Late at night, after I finish work for the day and the family has fallen asleep, one of the things I like to do is to spend some time just browsing all the samples in the Maschine library. I usually have some little idea of a sound or atmosphere that I want to try and create, and as I find samples and sounds that I like I add them to groups to build some ad-hoc kits. If I end up with something I like, I usually save it as a custom group so that I can load it up later and actually play with it. I’ve found this to be incredible inspirational so I thought I’d go over my workflow for doing this:

[Pictures coming soon]

1. Select a new, empty group to load a kit into.
2. Double click a kit in the library browser to load it into the selected group.
3. Listen to the pre-defines pattern(s) to get a feel for what the kit sounds like
4. Listen through the individual samples in the kit by playing around with the pads. If you have a keyboard controller set up try a few different pitches for each sample.
5. Drags the ones you like into a new group by grabbing the sample in the sound bank list on the left side of the pattern editor and dragging it to a new empty group in the group list on the left side of the Scene editor.
6. Rename the Group that you’ve started to add sample to to make it easier to identify.
7. Right click the group when you’re done with it and choose ‘Save as’ from the pop-up menu.

This way you’ll soon have your own library of custom ‘kits’ to play around with.

[Applies to Maschine 1.7]