“There were many people involved,” agrees MASCHINE+ Product Owner Mariana Borssatto.

“So many departments, so many people had to be committed. “It’s crazy, the amount of things that happen,” says Mario Altvater, the team’s UX Design Lead. But the MASCHINE software you know runs on a computer – what had to change to allow it to make the leap to standalone hardware? In short, everything: not just the tool itself, but the entire company around that tool. NI is first and foremost a software company, and that’s apparent all over this new instrument at its heart, MASCHINE+ is still a software-based tool. The company has its roots in this question of how a digital platform becomes an instrument – it’s literally the “native” in Native Instruments. Combine that with Komplete’s instruments, FX, and Expansions and you have something really special.” “You can develop the muscle memory to play it with your eyes closed, just accessing everything with your fingertips.

The goal, says Chris, is that anyone – from live bands to DAWless studio musicians can be “completely free from the computer, and solely focused on the instrument. With this first standalone iteration, the team aimed to squeeze that best-of-both worlds approach into one device. The sort of feeling you’d get from, say, a guitar, is precisely what MASCHINE has always intended to merge with the power and flexibility of computers. It’s not about looking at screens it’s about muscle memory and emotion. To help uncover some answers I talked to the team that helped bring MASCHINE+ to the market, starting with Hardware Product Manager Chris La Pietra.ĭescribing what makes ‘flow’ work on a conventional musical instrument is easy, he explains. What did it take to produce the first-ever standalone Native Instruments product, for example, and what might it mean for NI’s future? Here, we’ll take an in-depth look at a few of those crucial details and tackle some of the questions you might have about MASCHINE+. The computer you usually have to tether can disappear, of course, but beneath that familiar outer shell it’s the many less-obvious hardware and software details that add up make the standalone experience work. It’s what you can’t see on MASCHINE+ that makes it different.

Cannot open massive native instruments