Native Instruments Maschine +

Maschine properly is a good piece of software. For a decent amount of money you get samples, strings, horns, drums, some great virtual synths, and a full fledged sequencer. I bought Maschine a few years ago and the Maschine MK3. However, I never got to use it properly. Setting up my computer, downloading all the plugins, get them recognized and working, was a serious pain. In the end, I left my Maschine neglected and gathering dust. I preferred to spend more time with the MPC Live.

Enter Maschine+ . Well, it is not perfect. No piece of hardware is. However, there's that feeling of immediate gratification that I never got with Maschine. Dial a drumkit, dial a bass, pick some loops, and soon you are sequencing full tracks.

It's not complete: you can't use all the Maschine plugins in it; some aren't available at all. However, what you get is more than enough for anything. You could spend all day listening to presets, looking up for something better than you already have, setting effects, or simply creating your own sounds using the included polyphonic synth models.

I took one star from the "features" ranking, because with a better processor it could be able to play those gorgeous string libraries. However for a first version of a standalone sequencer, it's great. I spend more time with Maschine+ than with any other synth I have, and I have lots.

I will try to write this review short because there are so many things I can say.

First of all the unit looks, feels and sounds great.
- The build quality is good and sturdy, however the encoders can twitch sometimes.
- The pads are very solid and responsive.
- The buttons have a very nice click to them that give you a nice taktile feeling.
- The unit is made of plastic with an aluminium top and it feels very solid.

Regarding the software performance:
- The unit is very versitle and you really do have the entire maschine 2 inside at your finger tips and for 90% of the functions you can do it on the hardware without any computer interaction.
- The samples, instruments and fx are what we know and love NI about, but if anything, I wish it had a multiband compressor and that the compressor had a way to disable auto makeup gain as well as some form of gian reduction meter so I can have a visual representation of the gain reduction as well.

There are so many other good things I can say about this but instead I want to mention the few things I dont like so you can be fully aware before making the purchase.

- If you want to use program change and cc messages, to send to other devices from maschine +, you need to connect those devices to your computer, run the project in the maschine 2 software on your computer and perform all of the programming on there and then just transfer the project to maschine + and reconnect all of the hardware devices that will be receiving these messages. There is no way to edit, program change and cc messages from the hardware itself.

If you want to use a separate midi controllers knobs to turn macros or other knobs inside of maschine+ when performing live, you need to set this up with the maschine 2 software on your computer by connecting your midi controller to your computer and then transfering the project to maschine+ and re-connecting the midi controller.

- There are no 3rd party fx when in standalone mode, you can only use the Instruments and FX from maschine 2, while you can upload or sample any audio you want on the hardware itself.

- Only NI audio interfaces will work well with this unit. Technically it does support 3rd party audio interfaces over usb and it does see them as well as their channels, however you can experience dropouts and unexpected behaviour from the interfaces unless they are made by NI.

- The way we are using the unit to perform live both with pre-prepared songs with structures or for dawless jamming, there is a lot of page switching and menu diving if you want to tweak many parameters on the fly while performing.

- You have to monitor the CPU load when building projects to use live. I have had this thing crash a few times during rehearsals and once live. It turned out that monark as a bass vst is too cpu intensive. I think it hogged up to 50% of the CPU just for 1 instance at heavy cpu times and these spikes caused the maschine+ to crash a few times. I made good use of the autosampler that maschine offers and just ended up sampling my monark, bass preset and now it sounds the same yet doesnt use so much CPU. I think currently by combing sampled drums, programmed to play live, playing sampled bass, sending midi to 2 external synths and a guitar & vocal fx processor, playing sampled leads, flutes, asian instruments and having all of the eqs, compressors for the live mix as well as reverb and delays on send busses, I am using only up to 70% of the CPU at the hottest times. So the capabilites are there, but you have to be smart about them if you want to use all of the bells and whistles at once in standalone mode.

- There were a few other things but I will come back to add them in when I remember.

In conclusion:

The unit is amazing, especially for the price, thats why I gave it 5 stars in all categories. Consider the particularities I mentioned above and everything else is golden on this. I am very happy with this purchase.