Transe Posted March 30, 2017 Share Posted March 30, 2017 Hey Have been mixing since the 90s Old school, techno, House, Trance, Hard Trance etc and recently decided to step into some production for the first time of Trance music to start with as it is one of my favourite styles Purchased the NI Machine Mk2 and was looking for some advice on where to start with learning to layout some of my own trance tracks Thinking of getting some lessons through my local shop also as they offer this I have a laptop loaded with the Maschine software, Massive, wil be buying a audio interface unit that has stereo inputs which was recommended from my local shop Also good to mention i bought the S8 Traktor flagship controller also loaded with Traktor Scratch pro 2 which is more for mixing but thought i would mention it incase its going to be usefull with the production also Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Posted March 30, 2017 Share Posted March 30, 2017 RE: S8 controller.. You can integrate your maschine into traktor as well, there's plenty of traktor mappings for things such as remix decks. Or you can sync traktor and maschine via midi clock. Anyhow, if you're looking for production advice. I'd seriously not bother with paying for lessons upfront, just to learn the basics. If you want to learn your way around it, just search for a 'maschine 101' style course to learn the fundamentals of the system first. Once you've got that down, maybe start looking for some trance specific vids. If you want to take it further after that and are struggling, maybe look at paying for some 1 on 1 time with a tutor. This way, you're not spending money on a tutor to learn the easy stuff that we can all teach you super easy. The most important thing is to just sit down in front of it and muck around! You'll learn more that way than just watching & copying vids. Source: I have one P.S.: my personal thoughts on the maschine are are i love the sounds, but i like the sequencing in ableton better. So I use a combination of the two.. Do you use any other DAW at the moment? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Transe Posted April 24, 2017 Author Share Posted April 24, 2017 On 31/03/2017 at 8:04 AM, Mitch said: RE: S8 controller.. You can integrate your maschine into traktor as well, there's plenty of traktor mappings for things such as remix decks. Or you can sync traktor and maschine via midi clock. Anyhow, if you're looking for production advice. I'd seriously not bother with paying for lessons upfront, just to learn the basics. If you want to learn your way around it, just search for a 'maschine 101' style course to learn the fundamentals of the system first. Once you've got that down, maybe start looking for some trance specific vids. If you want to take it further after that and are struggling, maybe look at paying for some 1 on 1 time with a tutor. This way, you're not spending money on a tutor to learn the easy stuff that we can all teach you super easy. The most important thing is to just sit down in front of it and muck around! You'll learn more that way than just watching & copying vids. Source: I have one P.S.: my personal thoughts on the maschine are are i love the sounds, but i like the sequencing in ableton better. So I use a combination of the two.. Do you use any other DAW at the moment? Hi Thanks very much for the help I have been practicing in the maschine software on my laptop just trying to get my head around the scenes and making patterns, I have made a few patterns with drums and synths etc and started to compile together but having trouble in laying it all out to attempt to write enough patterns in sequence to create a song, I guess the more I practice the better, when writing the song is there a format that I should be sticking to etc for how many bars intil the next section etc of the track, I am just not sureas I am a bit of a novice at this I have been told about ableton is the go to for the compiling the song side of things yes, but I don't have a copy at this stage, would you suggest I try to get it or work with maschine for a while first? Cheers again!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LabRat Posted April 24, 2017 Share Posted April 24, 2017 Get the writing techniques down first. If you're on a Mac you'll have GarageBand installed which will be perfect to start arranging. If you're struggling with song structure have a listen to some tracks you want to take influence from and count the bars between sections. I'd suggest listening to a few songs as each producer has different ideas. Get a pen and pad and section it off - for example, intro, break down / build, 1st drop, 2nd break down, 2nd drop, outro. As you count how many bars that are between each section you'll start to see how similar or even the same most songs are. Keep in mind that majority of dance music is in a time signature of 4/4 which means there are 4 counts to make up the bar. It's unlikely you'll hear a time change in dance music but it does exist. I believe Porter Robinson had a time signature change to 6/8 in one of his bootlegs a few years ago. You'll know if you hear it because it will catch you out when you're counting Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Posted April 25, 2017 Share Posted April 25, 2017 You can use ableton (I do personally) but you can do arrangement on Maschine. As Spitty said, listen to other tracks. You'll find a lot of tracks use the same patterns in multiple parts of a song, just with some minor tweaks to parameters. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Transe Posted April 28, 2017 Author Share Posted April 28, 2017 Hey Thanks Guys, Thought I would keep you posted on my progress I have been analysing songs to see how they are compiled and am having a good time using Maschine, someone mentioned to me if I want a good sounding synth then sylenth and nexus are a good option, do you know how these work if I can use it along with Maschine software ? Also what would you suggest i would use to bring samples into Maschine, or are there any plugins available with decent samples that I could start with for using mainly for trance music? I eventually would like to lay vocals over anything that I end up putting together any ideas on starting out with samples, this can be done in machine or is an external plugin also an option ? Cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LabRat Posted April 28, 2017 Share Posted April 28, 2017 I don't know a lot about the maschine software but I can't confirm that sylenth is a great synth. I use it often. I hear that a lot of people use nexus mostly because they have really good presets. It is a great sounding synth and they seem to have modelled it quite well. Not sure if it's available for Mac though… I was looking years ago and haven't heard much about it since so will be interested to know if there's OS X support Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Transe Posted May 4, 2017 Author Share Posted May 4, 2017 Hi thanks for the reply I have been spending a good amount of time using maschine and getting to go through the sound libraries Etc im using a windows pc I7 processor and 8 gig ram and I started to get a few patterns going and noticed the sound was glitching sometimes then my pc froze, does that sound like I should be changing my Pc ? If I was to get a mac would that be better for performance issues ? thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LabRat Posted May 4, 2017 Share Posted May 4, 2017 I'm fairly bias towards Mac because I've always had one. I used a pc when I coproduced an album for a local artist and if the specs are there it'll be fine. I find 8gb of ram doesn't quite cut it, especially if you're stacking up the tracks. If you're comfortable using your pc I'd just upgrade the ram to 16gb and you should be sweet Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Posted May 5, 2017 Share Posted May 5, 2017 Ensure you're running maschine in 64-bit mode too! Otherwise you're limiting it to consuming 4GB RAM Skip to around 1 minute for Windows. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Transe Posted September 5, 2017 Author Share Posted September 5, 2017 Hi, Thanks for the link on how to setup Maschine in 64 bit mode! I have been practicing laying out basic patterns using maschine, trying out the scenes and building some basic drum patterns, adding some Instruments and trying out making a melody. I was wondering what your thoughts were on purchasing more sounds for use in maschine, i have been on adsr site and not really sure if i need the maschine ones, or if i can use any of the others like the Massive ones there for example?. I was debating on signing up for the subscription on Adsr are you signed up with any of the sites that sell packs ? I am looking to build nice melodic trance melodies, harmonic Synth melodies, deep sweeping Synths and background sounds, anjelic sounds, above and beyond, Oceanlab are a few of my influences that i like that style. I was looking at the NI Komplete package, however its out of my price bracket at the moment, so i was wondering if i can get smaller packs and just build up as i go, would love to hear your thoughts and any advise from your experiences with starting out towards trying to make some nice sounds, i have heard that the other Synths are great like Sylenth and Nexus also. Cheers Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mitch Posted September 7, 2017 Share Posted September 7, 2017 I got a couple of the NI packs using vouchers I got for free. They had some good sounds. Haven't purchased off any 3rd party sites. There's heaps of free maschine packs available if you look around a bit. Sometimes tutorials have a pack to download that goes with it containing some samples. Perhaps even look at getting 1 or 2 3rd party synths and learning them really well. It may be better (from a learning perspective) to do this, rather than buying komplete and using a fraction of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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