Vintage King, a U.S. based retailer just dropped a bombshell after leaking details on NI’s all new standalone groovebox, Maschine+.
Even before Native Instrument’s had a chance to post their own news and get hyped about it, another music gear retailer chucked the company under a bus by publishing a photo of its all-new Maschine+ last week. In light of the last few days, however, the company made a public announcement that’s given us the full overview of its next generation groovebox performance device and everything we’ll all quickly come to love about it.
There were talks and rumours for a while, but now we finally get to know what this powerful little interface is able to do for your productions. It features an Atom quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage to save all of your mixes and edits — this can be upgraded to accomodate a terabyte if needed. There are twin USB ports at the back of the unit, allowing you to hook up a compatible MIDI keyboard, plus an I/O connection. It’s also WiFi compatible and doesn’t require any need for a laptop or desktop to get going.
The most beautiful aspect is the fact you can blend your own samples with an entire database of sounds using Native Instruments Expansions. Just hook up your SD or USB and get all of your sounds jamming in one convenient place. The Expansions application comes preloaded with Solar Breeze, Deep Matter, Lilac Glare, Velvet Lounge, and True School and a ton of sounds from the highly-acclaimed KOMPLETE series. You’ll be able to get your hands on 70 of these Expansions come the official launch of Maschine+.
The swanky interface gives you all of the buttons, bells, and whistles to smash a killer performance anywhere you are with hands-on precision. Whatever elements, effects, textures, or instruments you want to shine in your projects can all be manipulated with the turn of a knob, giving you the same epic workflow capabilities as its predecessors.
What’s worth noting is that you won’t be able to load up any third-party plugins or content with the Maschine+; this feature is likely to come in later. You still get plenty to toy with, though, most notably the 128 MIDI presets NI have chucked in. You can easily transfer your projects from the hardware to your comp using the controller on its own. Also, the unit is fully mappable and syncs with Ableton Link if you ever get around to taking this baby on stage with you.
It’s been in the works since 2014, and needless to say we are very excited for the day when NI officially releases this first-of-its-kind piece of standalone gear. We’ve got no doubt it will be worth the wait for all its future users.
