Get to know Maschine’s Audio plugin

Audio was added to Maschine for the first time late last year. Let’s take a look at how it works

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Adding audio works just like adding a sample. We find our audio file in the browser and drag it to Sound 1. It automatically adds a Sampler to the sound. Click the arrow next to the sampler in the plugin list to change it to Audio.

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There are two playback modes: Loop simply plays back the entire audio file triggered from the start of the Pattern, and Gate, which lets us cut the loop in and out using the sequencer.

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We select Gate mode, and enter Step mode on our controller. We can now use the pad grid to trigger ‘chunks’ of audio loop. The Fade parameter in the software controls the attack and decay of these gates.

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Tune, Pitchbend, timestretch mode and Tempo controls allow us to play with both the quality and the timing of the audio playback, and – in some modes – adjust these independently. Try experimenting with the different Stretch, Re-Pitch and Formant algorithms.

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Back on the controller, we can switch to Keyboard mode. This lets us chromatically pitchshift the loop up and down the keyboard as it plays back. (This can only be done in Stretch or Formant modes).

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We can also edit our loops in the Audio plugin Edit window. We can record loops from the Sampler too. Set up your inputs to record externally or resample. Select Loop recording mode and define length. Once recording is captured, we just change our Sampler plugin to an Audio one, and our new loop is good to go.