How to record the arrangement in one pass, with all the automations on Maschine ?

spock

Hello, sorry in advance for my English,

One feature i use a lot on Push 2 is to record a live performance from session view directly into arrangement to create a basic structure, to capture the moment.

How to record the arrangement in one pass, with all the automations, notes, mutes... which were played live on maschine?

I find that the pattern creation workflow is excellent on Maschine but the automations and the arrangement are really not intuitive and fun, as a musician I prefer to play and tweak live rather than doing "arrangement programming "

D-One

It's a bit of a duality since MAS is based on a very instrument/live workflow but the arrangement is the opposite, you're meant to program it... It's unfortunate but this is something that affects all HW/SW in the same category as Maschine (like MPC's and whatnot). There's no way to record Mutes either. This has been massively requested for many, many years... It was announced that the NI team was working on this when MAS Jam was released.... in 2016 but since then they apparently gave up and moved on to focus on other things. 🤷‍♂️

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/28009#Comment_28009

As far as tips to workaround it there's nothing perfect but maybe this these can help:

For automation/modulation if you already have a basic Arrangement set and loop turned off then you can simply do an automation pass over the full song... This can work but if Mutes and such have a lot of influence on the way you automate then it might be far from a solution. For this to work the user has to think about the track-building process as a multi-stage thing.

Some folks just record the Audio output of performance, either with a driver that enables 16 separate outputs from Maschine to go directly into another DAW (using Blackhole for example), or doing it with the MAS plugin inside a daw. This works for some folks but having just Audio has a bunch of disadvantages.

You can also do the same as above but with MIDI instead of Audio routed to the DAW with MAS-plugin so your performance pass gets recorded as MIDI but this is quite complicated to set up and only having 16-MIDI channels means you have to keep projects rather simple or potentially control more than 1 instance of the Plug-in.

Nico_NI

@D-One Any tips for having that live recording feeling? 👀

D-One

It's a bit of a duality since MAS is based on a very instrument/live workflow but the arrangement is the opposite, you're meant to program it... It's unfortunate but this is something that affects all HW/SW in the same category as Maschine (like MPC's and whatnot). There's no way to record Mutes either. This has been massively requested for many, many years... It was announced that the NI team was working on this when MAS Jam was released.... in 2016 but since then they apparently gave up and moved on to focus on other things. 🤷‍♂️

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/28009#Comment_28009

As far as tips to workaround it there's nothing perfect but maybe this these can help:

For automation/modulation if you already have a basic Arrangement set and loop turned off then you can simply do an automation pass over the full song... This can work but if Mutes and such have a lot of influence on the way you automate then it might be far from a solution. For this to work the user has to think about the track-building process as a multi-stage thing.

Some folks just record the Audio output of performance, either with a driver that enables 16 separate outputs from Maschine to go directly into another DAW (using Blackhole for example), or doing it with the MAS plugin inside a daw. This works for some folks but having just Audio has a bunch of disadvantages.

You can also do the same as above but with MIDI instead of Audio routed to the DAW with MAS-plugin so your performance pass gets recorded as MIDI but this is quite complicated to set up and only having 16-MIDI channels means you have to keep projects rather simple or potentially control more than 1 instance of the Plug-in.

macchinista

Yes, what D-One said. I would add that in the last scenario, i.e. when using MAS-plugin, you could have both Midi and Audio recording at the same time inside the DAW. For example you could record all drums to midi, and all other instruments (bass, leads, chops, etc) as audio. So you almost double the number of distinct instruments (i.e. pads) which you can live record at once.

All these approaches however have limitations and require some pre-planning. Nothing like the free flowing approach of Ableton Live or Bitwig. If I am not mistaken, the MPC Live can do that as well.

spock

A feature request

Give the possibility to the user to record a performance (automations, mutes,...) in the arrangement

Allow recording the whole performance in clips (One clip per group)

All the technical foundations are implemented in Maschine, it should be pretty easy to do for the great engineers at Native Instruments :)

spock

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/28018#Comment_28018

Thanks for your reply, but this worfklow is too complicated with the Maschine+ in standalone mode.

"There's no way to record Mutes either"

• Yes, it's possible with the MPC One, You can Record Mutes
• With the Force you can record the complete arrangement (like Push2)

spock

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/28018#Comment_28018

@Nico_NI

From @D-One post

"his has been massively requested for many, many years... It was announced that the NI team was working on this when MAS Jam was released.... in 2016 but since then they apparently gave up and moved on to focus on other things. 🤷‍♂️"

@Nico_NI @Kaiwan_NI @Matt_NI @Jeremy_NI Do you know why it was never done? any chance that it will be implemented one day?

tribepop

Yeah the functionality in song view vs ideas view is still a little rough around the edges. It got better when they added clips but it would be awesome to be able to take any clip(s) in song view and convert it back to a pattern. So for example, say I mash up a bunch of clips and make a new composite 8 bar clip, I should be able to convert that into a pattern so I can reuse it outside of the song view.

D-One

I forgot to mention that some folks use plugins in Groups/Sounds, anything that has the ability to mute in/out audio and automate/modulate that as a makeshift on/off thingy; personally never tried it as it sounds convoluted and confusing to overview all your mutes and make edits.

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/comment/28515#Comment_28515

No problem. Yes, it's only feasible with the desktop version.

I meant to record a whole performance with all it entails, not just mutes, with Mutes that I was talking specifically about Maschine.

George Alveskog

I can't really understand why NI does not add this functionality. What's the point being able to trigger Patterns, Scenes, to solo/mute Sounds on the fly via hardware if we can't record that performance in MIDI for later editing?? Maschine Song view really sucks.