples so it's easy to navigate and manage. Look into Maschine Auto Tagger for automatically tagging large collections of samples so you can filter them in the Maschine browser.

    I’ve been curating and building a sample library recently for industrial type music and here are some of the sample packs I really liked that I came across available for free here:

    • Sample Magic - Dark Cinematic Electronica
    • Industrial Strength - Broken
    • Industrial Strength - Dark Industrial Dubstep
    • Methods of Mayhem - Industrial Toolkit
    • Loopmasters - Essential FX
    • Riemann - Industrial Techno 5
    • Rarefaction - A poke in the ear with a sharp stick
    • Anime Sound FX*
    • East West - Tekno Industrial*
    • Sonic Foundry - Loop Noir*
    • Sonic Foundry - Machine Language*
    • Sonic Foundry - Synchro Funk*
    • Sonic Foundry - Ambient Grooves*
    • Sonic Foundry - Esoterik Beatz*
    • Spectrasonics - Distorted Reality 1 & 2*
    • USB Soundscan vol. 24 - Industrial Loops*
    • X-Static Goldmine 5*
    • Zero G - Chemical Beats*
    • Zero G - Smoke*
    • Kniteforce - 1000 samples vol. 1*

    *- these samples can be downloaded for free as a larger collection called 90s sample CDs on the internet archive site. I highly recommend going through the Zero G Datafile libraries as those were heavily used by all sorts of industrial artists and video game music composers. I’ve found samples in there used by Lords of Acid, Rammstein, Dope, NIN, Chemical Brothers, Crystal Method, Crossbreed, Powerman 5000, etc.

    You might also want to look on splice or wherever you get your samples from and look for industrial adjacent genres likes dubstep, dark cinematic, etc. You should also build out your own library structure (e.g. atmospheres, bass, fx, drums, synths, etc.) and copy the individual samples from each of the other libraries into this one so you have a cohesive folder to go through when working.

    Drum-wise you should look into getting sample collections of old drums machines like the Roland 707 or the Kawai R-50. Samples from Mars has some good ones and there's lots of free collections around. I also recently found this collection geared towards old school industrial drums.

    Sorry for the long post, feel free to DM with any other questions or thoughts!

Answers

  • LXNDR_BE
    LXNDR_BE Member Posts: 116 Advisor
    Answer ✓

    Hi,

    I'm not into HARD Techno, but Dark Hypnotic Techno.
    My tip for a Techno MixDown you can find here ⇒ https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/35777/maschine-techno-mixdown-made-easy-tips
    Important is the summing of signals in the MixDown - your Kick&Rumble Group should be the loudest at -6dB or even less .. all other elements are below the volume of the Kickgroup.

    Also the Expansion "Body Mechanik" has some real good EBM/Industrial sounds.

    And yes, you can produce whole Tracks within Maschine, I did this with 2 Techno-EP's that got signed to Labels.

    You should use something like https://a1audio.alexhilton.net/a1stereocontrol to control your stereowidth, especially on the Kick/Bass below 160-200Hz all Mono (it's free)
    Put a graphical EQ on every Group, (Ozone 11 EQ from NI, wich is free or TDR Nova, wich is also free)
    Shaping the EQ-Curve per group is important to get all elements in their place on the "stage"

    Hope this helps a bit, greetings from belgium

  • tribepop
    tribepop Member Posts: 176 Pro
    edited November 14 Answer ✓

    Welcome fellow industrial music producer 😜.

    I use the M+ exclusively in a DAWless setup to make industrial, glitch hop, breakbeat, drum n bass, and hip hop so I’m probably qualified to answer this.

    Here’s some info I copied from my response to a Reddit post a while back that is helpful regardless of what genre you’re producing with in Maschine:

    Tip #1: Regardless of what DAW you use you should prolly be used to working with the concept of busses.

    So in my Maschine project, I have individual groups (e.g. Drums, Percussion, Bass, Leads, Vocals/Samples, etc.) and I also create new groups that act as a bus for related groups. There are no sounds in these groups, only effects at the group audio level. So I have a “Lows” bus that has a compressor, Saturator, and EQ at the group level to help glue the sounds together better. I then route the individual groups (e.g. Drums, Percussion, Bass) into my “Lows” bus group.

    I then do the same and create a “Leads” bus for leads and keys/guitar type sounds with brighter sonic qualities and route the corresponding groups into that bus. The audio output for each individual group should point to its corresponding bus group and the audio output of each bus should point to master or to an insert group (if needed). You can create as many busses as needed and can choose to send whatever groups tot want, I just chose to have groups based on sonic qualities (e.g. lows, leads, etc.).

    I recommend creating an insert bus group that every other bus routes into so that you can apply group level effects on the master (e.g. tremolo effect for lofi vinyl effect). Working with busses also lets you have a better view of the levels coming out of every stage prior to hitting the master. This allows you to see which combination of groups is taking up so much headroom as opposed to solo’ing individual groups.

    An example signal routing would look something like:

    Sound 1 (Bass synth) -> ‘Bass’ group -> ‘Lows’ bus -> ‘Insert FX’ bus -> Master

    Tip #2: Sound collection curation

    The next thing involves building up a sample library of useful sounds. Regardless of music genre you should spend significant amounts of time curating your sound collection (do this when you want to work on something but aren't necessarily feeling like writing music). Anytime you get a new sample pack, go through each sound and copy it over to your master sample folder and get rid of ****** you don't need. Do this with all of your synth presets as well. Nothing will kill productivity faster than having to browse through hundreds of sounds you will never use. All of your favorite producers and artists spend large amounts of time on sound selection and curating their collections. You should also come up with a folder structure for your samples so it's easy to navigate and manage. Look into Maschine Auto Tagger for automatically tagging large collections of samples so you can filter them in the Maschine browser.

    I’ve been curating and building a sample library recently for industrial type music and here are some of the sample packs I really liked that I came across available for free here:

    • Sample Magic - Dark Cinematic Electronica
    • Industrial Strength - Broken
    • Industrial Strength - Dark Industrial Dubstep
    • Methods of Mayhem - Industrial Toolkit
    • Loopmasters - Essential FX
    • Riemann - Industrial Techno 5
    • Rarefaction - A poke in the ear with a sharp stick
    • Anime Sound FX*
    • East West - Tekno Industrial*
    • Sonic Foundry - Loop Noir*
    • Sonic Foundry - Machine Language*
    • Sonic Foundry - Synchro Funk*
    • Sonic Foundry - Ambient Grooves*
    • Sonic Foundry - Esoterik Beatz*
    • Spectrasonics - Distorted Reality 1 & 2*
    • USB Soundscan vol. 24 - Industrial Loops*
    • X-Static Goldmine 5*
    • Zero G - Chemical Beats*
    • Zero G - Smoke*
    • Kniteforce - 1000 samples vol. 1*

    *- these samples can be downloaded for free as a larger collection called 90s sample CDs on the internet archive site. I highly recommend going through the Zero G Datafile libraries as those were heavily used by all sorts of industrial artists and video game music composers. I’ve found samples in there used by Lords of Acid, Rammstein, Dope, NIN, Chemical Brothers, Crystal Method, Crossbreed, Powerman 5000, etc.

    You might also want to look on splice or wherever you get your samples from and look for industrial adjacent genres likes dubstep, dark cinematic, etc. You should also build out your own library structure (e.g. atmospheres, bass, fx, drums, synths, etc.) and copy the individual samples from each of the other libraries into this one so you have a cohesive folder to go through when working.

    Drum-wise you should look into getting sample collections of old drums machines like the Roland 707 or the Kawai R-50. Samples from Mars has some good ones and there's lots of free collections around. I also recently found this collection geared towards old school industrial drums.

    Sorry for the long post, feel free to DM with any other questions or thoughts!

  • tetsuneko
    tetsuneko Member Posts: 797 Expert

    My suggestion is to forget everything you ever read online about anything, and get stuck making beats with your Maschine+. Make 10,000 beats on M+ and I can guarantee you, you will have made something worthwhile and learned alot, but organically and independently, by trial and error, and applying the experience you gained by doing it all.

    If there's any one thing you should pay heed to, its to get as good a monitoring setup as you possibly can. This not only includes your loudspeakers, but also the room where you are musicing (room acoustics need to be at least tolerable in terms of lowend response). This will help you a lot on your journey, and will enable you to make mixing decisions which will translate into other listening environments than your own.

    When I personally feel like lacking inspiration, I go looking for new music to listen to (in my particular genres of interest). In the case of Industrial Techno, one obvious venue for new inspiration would be attending club music nights which specialise in your genre. Understanding dance music is easiest to do from the dance floor, after all.

  • PK The DJ
    PK The DJ Member Posts: 1,933 Expert

    I watched a video yesterday about a guy who bought a used synth (miniKORG 700S) in 1978, and recorded the synth and vocals onto a tape deck in his bedroom. That's literally all he had. No drum machine, no sequencer.

    His name was Daniel Miller, and that track was the first release on Mute records, which he founded.

    So yes, you certainly can make a complete track on Maschine+ 😁

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