Preparation is everything

Maschine Mikro Mk3 downsizes the hardware screen compared to previous controllers. As a result, you’ll find yourself turning to the plugin interface for most library browsing duties. This is fine, but it can have the effect of breaking your creative flow if you’re halfway through building a groove and need to grab the mouse to dig through sounds.

The best way to overcome this is be prepared. Whether you plan to work from existing presets or want to use only your own sounds, it pays to set aside a few sessions in order to properly get to know your sound library and create lists of favourites. Maschine’s browser uses a ‘star’ system to highlight Sounds, Instruments and Groups, and this is easily accessible from the Mikro hardware. Having ready-made lists of ‘starred’ Sounds and Groups will make it possible to audition directly from the controller.

It can be particularly handy to prepare your own Groups, which is the name Maschine uses for its kits of up-to 16 Sounds. When first starting with Maschine it can be tempting just to chuck all your sounds into one Group, adding them one by one until the pads grid is full. It’s worth taking a little time to consider how Maschine’s Groups work though, and think about how Sounds are routed.

Groups

Groups effectively work like bus channels. Each of their sounds can be processed individually with insert effects, but Groups can also have have their own effect chains to sit across all the contained sounds at once. This is great for adding effect treatments to multiple similar sounds all at once, resulting in a unifying ‘gel’ – for example, applying analogue style compression across a whole drum kit. Because of this, it’s useful to build groups of one or two types of sound that benefit from sharing bus processing to add a touch of, say, compression, reverb or saturation.

Aux effects

Alongside Sound and Group effects Maschine can also process sounds via Master and auxiliary effects. Master effects work as you’d expect – add a processor to your Master out and it processes sounds from all of your Groups at once. Auxiliary effects are interesting though. Essentially, any Sound can be repurposed as an effect channel simply by adding only effects to it, without a sound source, turning it into a return channel. Under a Sound’s Audio Output menu, you’ll find two Aux routings that can be used to send that Sound to up to two effect channels. Since any Sound can be used as an Auxiliary, you can save these as part of your Groups, allowing you to, for example, save your favourite reverb as a send alongside a drum kit preset. You could also create Groups purely comprised of effect chains, to have a ready made assortment of creative processing channels ready to drop into any project.