Some things really improved, and others suffered. I hope this makes sense cuz i dunno how familiar you are with its layout as per words like Scene and Group, plus my own vocabulary is a little disjointed.
starting with the bad/non-intuitive :
it's a genuine ball ache to get your arrangement to sync with your DAW , at least at first
Because i always leave one bar of silence at the beginning, starting at bar 2 so that when i track stuff, it doesn't nick off the attack of the first sound's onset.
Sooo, maschine's "scenes" based sequencer needs to have, for example, a 9-bar scene as the first one, rather than an 8 (then the subsequent scenes can be typical bar lengths -- 4, 8, 16)
At first i was trying to default to a one-bar empty scene, but maschine will see any empty scenes as "available" to be used, and start recording to the first "available" scene .. so my empty scene would keep getting moved or recorded to, even when i set it to scene 2 with more bars... the thing is quirky as fuck
Tracking with it sucked at first too, but i got the hang of it. lots of multi outs, so after you write a beat, you just give each sample an output and set them up in the daw, hit record and get em all in one pass.
All scenes slave to the longest scene in the arrangement , for example -- if you layered a 2 bar scene with a 4 bar, the 2bar scene would play through twice before moving on. this can't be changed, you have to make it a 4bar scene with the second half empty if you want it to stop playing
personally i would have preferred if the shorter scenes that end first were silent until the longest scene finished.
good changes:
sped up my writing with drum beats, cuz it feels more like a drum kit kinda mpc thing which is nice (i'm a drummer) the shift functions on all the pads are nice -- things like quantize, quantize 50% (this is a great quick-to-use feature to retain your groove's feel but tighten it up a bit) (sometimes i tap it twice for a 75% quant
) Split function --> copies the loop you've written to a new empty scene, which you can then edit freely to create a variation on the first loop
I like the sample browser and many of the included sounds
Internal resample feature is really fuckin cool ... You can throw maschine effects (or your own plugins as well) and fine tune a couple of samples for layering, and then bang -- record them straight onto a new pad. New sound. (note -- i haven't figured out how to rename, save, and move those sounds i resample in Maschine. They come up with a weird cryptic filename like la3mb8f87h4r3a63a67. I would have to actually track it's output and save that sound from within my daw.... ehhh kinda sucks but still a great feature overall)
The sequencer Makes arranging based on loop/variation really intuitive
The sample editor is great for looping, cropping, otherwise altering a sample . for this reason i love this sampler for tossing resampled melodic content in. Like when i build orchestral hits, stabs, and sometimes melody loops, pads, etc. I love to just toss them into maschine to sequence them. keeps more sequencing on one screen, too, so i can just line up the scenes for each sample group
Recording automation is a breeze but is sometimes done by accident -- its basically done by turning any knob (just about every single param is automatable), but during playback and on the outer rim of the knob. automation is not as easy to edit after recording it, but its not so bad.
Filters are pretty good. Overall architecture of signal routing is good.
if i think of any other noteworthy stuff, i'll drop by or pm u. I use the shit out of this thing, i'll tell u that
I'm thinking of buying a few instructional dvd's, how quick have you got the hang of the sx man?