Imaschine 2

The original iMaschine app from Native Instruments was relatively well-received by reviewers and users alike. It was praised for its ease of use, the diverse sample packs offered as in-store purchases, and the ability to sample from songs stored on your phone or tablet as well as record your own sounds on the fly.However, despite its widespread acclaim, it certainly met with its share of criticism. One aspect often criticized was the lack of support for “app audio transferring” technology from services like Audiobus, AudioCopy/AudioPaste and Jack. These programs allow users to output sound from one app into another, which opens up lots of possibilities for making more robust compositions. Yet even though this technology has been a staple of mobile beat production for years, Native Instruments never integrated this into their original iMaschine app.Instead, users could export their beats into files that could be opened with Maschine, the desktop software that iMaschine stems from. You could make a beat anywhere you happened to be, then export it onto your computer and continue working on it from there. Alternatively, you could export your grooves to Soundcloud, where you could then download them and load them into your DAW of choice.These were nice features and all, but what about users who didn’t own Maschine? What about users that wanted to be able to mix each individual sample in their drum kits, instead of one .wav file lumping all the sounds together? These were just some of the issues that many users seemed to have with the company’s first app, and combined with rare and unimpressive updates and a general lack of communication from the company, people just began drifting away from iMaschine altogether.Cut to last week, when an email from the company announced that the sequel to iMaschine was now available in the App Store, promising to be a tremendous improvement on the original. I had no idea that they’d been working on this new app, so when I got the email I immediately had a look. It was a nice surprise; I’d been hoping for an update to iMaschine for quite a while.As of writing this, iMaschine 2 costs $4.99, the same price as the first app. For another dollar, you can purchase a megapack that includes all of the original sample packs from the original iMaschine, which is a pretty good deal. Since I use iMaschine for hours pretty

IMaschine 2 is actually a pretty powerful tool for how simple and compact it is. You can edit samples down to the waveform, manipulate individual note velocities, and create keyboard arpeggios. The 2.0 version has upgraded its sequencing capabilities to include scenes–sets of drum and keys patterns that form a track’s building blocks–that work pretty much like they do in Maschine. (In fact I kind of prefer how you interface scenes on the iOS app versus the full version.) Where the original iMaschine only lets you program loops up to 32 bars long, the new version gives you the capability to make whole song-length tracks.At $4.99 for the month of November, iMaschine 2 is a fraction of the price of even the entry-level Maschine Mikro hardware-software suite, and if you’re willing to work within its restraints, you can at least approximate most of the full version’s basic functionality. The ability to make full-length songs with it means that iMaschine 2 is pretty much a complete production platform now. It may have its limitations, but then again so do the early versions of Fruity Loops or Music 2000 for the Playstation One, and those programs weaned whole generations of electronic musicians (some of whom never stopped using them). Now that there’s an intuitively designed baby DAW within reach of any kid with an iPhone and enough money to buy a meal at Taco Bell, there could be a whole new generation of producers coming up off it. If there’s a rap

A grid) and scale modes on the keys (which reprograms the keyboard so every note fits your preferred scale), both of which help negate the clumsy parts of playing music on a tiny touchscreen. On the other hand, with its touchable interface, making beats on iMaschine 2 feels a lot like a video game, and is more fun than most of the actual games I have on my phone.NI calls iMaschine 2 a “sketchpad,” and its casual low-stakes vibe is highly conducive to quickly roughing out an idea for a drum part, or spending your commute making music instead of playing Two Dots. I learned a lot about the basics about how to work in a DAW from spending a month on tour with my old band and spending drives in the back of the van making beats on my phone with the original iMaschine.In fact, once I moved up to a real Maschine system, and then further on to Ableton, there were things that I missed about iMaschine. I like that it figures out how many bars long a part is while you’re recording, so you don’t have to set it beforehand. I like that you can record a sample from your iPhone mic and assign it to a drum pad in as little as two taps, in case you decide to make a beat out of your friend’s noisy pet bird.And if you feel like popping the hood and digging down a few layers, you can find that

Create multiple scenes and duplicate, rearrange and delete them as they wish. You can listen to one scene on loop or the entire track, which makes it easier to create more full-bodied compositions.Each of the 4 tracks now has 4 possible patterns, so you can create various sequences with the same set of sounds, also crucial to more robust song creation. You can opt to mute a track during certain scenes, in order to conserve your patterns for other moments within the song.Each track, as well as each individual pad in your drum kits, can be colorized, which is already immensely helpful when using the Maschine Studio as it allows you to color code your samples and remember where everything is. The added color can be inspiring, too – playing with a drum kit colored dark blue could give you different creative ideas than a magenta-colored one.They’ve also updated the keyboard to be more in line with the Maschine update from last year that allowed you to play various chords by just tapping one key. The program would play the rest of the notes in the chords, making it easier to create chord combinations in short periods of time, and that feature is especially helpful on the compact screen of a mobile phone. This function also allows for playing in specific scales and creating various arpeggios.It’s clear that there are plenty of new features to enjoy, but whether or not this should have constituted an update for the first app rather than becoming a second has been debated since its release. Personally, I think it should have been an update, but it could also be the case that they have a lot more in store for iMaschine 2, new features that the original app just wouldn’t have been able to handle.My hope is that, this time around, Native Instruments will communicate more closely with their fans, and work on improving their new creation based on user feedback. iMaschine and iMaschine 2 are still among my all-time favorite music production apps, I just hope to see more innovation and added capabilities along the way.7/10

Electronic music technology has a long history of blurring the line between toys and serious music-making gear: pocket–sized synthesizers with studio-quality sounds, technologically advanced keyboards disguised as something aimed at kindergarteners, and video games that not only teach the basics of digital production but have also ended up on more than a few actual releases.Native Instruments creates some of the most popular and powerful hardware and software gear on the market, including its popular beat-production hardware/software suite Maschine. But one of its best products is exceedingly humble compared to its feature-heavy interfaces and virtual instrument libraries that run into the hundreds of gigabytes: iMaschine, the simplified iOS companion to Maschine that last week just received its biggest update since its release in 2011. Videos by VICE Compared to the app’s older bro, Maschine, which has evolved over the years from a drum-focused setup into the closest thing Native Instruments has to an Ableton-style digital audio workstation for complete track production, iMaschine 2 is incredibly bare-bones—even in its 2.0 incarnation. The application is a sort of micro-DAW with four channels that you can use to sequence drum pads, keyboards, or recordings straight off the iPhone’s microphone, plus a mixer and a couple of effects, and not much else. It’s basically a high-end audio toy. Which is what’s so great about it.At this point in the evolution of DAW, having an even moderately sized library of plug-ins means having immediate access to more sounds than a producer 20 years ago could dream