I may Have Found A Way To Extend Orion Indefinitely

[bones]

Sik and I each bought a Maschine Mikro this week and the Maschine software looks like it could be the perfect way to keep using Orion whilst staying up to date with all the latest cool stuff or just to shake up your workflow here and there. It's early days but when I load one of the projects that comes with Maschine, it plays back in sync with Orion, in Pattern and Song modes, without having to put anything into the Playlist.

Maschine is kind of interesting. It's like having a DAW within a DAW within a DAW. When you run it inside Orion, you add yet another layer to it but you can do it with just one Mixer channel because all the stuff you'd normally take care of in the mixer can be taken care of deeper down into the layers. Normally I'd think that was just overcomplicating things that I prefer to keep simple but in this case it's really just moving the complexity into easy to work with layers. That makes each part of the process feel less complicated, by putting the complexity where it makes the most sense. e.g. If you want to add effects to your kick drum, you do it directly onto the kick in Maschine, instead of in the mixer. But if you prefer to do it in the Mixer, you just route it to a separate out and it gets its own Mixer channel in Orion, just like DrumRack. Because the Maschine UI is there in Orion, editing patterns and arrangements in Maschine is just as easy as doing it in Orion. That means working with Maschine in Orion is just as easy as doing it all in Orion itself. IN fact, it gives you a few workarounds that might make it even easier than doing everything in Orion. e.g. Being able to see/tweak an instrument UI while the piano roll is open.

For us, I can see Maschine replacing Sampler, DrumRack and the other drum synths we use in Orion, simply because of the sound quality on offer. The value for money is unbelievable because we got more than 15GB of the highest quality samples I've ever used plus plenty of NI plugins, including Massive, as well as the Maschine software, which could totally replace Orion if you were inclined to want to do that, and the hardware controller that makes it so easy to work with. All for US$299 - it's a crazy good deal and it all seems to work perfectly with Orion 64 bit.

[Kriminal]

You use it in Orion?

[funky koval]

It seems kind of redundant. I mean running maschine in a more traditional linear sequencer like Cubase or Reaper, that I can see. Whatever floats your boat.

[bones]

It depends what matters to you. To me, Cubase and Maschine are far too similar and the only advantage I see using the two together is Maschine giving you a pattern based workflow. But as actual sequencing is about 10% of making a song, it's not terribly relevant in the overall scheme of things. OTOH, Orion has a proper mixer, a completely different workflow and, most importantly, it has Wasp 5.

In the end, that's what killed Bitwig for me - no Wasp. We use it in literally every song we've written in the last 20 years, sometimes 4 or 5 instances of it. Some of our best work is all Wasp and drums. Not having it leaves way too big a hole for us to be able to fill. I've tried to use DUNE 2 instead but DUNE is way too clean, you can't get that nastiness that Wasp does without trying.

Where it will get interesting, is to see if Orion's mixer really matters enough that I won't want to do more than just drums in Maschine. It's a great way to get comfortable with a different paradigm so that I can decide whether my 20 years of prejudice against the mainstream sequencers has been valid or completely ridiculous. (It's never been just about a pattern based workflow for me.)

You use it in Orion?

That's the aim, yes. It's something we'll work up to and over time we might expand what we do with it, as approriate. For starters we'll use it for drums, which seems like huge overkill in some ways but that's what the product is mostly about and the CPU penalty is very small, about the same as Battery. It's also handy to be able to fire up Maschine standalone and work with it and the controller to get some stuff happening, before transferring it to Orion when it's time to get serious. It will expand our possibilities, which is what we're looking for, without necessarily complicating our workflow at any specific point in the process. Even the Mikro hardware is very good.

It started with us realising that we're still using the same drum sounds we used on our first album in 2003, and we still sequence them in the same way, so we wanted to shake things up in that department. Initially we were looking at Battery, which is free this month if you buy two Expansions, but while it's an amazing drum machine, and it works with all the Maschine sample content, you have to sequence your drums in the piano roll, which is tedious in the extreme, especially when you can't see which note is which drum sound (the RNG thing doesn't work with Battery).

What it did, though, was really show up how far behind our drums are. Just the content that downloads with the Battery demo is light years ahead of the rubbish we've been working with. All our kick drums, for example, are things I rendered out of Fruityloops when we first switched from that to Orion, except one, which is even older (from my Korg Trinity) and our hi-hats are from Hammerhead, which was the first virtual instrument I think I ever installed, back in the area of beige boxes and CRT monitors.

[Kriminal]

If you are using it in Orion, how will that keep Orion going indefinitely? Just use Orion....?
What did i miss?

[bones]

I'm not worried about Orion itself but as more plugins become available that don't work in Orion, and we all know they'll never get fixed, we can use Maschine to run them. If they don't work in Maschine, we can hassle NI or the plugin vendor to fix it, whereas no-one is going to supply a fix for a dead host. e.g. Arturia Analog Lab 3 crashes Orion when you close a project that uses it but Maschine seems to handle it just fine. Waves plugins, which have never worked in Orion, also work fine in Maschine (and are ridiculously cheap at the moment).

[funky koval]

So essentially it comes down to Orion being mostly just a mixer for you. Interesting. As for the Wasp, Rich should just make a standalone version of the one included in 8.6 and sell it for a few $.

[ThehakkeMadman]

We want WASP as a VST!

[Kriminal]

Shouldnt be too hard, it already is, just tied to an Orion wrapper.

On the other hand, im not sure Rich would release something that doesnt reach his modern quality standards.

Even as an unsupported windows only freebie it may take more time than he has available.

[bones]

Yeah, it would solve a lot of our problems, that's for sure, but I can't see why Rich would do it, except to be charitable to his loyal users.

So essentially it comes down to Orion being mostly just a mixer for you. Interesting. As for the Wasp, Rich should just make a standalone version of the one included in 8.6 and sell it for a few $.

It depends. Initially we'll still do most things in Orion and just use Maschine for drums but if we can find other things to use it for, and it makes sense to do so, we'll do those things in Maschine. The way it looks at the moment, the NI plugins we have seem to work better in Maschine but with everything else it's at least as easy to keep doing it in Orion.

[Tux]

I think the time is near when another developer will come out with an Orion like DAW. I know the pattern based thing isn't so important to Bones but there's a lot of people missing that feature and Orion was the last DAW that was centred around this concept.

I've just posted on KVR on yet another thread created by someone bemoaning the lack of pattern based DAW's and I say here what I said there, I'll just keep on using Orion until the niche is filled by someone else. There's definitely a market for a pattern based DAW as the regular threads on KVR will attest.