The past year has seen Native Instruments make headlines on several occasions for reasons other than their products, with controversies over mass redundancies, a later-reversed decision to discontinue a host of older products, criticisms of how the company handled internal racism and, most recently, a change of management at the top.
NI now seem to be bringing focus back to the gear itself, with a string of big announcements capped off by the long-awaited arrival of a fully standalone Maschine. NI launched the first iteration of their controller-centric beatmaking system back in 2009, at a time when standalone samplers and MPCs had fallen out of fashion in favour of laptop-powered systems. In the past decade though, things have swung back the other way somewhat; the likes of Akai’s MPC Live and Pioneer’s SP-16 have brought beatmaking back out of the box, and there have been calls from a growing portion of the Maschine user base for it to follow suit.