Today is day 8 of The Month of Maschine 2013. In today’s video we will be adjusting the grid size of a pattern.

Because Maschine does not feature a typical audio timeline, it relies on the grid more than most DAWs. When you create patterns in step or control mode, even if they are not quantized, those beats will be placed somewhere on the grid. For that reason, it is important to know how to manipulate the grid. By default, the grid is set to 1/16th notes. That means every bar will be divided into 16 slices. There are 16 pads on the Maschine controller, so by default there is 1 pad for every step in the bar.

To change the grid, hold the [GRID] button and select what note length using the pads or the left and right arrow buttons in the transport controls section and the to the left of the LCDs. You can also change the grid size in the software using the dropdown menu at the bottom of the arrangement section underneath the sound slots. There are 16 grid settings ranging from 1 whole bar to 1/128th notes and triplet variables for all but the smallest note length. You can also turn the grid off. When you change the grid size, the notes that you have on the grid will not change in length. They will just take up more or less space on the grid.

Depending on what grid size you choose to use, sequencing patterns in step mode on the controller may work differently. For example, if you use a grid smaller than 1/16, there will be more than 16 notes per bar. This means that you will need to use buttons 7 and 8 to select which 16 note region you’re sequencing at a time. The opposite is true for a grid size that is larger than 1/16. In this case, you will be using fewer than 16 pads. In the case of ?, you will use only the first 8 pads on the controller.