Maschine is supremely set up for generating improvised performances and jamming out drum arrangements on the fly. This is handled automatically by the new Audio device, which provides either continuous audio playback or gating/pitching from MIDI. Audio clips show as waveforms in Sound slot lanes.

You can now record or drop in loops and they'll be stretched or pitched into time with your song. The other significant addition to Maschine since our last visit is the handling of audio clips. However, you can't save multiple snapshots or morph as you can on the other Maschines. This captures a temporary snapshot of all mixer and device parameters in your project, for recall later. I'm really happy to see that the Lock button has found its way onto the Mikro. The encoder on the A-Series makes slightly shorter work of this, but this is a task that's much slicker on the Maschine Jam or the S-Series keyboards. Using the Mikro MkIII hardware to set which Patterns are active in each Scene is painful as you have to skip between Scene, Group and Pattern modes. Maschine software now comes with all NI's keyboards and pad controllers.The Mikro can recall Scenes and Patterns directly from the Pads. If you want to create song arrangements in Maschine, Scenes can be dropped into the timeline as 'Sections'. Superficially it might seem similar to Ableton Live's Session view, but it's a fundamentally different and arguably more efficient approach.

This is done in the Ideas View, where Scenes are organised as columns comprising combinations of the Patterns you've created. The most significant of these is the ability to work with Scenes independently of the timeline arrangement.

Soft Maschineīoth the A-Series and Mikro MkIII come with the full-featured Maschine software and plug-in and enjoy the latest enhancements to the platform. Published June 2019 The latest additions to NI's music production controller ranges should be highly appealing to those looking for more affordable or portable options.

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