Using Maschine expansions without Maschine
If you’ve bought some version of Komplete, you’ll probably see a ton of Maschine expansions included:
But what if you don’t actually have Maschine and its accompanying software?
Drum Kits
These are easy. Just navigate to the directory where the expansion pack was installed:
Browse into the “Sounds” directory, and then look inside the “Battery Kits” directory.
You can load these kits in Battery directly (just drag and drop one onto Battery’s trigger pads) or search for them in Battery’s kit database.
Instruments
The .wav files for all the instruments are available inside the expansion folder, but NI seems to intentionally withhold Kontakt patches combining these samples, as if they’re trying to force you to buy Maschine in order to use content you’ve already paid for.
Luckily, it’s not hard to create a quick Kontakt patch yourself:
Finding the samples
From the installation directory of the expansion, navigate into the “Samples” directory. Inside, there should be another directory called “Instruments”. Step in there, and you’ll see a list of playable instruments or instrument categories inside the sample pack. Browse down until you get to a folder containing some .wav files:
We’ll combine these samples into a single Kontakt patch
Creating a Kontakt Instrument
Select all the .wav files and drag&drop them into the Kontakt Window:
You now have a single Kontakt patch for all the samples. Unfortunately, the samples are not mapped to their correct keys. Let’s fix that:
Click on the edit icon:
Then on “Mapping Editor”.
From the Edit Menu, click “Select All Zones”:
All zones will not be highlighted in yellow. From that same Edit menu, select “Auto map - Setup”:
The mapping dialog will appear showing a sample file name. Kontakt will recognize that the file contains a note name (A0) in this case, and will propose to use that note name as the sample root:
In other words, you shouldn’t need to change anything in this dialog. Just click “Apply”.
Next, with all zones selected, open the Edit menu, and choose “Auto-spread key ranges via root keys”:
Now, try playing your instrument. If should play quite well.
Finally, rename the instrument to something meaningful:
Now, save your instrument for easy reuse.
Bonus: Maschine Instruments with Halion
If you own Halion, the workflow to import samples is much simpler than with Kontakt. Starting with an empty slot rack, simply Drag&Drop all the samples together onto the slot rack:
Click OK in the Import Samples dialog. Just like Kontakt, it figures things out on its own.
That’s it! You can now play your instrument. You can save your instrument for reuse, but given how easy it is to import samples into Halion, why bother?
