Easy Arps and Chord Progressions with Maschine and Sundog

In this tutorial, we create easy arpeggiated patterns and chord progressions with Maschine and the Sundog scale studio.

This tutorial covers how to create easy arpeggiated patterns and chord progressions with Maschine and the Sundog scale studio, using the sound we created in last week’s tutorial.

Whether or not you are strong with music theory yet, Sundog makes it very easy to move beyond the limitations of Maschine’s piano roll for melodic sequencing. First, we look at setting up an IAC bus for Mac users, but there are excellent setup tutorials on feelyoursound.com for all platforms.

In Sundog, we choose C minor as our key and scale. Then, we move to the chords view and choose a very simple pattern before dragging its MIDI over to Maschine, where we pitch certain notes up or down an octave to improve voiceleading. Then we click “Use Chords” before we explore the arpeggiator, which now follows those chords. Once we’ve recorded a sequence, just by holding down the first key, we can drag the arpeggiated MIDI pattern over as well. Sundog allows us to quickly change the scale we are using, so choosing a raga from the drop-down menu, we can drag MIDI from either the arp or chord sequence which now follow our new scale.

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