Maschine as scoring tool

I just read the interview with Jason Grave, on your facebook page and:

Aww!!!Such a nice in-depth interview right there! Hybrid scoring is the very cool thing about today’s technology, and for me an epiphany came with Maschine echosystem, combined with kontakt. I scored two circus show, and two motion pictures, using Maschine as my main sketching interface, and i was able to make hybrid instruments out of more traditional stuff, like harmonica, pump organ and dobro, and blend them with real or vst synths and play them in loops, and create momentum cells on the (o so sensible) MK3 pads for  different mood, so i could literally jam the score like a performance. 

Some of the most interesting and dynamic parts of my scoring are done as a reaction to the movie (or the athletes’s circus act) rather than telegraphed.

It feels like a live performance.It’s emotionally driven like a natural response.

I tryed to do it in Ableton, but having all these kontakt and Maschine libraries made me investigate in the possibilities behind NI’s hardware, wich are pretty astoundings.

I worked on a score, a movie called Target number one, with Josh Arnett, a couple of years ago, and there was this very primitive fight, in a Thaï prison. But the overall score was very electro driven, so I taught of sampling this Muy Thay cd, my teacher uses for sparing, it’s a copy of a copy of a real fighting traditional music. And i sampled a couple of passages on my Maschine, it became a polychromatic instrument. And then, i side chained it with a very deep and agressive (yet filtered) beat, mixed with some recording i had from a funeral horn in a temple in Karnataka. 

I mean, this type of freedom leads you to break your own creative barriers!

And, it’s ridiculous how easy it can be done with this gear! If you think of a musical idea, there are so many ways to create music in this echosystem.

I do have to rely on Protools for the final stages (especially with movies), for postprod and tempo variations (NI: you got to implement tempo variations in the song window on Maschine software!!!)

And, if i can have two more (easy) suggestions, here they are:

1- please allow us to mute notes in the Maschine scoring layout without deleting them !?!?

I MEAN REALLY!!!

2-Communication between daw and Maschine (as slave)

should be just like vienna ensemble pro.

Actually, only 16 midi channel are usable, in my main DAW to be played in Maschine (wich has 16 instrument PER group)

So making a scoring template with maschine as a slave is limited to 16 channels, and you ain’t going nowhere when you consider that your average orchestral template contains between 150 to 300 tracks (some people are using closer 700 hundred tracks!!!)

But i made a Template of BBC Orchestra from Spitfire Audio, using Protools and Maschine, and (appart from the fact that it was a pain in the butt to have a new instance, every 16 instruments of the orchestra), it worked fine, and the layering of the différents instruments and their articulations, on my maschine Jam, and the synchronized color coding between the Jam, the Mk3 and the KKS41 is as close as it gets from having the orchestra in front of you.

Every parameter tweekable on a touch of any of these hardware… 

Man, you guys don’t know how powerful this ecosystem could get if only you would add the midi channels and flexibility!!!!!

Anyway, hats off to y’all and especially to Jason Grave, who inspired me to write you this never ending post!

Cheers!!!

Eloi