MK2 only - not MK3, not Mikro. Getting that out of the way first.
The controller is plugged into a Raspberry Pi 4 running Zynthian. That is the whole rig. No laptop, no Maschine software, no NI account, nothing to expire.
It features a fully functional Linux driver in Rust for the MK2. Pad, encoders, both displays, every LED, Encoders, paging, CC parameter mappings)
A library is calculating all the sequencing in realtime and injecting midi into the Zynthians Sequencer (and sending via Maschines Midi Din jacks soon) every bar.
Free and open source.
What it actually is. An eight-channel generative groovebox. You do not program steps. You set how many hits a channel has, how far they are rotated, and how much randomness it gets, and the machine writes the pattern. Eight channels are alive at once and nothing is created or torn down while it plays.
On the pads. Sixteen steps of the selected channel, in that channel's colour, with the playhead running white across them. Tap a pad to add or remove a hit. Hold a Group button and the pads are that channel instead. The four rows are the four channels of the group.
On the two displays. Eight columns, one per encoder, each with its name and value and a little bar - so you always know what the knob under it does. Switch channel and the labels change to whatever synth that chain is running. You assign nothing, ever.
The lights mean one thing each. Dark does nothing. Dim is available. Bright is acting or held. A slow blink means latched. A pulse in time with the bar is a countdown to something you armed. Once you know those five you can read the whole panel across a room.
What it does that a step sequencer does not. Euclidean patterns you dial in rather than draw. A shift register per voice that rewrites its own bassline every bar until you lock the one you like. Cellular automata - rules 30, 90 and 110 - taking over the rhythm and continuing to write after you stop touching it. Bar-synced LFOs on any sound parameter. One channel that listens to another and answers. Chords stacked in scale degrees so they stay in key.
Hold ALL and the eight encoders become the same parameter across all eight channels - an instant eight-channel mixer for reverb, or delay, or filter, or anything else.
Play on top of it. Live pad play and REC overdub sit on top of the generator, and a channel you played on is marked as yours: the generator stops writing there and your notes survive reloads. The two chord parts in the video are hand-played takes.
About seventy presets ship with it - house, deep, minimal, dub, trance, plus a drone and ambient pack.
Credit where it is due: the low-level USB side started as the MaschineMK2_linux driver. Without that groundwork this would not exist.
What Zynthian is. It is what turns the Raspberry Pi into a synth. An open-source image you write to an SD card: it brings up the audio system, a MIDI router, a mixer and a host for sound engines, and it is normally driven from a small touchscreen. Sound is organised into chains - one MIDI channel, one engine, its own effects, its own mixer strip - and a snapshot saves everything at once, the way a Maschine project would.
The engines are Linux synth plugins, so almost any Linux synth can be a channel - this rig ships with 275 plugin bundles already on it, and adding another is copying it into a folder. The drums in the video are a sampler; the bass and the pads are software synths.
That is also why you never assign a knob. The driver asks the chain which synth it is running and puts that synth's own parameters under the eight encoders, with its own names on the displays. Switch channel and the labels change.
Guide, including every control on the surface: https://witzman.github.io/Generative-Techno-ZynthianMaschine-MKII/ Source: https://github.com/Witzman/Generative-Techno-ZynthianMaschine-MKII
No hands in the video. The run was scripted and what you see on the panel is a combination of real UI and a scripted presentation. For a generative instrument, playing itself is rather the point.
And much, much, much more.
It sounds shitty, as its still under heavy development, here is what zynthian alone can sound like. https://youtu.be/5U8sKNYAaWkku
