Using Program Change Messages in Maschine

In this video, I show how to use Program Change messages in Maschine. This can save a substantial amount of CPU in some cases, if necessary. It can also be used as a sound design tool – rapidly changing between snapshots while sound is playing can give interesting and unpredictable results, especially in Reaktor. This can be quite nice in certain genres, particularly glitch and electro house/complextro.

The video shows how to set up two Native Instruments synths – Reaktor and Massive. While Reaktor works with Program Change messages by default, Massive requires a small amount of setup.

Massive has a huge number of presets, none of which are organized into traditional MIDI banks (to my knowledge). This means you must create your own bank for Massive to use.

While this takes a little bit of time to set up, it also offers a huge amount of customization in the types of sounds you can use. For the purpose of the tutorial I created a bank with 128 random bass sounds from the presets that come with Massive.

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