Quote:
Originally Posted by TweakHead
interesting posts here!
owning the Maschine, you guys need to realize you have a drum machine already...
I mean, would you be ok with just the software? or do you value the velocity sensitive pads? and the interface itself?
I think the physical interface is much more valuable then the sounds themselves. I mean, why on Earth would I need Maschine just for the library sounds? (they're damn good, but so are milions of sample packs out there?), or the software?
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Well I think Berni's original point, at least the one I intended to agree with, was that $1500 for a drum machine is stupid-expensive up against something like Maschine which is only a few hundred dollars, offers excellent DAW software, excellent integration with other DAWs, an amazing library (not just a bunch of samples but well-organized kits as well), a free synth pack-in, (Massive) and more recently dedicated drum synths for creating your own sounds and real time manipulation, and that's over and above the great piece of hardware it is as a percussive controller or sampler. It they want to sell a bleeps and burps machine for a couple, or maybe three hundred bucks then it starts to seem a little more competitive with what's out there today.
The physical interface is important as you said (see my prior comment about just the importance of something as simple as a stand which allows for more flexible angles to position the hardware), but for me the beauty of Maschine is how much time they've spent on the integration portion of it. They *GET* software, whereas many hardware companies don't.
The way I use Maschine right now is I have a second smaller monitor sitting to the right of my primary 27" monitor. I run the Maschine in standalone and keep the window on that monitor (as it is close to the actual hardware), it sort of feels like an instrument in itself with a dedicated display (and I don't mean the tiny little screens, I mean the 1280x1024 monitor running the standalone app). Then I run Cubase on my primary monitor. That way they are in two separate processes (as opposed to running the plugin inside the DAW). I can edit the Maschine project for drums, and just drag the clips from Maschine into Cubase... it's an instamatic drum loop factory
I don't even know if that's how I will continue to use it, because it comes with some drawbacks (like if I change the tempo in Cubase I need to then do same in Maschine and redrag the audio clip over, whereas if I just ran the Maschine plug-in I would not need to do that.)
But after you have that kind of integration in your workflow, going back to a piece of hardware that doesn't even attempt to integrate with the DAW (or does it badly), and then paying 2 or 3 times more for it is not really a tempting offer, IMO.