Overview of the Maschine Compressor and Maximizer Tools

This great tutorial breaks down the Maschine compressor and maximizer tools and how they can be used to help you produce truly professional results!

Maschine comes packed with incredibly useful and intuitive tools that have grown and evolved in the first two major versions of what has quickly become the industry standard for hands-on groove production.

This lesson specifically looks at the Maschine compressor and maximizer tools.

Both can be found in the effects drop down menu in the Maschine software or in the effects tab if you are navigating through the accompanying hardware device. Both can be used in a traditional approach, properly processing your sounds or in more aggressive or experimental ways. So it is fair to refer to either as a tool or as an effect.

Learning to use compression on Maschine

Compression is basically just volume automation with specific parameters to control exactly how, when and why the volumes automation occurs. Both the Maschine compressor and maximizer offer very simple interfaces and intuitive controls to those who understand how the tools work. Of course, since they emulate real-world gear, it is best for you to have a basic understand of how each of these tools is supposed to work, how it is designed to process audio and how professionals have used them. All these things will help you gain a deeper understand of the tools themselves and therefore grant you access to all of the potential they bring to your mix.

When working with the Maschine compressor and maximizer on your own projects it is important to understand that a limiter is basically a compressor with some very definitive parameters in play and a maximizer is widely considered a marketing term. But, as with many things in the audio it is simply not quite that easy.

Imagine if you set up a compressor with a 10:1 ratio or higher and then activated the brick wall setting, which does not allow any audio to go beyond a certain DB. This would be considered a limiter.

Learning to use the Maschine Maximizer

Now we can look at the maximizer. If you understand how a normalizer works (calculating the difference between the loudest peak in your audio file and then raising it and the rest of the audio to reach 0db) and you introduce the idea of a threshold, you can then limit the ‘peaks’ that are used as the benchmark for the normalization process. This results in more of your audio receiving a boost in db, hence why the perceived loudness is greater in most cases.

Cheers,
OhmLab