Making a Track with Native Instruments’ New Standalone Maschine+

In this Point Blank tutorial, Anna Lakatos aka Anna Disclaim, a Point Blank lecturer, Native Instruments Product Specialist and Ableton Live Certified Trainer, shows how you can sketch out quick track ideas and build beats using NI’s Maschine+ and demonstrates how you can do all of this using additional music production hardware.

Maschine+ is a sampler, a drum machine, a synth and an on-stage superpower. In short, it’s whatever you make it. Leave the laptop behind, jam with your other gear and create beats in minutes with a wealth of on-board sounds, instruments and effects.

If you’re eager to become a master of Maschine, Point Blank can help. Thanks to their ongoing partnership with Native Instruments and state-of-the-art NI studios, they offer specialist courses that can teach you the ins and outs of this music-making powerhouse and then some. Plus, they’re currently offering 25% off their selected online and LA courses until 31st December using the codes ONLINE25 and LA25 when enrolling.

To kick things off, Anna shows what’s new with the Maschine+, giving an overview of the device’s key features, inputs, outputs and more. She goes on to demonstrate how to sequence chord progressions, locate and record your drum hits and use the in-built step sequencer for looping different elements. To lay down some bass, Anna fires up her Moog Minitaur, showing how to set up your MIDI routing and resample your favourite piece of hardware, before adding in some additional synth work using a Roland JP-08. Finally, the NI Maschine mastermind drops in some vocals and shows how you can slice up samples to create your own vocal chops.