If you’re using Native Instruments Maschine and Ableton Live, you may have struggled with a common question: what’s the best way to integrate the two?
Or, put another way, how can you make the most of Maschines’ intuitive hands-on hardware, and maximize the sequencing and arrangement features of Live?
I’ve been around the block on this question more than a few times and spent hours testing and revising different scenarios. In the end, I’ve ended up with what I think is the best way to integrate the two, leaving maximum flexibility and accommodating different workflows.
The answer, for me, is a template that routes each of Maschines’ 8 groups to 8 individual tracks in Ableton Live.
For maximum flexibility, the Ableton Live tracks are set up as external instruments, meaning you can not only route & record audio from each Maschine group into the individual Ableton tracks, but you can also record MIDI output from Maschine if you wish.
So, if you like to take advantage of Ableton’s excellent sequencing, mixing and processing features and essentially use Maschine as your sampler, this works well.
OR, if you are one who prefers to do all of your sequencing, mixing & processing work inside of Maschine you can. A nice advantage is that you can still use some of Live’s proprietary effects racks, MIDI effects etc by placing them on the relevant Ableton tracks.
NOTES:
*The first Maschine group in the template is for drums. Utilize Maschines’ dedicated mixer to pan and mix levels, and then bring the audio into Ableton as summed audio.
**When changing the sample on any Maschine pad don’t hit “reset”! It will also clear the routing. Instead, just drag a new sample onto any pad to replace it.
***This template requires Ableton Live 9 or later and Maschine 2.7.8 or later.
****Feel free to update the name of each group in the template if you wish. I’ve just named them in a way that works for me.
Download the Ableton with Maschine Template and enjoy!
16-pads | Underground Music Production & Culture. 
Hi! This sounds interesting, but sadly it crashes my Ableton Live 10 when I try to load the projectfile.
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That’s super strange, Sten. What version of Maschine are you using in your session. I’m using the most recent free upgrade to 2.7. Send me your email, I think I have one I built for Live 10 for personal use. I’ll shoot that over to you and see if you have better luck.
I’ve tried the template on various machines on my end and no issues, so I’m thinking it probably has to do with your version of Maschine.
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I have Maschine v.2.7.7 and Ableton Live Suite v.10.0.3, I tried opening just the Maschine file and it gave me “error loading file”. Do you use Maschine v.2.7.8?
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Yes, it’s 2.7.8. That will be the issue. I’ve updated the blog post notes to make this clear. Thanks for the feedback.
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Hi,
Thanks for the template. I have tried following so many tutorials but this is the closest i have come to solving my problem.
The template loads into ableton 11, however the pads on maschine hardware are triggering multiple groups at once making it impossible to record what i want. I followed the instructions making sure i did not overwrite the your pre assigned routing but there still seems to be some sort of clash.
Can I please request another template or tutorial on how to do this, I really want to be able to record into a midi track from maschine VST using maschine mk2 into ableton live scenes.
Thanks
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Hi, Manny. Sorry for the delayed reply. When you say “the pads on maschine hardware are triggering multiple groups at once making it impossible to record what i want” are you saying that the Maschine pads are triggering multiple Ableton groups at once? If so, my first guess is that you have the external instruments for each group in Ableton set to receive on the same MIDI channel. For each of your Maschime groups, they should be set to transmit on a unique channel (it’s been a while since I used the template, but I think I set the 8 Maschine groups to transmit on MIDI channels 1-8). Make sure each of the corresponding Ableton tracks has it’s external instrument set to receive on the right channel. Let me know if this helps.
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