I managed to get a really good deal on a Maschine MK1, and am trying to figure out my music budget and production goals for 2017.
Mostly what I am looking for is improved workflow and increasing the speed of creation and quality of my music. I am leaning towards the Jam, but I am not sure.
My DAW is Bitwig Studio, and I plan on staying with it, but I also feel like it would be of benefit to learn Ableton at some point. I certainly would play around with the Intro version that comes with Push.
Thankfully both of the devices are supported by BWS. However NI actually created the DAW integration scripts for it, whereas the scripts supporting Push on BWS were created by the community. NI is using BWS as the DAW in all of its promotional material for Jam, and that intrigues me.
On fun factor, they are mostly tied.
Professionally speaking, they also are a bit tied. Visually, Push looks like a more serious production tool, more like a Maschine Studio level piece of gear. However, Jam comes with Komplete Select, and that provides me a logical upgrade path to buy the full version whenever they have their annual half price upgrade sale.
The Jam and MK1 will work just fine in tandem with Maschine right out of the box. But arguably the Push plus MK1 working in tandem could be just as efficient together.
The Push seems to be a lot more open to hacking and experimenting, whereas NI stuff seems pretty locked down and proprietary to their specific way of doing things. I quite enjoy disrupting the status quo and going off-script, so open hardware is a huge plus for Push.
I also am not sure if I really need to go down the Komplete path considering that I can rent EWQL and that seems like more than enough variety of sounds to find what I need, especially since I already own a pretty well-rounded library of synth plugins. However, a lot of interesting sample-based libraries require the full version of Kontakt, and Reaktor seems like something I would never get bored with.
Ultimately, I have had a lot of trouble sticking to anything long-term, yet I seem to never run out of passion for creating music. I am currently on disability and would like to be self-sufficient again, but it has been really difficult for me to focus on business ideas. Music seems like a pretty tough industry to break into, but I have the luxury of having no obligations to prevent me from pursuing it.
My other thought is to be happy with what I already have and spend my 2017 music budget on hardware gear, like the DrumBrute and a couple Volcas. Then I am not staring at my computer screen as much. I could cut myself some slack and save the career goals for 2018. As much as I enjoy having so many options at my fingertips, I have often found it more fulfilling and easier to be really creative by setting up arbitrary constraints rather than having so many options that I end up losing my focus to information overload.
Decisions, decisions...
/firstworldproblems
Submitted December 21, 2016 at 07:05AM by SoundGoddess https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/comments/5jj5vg/trying_to_decide_between_a_maschine_jam_and_a/?utm_source=ifttt