NI Maschine Tips: Record Mutes and Solos

Last Updated on March 29, 2017 by IDS Team



Let’s be honest. As much as we longtime Maschine users complain about its shortcomings, it’s still the first tool we reach for whenever we want to lay down a quick idea, do sound design or even make a complete song. We know that if you experiment in Maschine long enough, you’ll eventually discover something it can do that you never thought was possible. In this series of articles I show best work-arounds I’ve found through experimentation and forum lurking. Hope you enjoy and use them on your next masterpiece.

Maschine – Mutes and Solos Automation With a Free Plugin

Maschine’s 2.6 update brought among other features, Lock Snapshots. Now we can mute and solo our patterns and save them as a snapshot to be triggered at a later time. The drawback is that these snapshots can’t yet be recorded inside Machine. Enter Muteomatic by Sound Radix. Muteomatic is a “plug-in that automates the activation of a talkback or listen microphone channel according to your DAW’s transport state”. I saw this and immediately thought…aha, recordable mutes and solos in Maschine! Here’s how I got it working.

After installation:



  1. Add a new group.
  2. Drag and drop Muteomatic to the first pad of the new group.
  3. Name the group “Mutes/Solos” if you like.
  4. Give the pad the same name as the instrument or sound you want to automate.
  5. Hit the Channel button on your controller or in the software.
  6. Choose the instrument you want to automate and send the audio output of that pad to your instance of Muteomatic.
  7. Go to the instance of Muteomatic and play with the “DrngPlybck” knob.
  8. Finally, touch and hold AUTO on your Maschine hardware and record your automation.

By default, Muteomatic loads in Mute mode so you won’t hear any sound until you turn the DrngPlybck knob up a little to let the audio pass through. This might seem to be a long-winded process, but remember you can save this as a Group and have it ready anytime you want to record your mutes and solos. Muteomatic is really light on CPU usage. The solo feature works in the opposite way, meaning that you would route every other instrument you want to mute to one instance of Muteomatic. Thus, leaving the instruments or sounds not routed to that instance of Muteomatic alone and in a soloed state in theory.

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