Has NI Lost It's Way?

@D-One

Why not? The guitar industry is stuck in the 1950s and thriving! 🤪

I actually support the improvement thing, because with improvement you can find and make new and unique styles, effects, maybe you can even build your own instrument!

Speaking from experience...

Nearly every day, I appreciate Guitar Rig more and more because it fueled the creativity I needed.

My creativity evolved so quickly to the point that I literally made very catchy alternatives for cabinets, such as Reverb and Filter.

With Reverb instead of Cabinet, I dragged the knobs of any Reverb so that the reverb was coming only and no original input signal.

Then I putted some distortion, and sweet brother, you would not believe the beauty of a shoegazy sound...

Same for the Filter instead of Distortion.

You don't believe me?

Let me show you my sample recorded with those new fx racks!

This is the nostalgic sound by using any distortion but with Reverb instead of Cabinet.

This is the progressive and angsty sound created with distortion, butinstead of Cabinet, filters are used.

Let me know what you think about these fx racks!

Yeah, didn’t mean it quite that way, so sorry for the way it came out. What I meant was that people need to shift focus to actually learn the tools and become awesome with what they have instead of getting stuck wishing a few features would be added because that would make or break their whole experience with an instrument or even career. What it lacks can be found elsewhere without having to actually invest in a whole new ecosystem. I don’t know why but I don’t get as tempted as others seem to be to change everything just because of certain features coming elsewhere, or even by regular updates, what are they really adding/subtracting? Except stem separation? Which is still software based and can be done without owning a One+.

I don’t know, I won’t leave the workflow and the JOY because of lacking features I use Logic for anyway…

well, my creative process is using the M+ only until I feel I have enough of a track, intro, variations, full beat, some interesting stuff here and there, 80-90% finished, mix and eq. After that I just copy the project file to my computer, open up an empty project in logic, open a “software instrument channel”, load maschine as an au, within maschine I open that project, bypass the eq and other effects, raise the volume on every sound so I have enough to work with in logic, kinda like resetting the mix to -2dB or something and export every sound separately as wav. So I create new audio channels in logic for every sound. I’ve tried opening maschine as multi timbral and routed all 16 pads to individual midi channels but I just prefer it this way even if it’s a bit more work. I don’t mind it. If I need to change something I chop my samples and create maybe a drumroll or whatever or I just create a new pattern within maschine which is an au in logic and just export new wav. Use loop optimize for drums, and turn it off for pads or other stuff that has a long tail, a long release or a big reverb or whatever. Or I just open that specific instrument as an au (massive for example) and select the same patch and just dial in the settings.

I guess this could be optimized in a few ways but this is how I work. Sometimes it’s good to export as wav bcs then I stop tinkering around with everything.

and in Logic I then build my whole track, eq, mix, automations, effects and everything else. I could keep all the eq and mix volumes and such from maschine but those are things that change a lot throughout the process so I need more control there than velocity levels of a shaker for example.

peace and love

I'm surprised this is in the Maschine forum, since I've felt for a while that Traktor's been neglected on behalf of Maschine development.

Not trying to make any particular point, I hope NI are responding and clarifying things so people know what to expect. Good luck with these things, hope they're addressed in a timely, orderly german fashion :D

Although obvious, that’s an interesting assessment. And referring to the original question, they indeed have lost their way with regards to that aspect. At least IMO.

I can only speak for myself but my frustration with NI runs very deep because of how many years I have been on this merry go round of finding workarounds for things only to have NI basically break the software in an update. I then spend hours troubleshooting only to have the same sort of thing happen 3 months later. I gave up on their support a long time ago after they ran me in circles over all my play series instruments loading with a white GUI. I even sent them an old post from Spitfire stating that it was a known issue that had been solved at some point. Eventually I found a work around whereby I had to use the “open with” command in file explorer to get anything to launch properly. This is just one example. I’ve been through years of this…plug-ins launching in demo mode is another one. Go search how many times that has come up over the years due to inability to uninstall these programs. I feel like at this point I could work the NI support desk. The MK3 release, which I bought into only to find out some very critical features like midi templates and ability to map pages in the new NKS2 control mapping were not included, was somewhat of a last straw. This came on the back of a very long transition period for Apple Silicon compatibility that also forced me to have to buy a windows laptop to hold me over. I am trying to keep things in perspective, but the NI user experience has not been pleasant. I stuck with them for all these years because I had so many projects using these plugins, but the last two years have almost forced me to move to alternatives like the Akai Force. Also, I have bought all their instruments on release day almost always up until this latest electric piano release. I simply can’t justify investing anymore in this platform.