Ableton Forum

I am about to sell my maschine. I simply hate it in every kind of way.

Except for the drum synth.

Does Live Suite have something similar featured? Sofar I haven't found anything. Also NI Komplete doesn't offer the same flexible way of drum tweaking (drumlab)

I am open for suggestions. Might eventually just keep the maschine for this purpose.

Live has m4l drum synths but in my opinion they do not hold a candle to the Maschine ones.

you should keep maschine for the drum synth .it's probably one of the more handy ones .
learn on you tube how to use live Tools and synths and you will decide after .

turbomartin wrote:I am about to sell my maschine. I simply hate it in every kind of way.

Except for the drum synth.

Well, you're not alone in not liking Maschine, especially how to work it with Live. I use Fxpansion Tremor and Softube Heartbeat. The latter can be controlled quite a bit from Maschine and I've even considered getting one for that.

turbomartin wrote:I am about to sell my maschine. I simply hate it in every kind of way.

If you decide to sell it please give me an offer.

Stromkraft wrote:

turbomartin wrote:I am about to sell my maschine. I simply hate it in every kind of way.

If you decide to sell it please give me an offer.

Alright, will do.. Just trying to find out a decent alternative at the moment. Your suggestions look pretty great.

I am using the Kick 2 pluging (sonic academy), which does one very specific thing very well, and is easy/fun to use.

Maybe I should settle for NI Drumlab (komplete), which does all percussive elements actually fine. They can't be tuned in the VST itself tho (you can fiddle the tuning knob, but no indication on what key it is).

Still open for suggestions on this

yur2die4 wrote:Live has m4l drum synths but in my opinion they do not hold a candle to the Maschine ones.

Forgot about those.. I am familiar with them, but they sound extremely thin/unnatural (or I am seriously lacking the skills for it, which is also very likely). Deleted it, and wasn't planning on using it ever again.

kolta wrote:you should keep maschine for the drum synth .it's probably one of the more handy ones .
learn on you tube how to use live Tools and synths and you will decide after .

I can appreciate this approach. However, if there is a steep learning curve involved, I don't know if I want to use it.

This might sound very lazy, but for the fundamentals of a track, I want to build it in seconds without thinking at all.

Or how do the pro's do this? They're not browsing sample libraries all day, am I wrong?

turbomartin wrote: This might sound very lazy, but for the fundamentals of a track, I want to build it in seconds without thinking at all.

I must say that getting a great sound in Heartbeat is way faster than in Tremor, though the latter is very versatile and flexible Heartbeat do make use of samples mixed with the synth.

I did forget to also mention Operator and the Designer Drums collection for instance. While I keep telling myself I can do these FM-oriented Drum sounds better in another of my FM-capable synths the basic sounds are actually quite good and useful, if in need of some processing, but that just makes these more moldable.

I much prefer to make sounds from scratch with synthesis, simply because most samples are crap to my ears. Far from all of course, but I crave control. I do like Sampler for drum sample playback, but there's still a lot of prep work. Samples do have their place. I just want to make music.

Also take a look at Microtonic.

These Designer Drums already caught my attention a little while ago. They sound great. It is difficult to tweak them, cause for some reason it is very easy to make operator sound terrible.

Will definitely check out heartbeat and microtonic.

turbomartin wrote:These Designer Drums already caught my attention a little while ago. They sound great. It is difficult to tweak them, cause for some reason it is very easy to make operator sound terrible. .

I think you need to know FM sound design well in order to get anywhere — Most of the great sounds in Designer Drums are FM I think — and Operator from default doesn't sound good to me, so you need some talent, a visionary mind and likely experience from other synths suited for drums/percussion to get it right.
Actually synthetic drum sounds in general are hard to get really right on most synths. They don't all sound alike either, theory aside. That's a good thing though.

I use a drumrack and throw a few sylenth1 vst's with different drumsounds in a the slots. There you have it, one crazy synth drumcomputer.

JAMM wrote:I use a drumrack and throw a few sylenth1 vst's with different drumsounds in a the slots. There you have it, one crazy synth drumcomputer.

Yeah, that's how you do it. Mix any sounds into your own kits exactly like you want it.

Yeah me too!!! MAschine has been pissing me off to no extent, ALWAYS "no plug in found". always looses it's directories or even if you show it it still looses them anyways, maschine software is garbage. I spent alot of $ on that piece of crap! I just wish there was a controller comparable. The drum synth in MAschine is cool though , as far drums in Live, I use a drumrack. I also use Spectrasonics Stylus rmx, tho it's a bit ancient it still has good drum sounds and can be altered with filters, effects, etc.