Q:”Thanks for your answer, it was very helpful. I have some other questions. I saw in the NI video that you have an MOTU interface. How is it? I’m asking because I want to buy an MOTU ULTRALITE MKIII HYBRID. ”

A: The MOTU 828 is dope, rock solid, never drops out on me like the previous interface I had. I like the MOTU because its multi-client compatible, so I can run multiple audio apps at once with out conflict. This is something that the 003 rack could not do at all. Audio Quality is good, its obviously not a top tier interface, but I think it sounds good enough and I am able to get good results out of it. For me the Multiclient ability was the most important aspect of going Motu.

Q:”The other thing I want to ask is: What is the reason to have Maschine, when you already have Ableton Live with Drum Racks?”

A: I asked myself this question at first as well. Drum Racks does a good job of letting you build drum kits, effect chains, and sliced samples, however is misses a very important factor, ITS NOT HANDS ON. Maschine gives me a very organic hands on approach to creating kits, effect chains, drum patterns etc. With Maschine it easy to replace a drum sound on the fly without doing the Mouse/Menu hunt. Also when working with Drum Racks I found that I still had to create multiple midi tracks in order to shift my individual drum sounds to get the groove to feel how I wanted. With Maschine I don’t have to approach sequencing in that manner, because all sounds can be individually controlled without the need for creating an individual midi track per sound. This means that my workflow was drastically improved working with Maschine because I dont have to manage a whole bunch of midi tracks in Ableton. Since Maschine is hands on, it feels more organic to work with, and coming from an MPC background (for the past 8 years) this was important to me because thats the way Im used to work on tracks. Overall the advantage that Maschine has over Ableton would be workflow, but for me Maschine and Ableton work well together, because I rather use ableton to freak my arrangements and put effects on different sounds. Maschine also has an Ableton Control Template that Makes it respond much like a Launchpad by Novation would.