Review of Native Instruments Maschine

I recently became the proud owner of a new Toy. The Native Instruments Maschine. I have to say I have used a lot of drum machines, and midi control drum pads, but this by far is one of my favorites. The sounds are absolutely stunning, the effects included are fantastic, and the ease of use of finding the perfect sound is probably one of the best features. I really enjoy how easy it is to load up a kit and sequence some beats together. You have lots of options on how you want to sequence. You can choose how involved you want your computer to be in the process. That sounds funny I guess but in all reality you can control 100% of the creative process directly on the Maschine or you can utilize the sequencing engine on the computer. Its up to you. You can also link directly to another music source such as a hard drive. Thats great for me as I have an external drive with around 125gb worth of various sounds, samples, loops and accessing some of these for sound creation is absolutely perfect! All in all one of my other favorite features on the Maschine is how all the pads light up. Its really quite useful in darker rooms and it looks cool from a stage when the crowd is looking on! If your doing hip hop, electro or whatever else I have to say that I’d choose the Maschine hands down over an MPC1000 any day. It offers so much more than the MPC does especially with the 5GB of included royalty free sound kit. Its just a great all around tool to get the foundation of your beat put together. I put it on the must have DJ TRENDS of 2009.