Stealing ideas from presets

Maschine makes it very easy to apply your own creative stamp to preset sounds. Here’s one easy method Debate rages within electronic music about the legitimacy of making tracks using presets, and we don’t have the time or energy to get into that here. Whatever your opinion on the subject, it’s worth noting that Maschine’s Factory Library comes stocked with a lot of excellent, well-designed Sounds and these can provide a great starting point whether you plan to customise them yourself or not. Obviously, the easiest way to customise presets is to simply find a sound vaguely similar to what you’re looking for and then tweak parameters until you have something that suits your needs. However, as we’ll look at below, Maschine makes it easy to create Sounds that combine existing presets with our own unique sounds for easily-made hybrid results.

We use the Maschine browser to find a percussion sound we like. This sound is made using DrumSynth along with some Flanger and Delay. We like the tone of the effects, but want something more unique.

To give it our own stamp, we simply drag a found sound sample from our own library and drop it in place of the DrumSynth sound. Now we’re using our own sample, but can keep the nicely tailored effect chain.

We apply this idea to a full ready made drum Group preset. Find something with cool ambient effects and go through replacing/editing sounds, letting the feel of the original preset inspire your own unique kit.