New Maschine User - How to Record Takes

Foldyman
Foldyman Member Posts: 39 Member
in Maschine

I've had the Maschine now for a week or so and generally love it, apart from one very important thing IMO.

I think I've got to grips with most of it and answered all my own questions, but one thing remains, and I won't quite believe it if they haven't thought of this...

When recording (either by punching something in on the pads, or recording some audio), there seems to be no appreciation for the likelihood that your best take of anything is always going to be a few bars in. You get one go, and it's your first go.

The audio plugin for example, I can set the target to pattern which I thought would be excatly what I'd want, but why would it stop recording after the alloted number of bars? Why do I keep having to press start again to record another set of bars? Can I not set it to just not stop recording and keep adding patterns as I go?

If you're playing in on the pads, then of course you can just keep recording and then chop out what you don't like, but this seems like an unnecessary step when it should just be making this easy by presenting me with a stack of patterns that I can just click through and audition.

If it's audio, then I don't even see a reasonable way around it, as even though you can truncate with the audio plugin, the selection rage doesn't snap to bar lines - it's just compltely free. If you then replace the audio plugin with the tempo aware sampler plugin, you can only chop it up into 4ths, which they then give you the option to split further, but not join up into a full bar or more!

It's like they've determined what the best way to work would be, specifically disallowed it, and then gone further by eliminating the next most obvious workaround.

Have I missed something (I really hope I have), or have they really not thought of this? They certainly seem to have thought of everything else!

Cheers,

A

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Best Answer

  • Murat Kayi
    Murat Kayi Member Posts: 430 Pro
    edited March 2022 Answer ✓

    Shouldn't setting the sampling mode to "detect" in a new group give you the capability to record audio as long as you want and set the start and end points after that?

    Or: Loop mode and length set to "Free" will keep recording. You would have to go in and edit after the fact. No take system, though

    EDIT:

    as far as I can tell it's more "pattern, stop, pattern, stop, pattern..." which kind of kills the flow.

    And yeah, you're right. I never stumbled upon this, because I never used Maschine the way I used my stompbox looper back in the day, but it's true. The closest you can get is probably going for "free" in the length section and editing afterwards

Answers

  • Murat Kayi
    Murat Kayi Member Posts: 430 Pro

    Please watch this and get back to this thread and tell us if this answers your questions


    https://youtu.be/5n_95rUTvfs


  • Foldyman
    Foldyman Member Posts: 39 Member

    Thanks for that @Murat Kayi, I did stumble across that and in isolation they're really useful features - I actually love that you can just it just like a conventinal looper if you want, and with a footswitch it's great, but...

    It was the part where he says "you can record pattern, after pattern, after pattern" that holds so much promise, but as far as I can tell it's more "pattern, stop, pattern, stop, pattern..." which kind of kills the flow.

    I suppose in essence I just want it to not stop recording, it's maddening that they decided to make it stop automatically and you then have to restart it, rather than have it just carry on creating patterns for you, and it stops when you press stop!

    It desperately needs like a “latch record” or something. Or more sarcastically just a “carry on doing what I told you to and not do something I didn't” feature.

    If anyone's used takes in Reaper, when you record into a looped section, you're just presented with all your takes, and you can click through and audition them. Totally get Maschine is not a DAW, but it is supposed to be a box to get musical ideas down quickly and intuitively.

    It's not too bad for things played in on the pads, because you can fairly easily scan through bars (or effectively your "takes") with the grid setting set to 1 bar, then you can just chop out anything preceding or following the one you like (even though this still feels like an unnecessary complication, and you can't just truncate anything outside the section like you can with audio). There seems to be no way of doing this for audio though. You decide how many bars you want, and your take is your take. Stop flow. Try again etc.

    The closest thing (I think) is to record audio in FREE mode, change the plugin to sampler, slice the samples (adjusting the tempo to half to get as close to a bar as you can, rather than increasingly smaller subdivisions of one bar), then create a pattern from that. Then you can chop out bits of the pattern as you would be able to had you just played something on the pads. But then you're needlessly triggering chopped up bits of a sample as well as it being a huge faff for something that seems incredibly simple.

    It's a great box overall, just can't understand why they made this work in literally the exact opposite way it should!

    Unless of course I really just don't get it and there's a massively obvious way of doing this staring me in the face. Hope I'm being a dumbass here! 😀

  • Murat Kayi
    Murat Kayi Member Posts: 430 Pro
    edited March 2022 Answer ✓

    Shouldn't setting the sampling mode to "detect" in a new group give you the capability to record audio as long as you want and set the start and end points after that?

    Or: Loop mode and length set to "Free" will keep recording. You would have to go in and edit after the fact. No take system, though

    EDIT:

    as far as I can tell it's more "pattern, stop, pattern, stop, pattern..." which kind of kills the flow.

    And yeah, you're right. I never stumbled upon this, because I never used Maschine the way I used my stompbox looper back in the day, but it's true. The closest you can get is probably going for "free" in the length section and editing afterwards

  • Foldyman
    Foldyman Member Posts: 39 Member

    Thanks again @Murat Kayi, at least it sounds like I've not compltely missed something obvious.

    Shouldn't setting the sampling mode to "detect" in a new group give you the capability to record audio as long as you want and set the start and end points after that?

    Yeah I suppose the issue is not necessarly how many bars you can record, but how you can't set start end points after that particularly well. The Play and Selection ranges do not snap to subdivisions, so you can't relaibly select then trunacte down to the exact bar(s) you want. You can slice based on subdivisions, but then you end up slicing the content of the part you do want as well as trimming away the bits you don't. You're then forced to trigger all your remaining sliced up bits individually, which is a bit of a mess as well as awkward.

    Totally crazy!

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