Setting up Maschine with NI Massive

Seeing how our favorite synth is now included free with the update, we want to extend a warm welcome to our newest community members and share what you need to know about setting up Maschine with NI Massive!

MassiveSynth.com has been the fastest growing and most active NI Massive community in the world since it began, more than two years ago. In that time we have remained dedicated to providing the very best in all things Massive, and now that includes Maschine as well. You have long been able to use different plugins within Maschine, even synths, but Native Instruments has obviously realized the potential locked away in this devastating pairing of Maschine with NI Massive. For people who did not own Massive prior to this recent update, it is a groundbreaking shift in the way you can make music with Maschine, putting all of the power and sonic capabilities found in Massive right at your fingertips for live performances and recording alike.

Native Instruments has done an amazing job, yet again, of making the process of setting up Maschine as simple as plugging it in. Literally one USB cable away from making killer beats and songs, all you need to do when you take your Maschine out of the box is install the software, plug in the hardware device, launch the program in standalone mode and wait for the program to find and map out pathways to all of the sounds on your computer and harddrives. If you have already been using Maschine for a while and have just updated the software, you still need to launch the program in standalone mode to finish the update process. (If there are issues with finding all the sounds on your system, do not worry. This will be covered in-depth in future posts.)

Once you have successfully launched the software, you can quit out of it and launch it inside of your DAW as a plugin if you prefer. Either way, you are only seconds away from being able to use Maschine with NI Massive. We will be going into detail, in future tutorials, as to how you can get the most out of Maschine when producing with Massive. But for now we sill stick to the basics and get you set up.

Looking at the software interface for the first time, will be daunting. But if you just focus on the parts of it that are relevant to getting started, it will be easy enough. It should look something like the image below.

Now let’s take a look at the main navigation controls, in regards to the sound libraries. In the upper left-hand corner are the various filters that will make sorting through the sounds easy. Below that is where the results are displayed. Right now, let’s focus on the small button that looks like piano keys. This will show you instrument plugins that are accessible to Maschine. I have restricted the plugin instruments that Maschine can use in order to keep CPU usage to a minimum and keep things performing fast. We can go over some best practices for performance in future lessons. The image below shows that I have selected Massive, and specifically the bass synths contained within the Massive Threat sound library. You can easily navigate to any sound or instrument using the Maschine hardware, too. This too, will be covered in future tutorials about using Maschine with NI Massive.

I would like to load the first bass in the list, called Absolute. I can load it several ways, but for now we’ll keep things simple and just double click on the sound in the left-hand side bar. This action loads the sound into Maschine and you can see it is now listed in the number 1 slot of Group A. As it stands at this point you can now play a single note from Massive, using the selected sound, by pressing the number 1 pad on the Maschine controller. But that is all you can do, unless you begin manipulating knobs and buttons. To turn Maschine into a more traditional MIDI controller and play notes up and down a scale, you will need to press the button that looks like piano keys directly to the left of the Group A sounds, shown in the second image below. Once this is selected you should be able to play your Maschine hardware device as a synth!

It really is that simple. Using Maschine with NI Massive should open a lot of doors for musicians and producers, and will potentially change the way we interact with out instruments moving forward. We would like to hear from all of you Maschine users! What do you want to learn about? What troubles are you having with the software or the hardware? Do you have tips, tricks or tutorials of your own to share? Let us know by sending us a message before you leave the site today. Things are about to get a whole lot more awesome up in here. Thanks for stopping by!

Cheers,
OhmLab