You all know I’ve been using Maschine for a while, and one question I get quite a bit is how to lay out a song using scenes.

It’s a little different than traditional song mode in a beat machine…

where you just put a pattern in a list and tell it how many times to loop.

But once you understand it…

you’ll be making songs very quickly.

Here are some things to remember about scenes, patterns, and tracks in Maschine:

• a scene is pretty much a “snapshot” that holds the state of the current pattern for each group
• There are 8 groups, each can have 64 different patterns
• Each scene can only hold up to 8 patterns, 1 for each group
• Each pattern in a group can hold 16 tracks or “sounds”
• a scene will play as long as the longest pattern in the scene, smaller patterns will repeat to match the lenght of the longest pattern
• patterns are linked across scenes, if you change a pattern in one scene, it changes in others, it’s best to use different patterns to make changes
• renaming the scenes can help you keep track and have a nice overview of your song

I hope this helps you out, if you have any questions feel free to ask as usual. Maschine is very powerful and capable of full productions, sometimes it just takes a little help to understand the best workflow for doing so.

This is by no means the only way to use Maschine, I’ve just found that this way works for a lot of folks used to building songs with patterns, and working on sections.

With all the scenes and patterns it’s definitely very flexible for live use and performance, but that’s not something I do so I wouldn’t be the best person to show you how to set that up lol.