Maschine Studio: Using it in the Studio

Maschine Studio: Using it in the Studio. This is long overdue, but Bunker 8 is looking back at one of their most prized pieces of kit, Native Instruments Maschine Studio.

We are in the process of working through an deeper vendor relationship with Native Instruments. For those who are unaware, we were one of the first developers to be signed on to supply content for an unknown project at that time. We were asked to create a series of samples and short loop arrangements with midi files for a project that we knew nothing about and were not told anything about. We thought it was some soundware project at the time, we were told it was for Maschine, we thought what a strange name for a sound project, very vague.

Well, as we know now and most of electronic music and music production in general knows, it was for the first generation Maschine Product…!

This product has proven to be an extremely important product for NI. This is Native Instruments’ “iPhone”. It was that important to them as a company. This was also their first foray into building hardware. Previously, they had been a software/sound ware only company. There was a major leap here. The first version of the Maschine software, for a release one, was interesting and had a compelling workflow, but it was a bit of a diamond in the rough. There were a few major producers who saw the potential, but most retreated back to their MPC’s and called it a day.

But then the product began to gain traction, it began to be something more than just a beatbox. Native Instruments did what very few other software companies in music have done, they focused heavily on continuous improvement by solving complex workflow challenges with the MPC model. Instead of making it just a beatbox. they made it their own category.

It was Maschine Studio that finally did us in. It is literally a perfect product for music production…

This miraculous piece of gear is not just Maschine with a jog wheel and colored screens, it integrated with Kontakt and all the other NI hardware so well. You could do the vast majority of your composition work directly from the hardware without looking at your computer screen. The knobs felt substantial, the pads were just tremendous. Here was a product that you could literally centre your whole studio and production workflow around. And we did…

There is so much substance to Maschine, that we cannot dot it justice. All we can say is, if you have not tried it, you do not know what you are missing. This is not an MPC, oh god no, this is a whole new way of thinking about music production. From software to hardware, it is so well integrated that almost everyone we introduce it to, ends up buying one and using it as their main axe.