Has anyone been using a maschine with the Hapax? Looking to buy the Hapax for this purpose. Seems like a great fit, the maschine functioning as a sound module/mixer/recorder and the hapax doing the sequencing of course. The maschines workflow is incredible but is lacking in generative and more importantly automation, I really can’t believe NI still has people manually drawing automation. electronic music is so dependent on smooth filter sweeps, transitions, slowly building elements…ie. automation! It’s so underdeveloped on maschine that it makes it almost useless for that sort of production. Anyways any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
I considered a standalone Maschine as my sampling/looping hub, sequenced externally via Hapax, but as best I can tell, its functions in that regard are much more limited than the MPC, e.g., I think you’re limited to assigning sounds/samples to just the 16 Maschine pads v 8 banks of 16-pad programs (plus 8 total plugins) on MPC
this video runs through the basics of sequencing a Maschine externally, though also leaves some questions about just how far you can go in maxing out the MIDI channels/pads
would also add if you check out the Maschine thread on Elektronauts, it’s debatable how invested NI is in Maschine hardware going forward — there were some recent big price cuts on the Plus box that others took as a bad sign and I think NI hasn’t updated the firmware/features nearly as often as Akai with MPC
Thanks for the response! Yea, I can see why the mpc might be the better choice but I already own and understand the maschine and really just want to expand on the sequencing via something like the hapax.
Is it possible to use midi over usb and standard midi as 2 separate input channels on the maschine? allowing control over 32 seperate pads ? This seems like it would be more then enough for me, 4-5 synth engines, 10-12 drum tracks and plenty extra for random samples and fx.
I ultimately didn’t go with Maschine so can’t be sure myself but my understanding was each pad corresponded to a single MIDI channel (but whether that’s only DIN, or only USB, or if you can double up per pad I don’t know). This was also my issue with Blackbox 1010.
MPC gets around this for me with Hapax by working in Tracks (and I’m only dedicating 4 of Hapax’s 16 to my MPC overall) that I can assign and then map by MIDI note value. So not only spreading samples/loops across more than 16 pads per Track/MIDI channel but also splitting plugins on the same Track across the keyboard to get multitimbral playback if I want it
Maschine‘s plugins are probably better and more numerous but at least in terms of running them from Hapax, I wasn’t confident I’d have as much flexibility as MPC
I had the MPC for a bit but found it uninspiring and the touch screen surprisingly clunky, although i don’t doubt it’s still better for many things, Maschine plus for all its downsides is still kind of incredible. Even if you were to only use it a as a sound module, the quality of the synths and plug ins, as well as access to your entire sample library are better then anything I can think of.
The choices Native instruments make as far as, lack of support and a few random features that seem years behind the competition are a little baffling but what they do right is make an incredibly expansive and rich sounding tool.
yeah I think what ultimately tipped the scales for me as that video notes is you apparently can’t trigger patterns/scenes on Maschine externally, which I would need to do if i used it for the same looping of breaks etc as I do in MPC
