As production software became increasingly powerful throughout the ’90s and ’00s, hardware samplers and sequencers began to look obsolete. Why would anyone want to work with a limited and expensive piece of equipment when soft samplers offered vastly superior sampling capacity, increased polyphony and total recall of projects? By 2010, production hardware appeared to be following the paradigm popularised by Maschine – bespoke controllers designed to work in tandem with powerful software.