Re: NI Machine Studio / Jam vs traditional DAW workflows
2016/10/05 05:29:29
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Hi Rob,
I'm just a hobbyist, not a heavy duty user, but my experience as a user of Sonar, Maschine and Komplete Kontrol is that I keep Sonar and Maschine mostly separate. I find that for inspiration and flow, I can move things along really quickly using Maschine, but once I've finished with getting the song "written", I export main stems and import into Sonar for mixing and mastering. Sometimes I want to take a more traditional DAW-type approach to writing and then I leave Maschine completely on one side and use Sonar.
It would be great if there was a level of integration between Sonar and Maschine - NI has put some effort into this with Ableton and to a degree with Logic, however I can see that Ableton lends itself more easily to the pattern-based approach of Maschine. I have trouble envisaging how it would integrate with Sonar, unless it was somehow linking in with the matrix.
Going back to what I said at the beginning I am only a lightweight user; but like you, I have trouble seeing how to use Sonar and Maschine together and blend the best of both worlds. It would be great if we could though!
I'm really tempted by the Maschine Jam it looks like a lot of fun and a real step forward in getting ideas down really quickly.
As a side note, I only wanted to "dip my toe" into the world of Maschine because I felt I wasn't into the whole finger-drumming thing. That's why I got a Maschine Mikro and got it cheap and secondhand on ebay; but in fact I've found that I really love it, it's great fun. To my surprise and much as I love Sonar, I'm using Maschine more.
Sonar Platinum x64
Cakewalk UA-25EX
Asus X556UA-DM898T i7-7500U 8GB 1TB, Windows 10 Home
Komplete 11 Ultimate, Kontrol S49, Maschine Jam, Mikro mk2, Arturia V Collection 4