Advanced Method for Playing Chords in Maschine

In this video, I show a sophisticated method for playing chords in Maschine with the press of a single pad. It takes a bit of time to set up, but it’s worth it!

This video makes creative use of templates in Maschine. We begin with a template created for a previous tutorial, How to Play Instruments in Key and Scale in Maschine (download available at the link!). Using the C Major scale as an example, each different chord type is sent to a different MIDI channel, with notes to turn into major chords sent to channel 1, minor chords sent to channel 2, etc.

Inside Maschine, each channel is received individually by ‘dummy’ MIDI tracks which transpose the notes according to their channel and send them to the receiving instrument. This requires many MIDI channels per instrument. Personally I like to save Groups set up for this purpose, so you can simply load the desired input to the first slot in the group and start playing!

Until Native Instruments improves the MIDI handling in Maschine to allow Reaktor and other programs to process MIDI and send it along to other instruments, this is probably the most sophisticated type of chord control possible in Maschine.