iMASCHINE – This $5 app turns your iPhone into a music production studio

Native Instruments is doing it again, this time expanding its line of groove-creation hardware but taking a software approach. For those of you unfamiliar, Maschine has been the Native Instruments go-to standard for music creation for the past couple of years. The company recently introduced Maschine Mikro as a physically-smaller (yet still incredibly powerful) version of the original. This time, it’s all about iPhone.

iMaschine is a $5 application, available now in the App Store, that brings the looping, sampling and effects power of Maschine to your iPhone. It’s insanely packed with abilities, and appears to work quite well from the demo videos that we’ve seen thus far.

• 16 pads for playing the included drums and one-shot samples
• Library includes 10 projects, 25 kits and over 400 individual samples (100 MB of WAV sounds)
• Pad sampling mode: record your own one-shot sample through your iOS device’s built-in microphone
• Keyboard mode with two manuals for playing chords, bass and melodies
• Note repeat function with 4th, 8th, 16th, 16th triplets, 32th for keyboard and drum pad mode
• Audio recorder mode lets you record an audio (e.g. vocal) track through your iOS device’s built-in microphone
• Assign any of the 4 groups to pad, keyboard or audio recorder mode (e.g. use it as pocket 4-track recorder)
• Mixer page includes two send effects with Delay, Flanger, Chorus, LoFi, HP, BP and LP filters
• The live-mode sequencer automatically detects the recorded loop length
• Finished loop can be exported with one touch as an audio file or uploaded to SoundCloud
• Project (including samples) can be exported to MASCHINE for finalizing in your studio environment
• Import your own 44.1 kHz 16-bit WAV samples
• Additional drum kits and instrument sounds can be easily purchased through the in-app store

We haven’t yet had a chance to play with iMaschine, but we will soon. Once we do, we’ll get a full review up of the app. For now, I’ve heard from many of my loyal DJ and production friends that they’ve been waiting to play with the app, so we wanted to make sure to get the word out.

Check out the demo video below, and then let us know your thoughts in the comments.

A fan of the audio geek stuff? Check out our review of the Traktor Kontrol S4, and the announcement of the Kontrol S2.