I’ve been spending quite a bit of time considering this. I’m looking for something that will allow me to ditch the laptop when playing live shows, but that is also useful in my hybrid hardware/software studio setup. Given that I work in my studio 99% of the time vs 1% of the time playing live shows, the ability of any tool to be an asset in the studio is naturally very important.

I actually bought a 1010music blackbox with the thought that this would be my bridge for computer-less live shows, but I just don’t use it in the studio as I have other tools that are far more effective than it (I’ll immediately reach for the digitakt instead of the Blackbox). I haven’t even had a live show since I bought the Blackbox a year ago so it’s basically been useless, and I’m suspecting that it might be fairly limited in a ‘ableton live replacement’ during a live show.

As far as live shows go, since I got into hardware my usual approach was using Ableton Live to play stems from released tracks, and effectively jam over the top of those with hardware, occasionally using some effects in Ableton.

From what I can tell the Akai Force would be a better option for Live shows, but the Maschine+ might actually be better suited to the studio.

The Force would probably win for live shows simply because it’s got that whole scene launching workflow that I’m accustomed to from Ableton Live, plus, crucially, it now offers disk streaming, which the Maschine+ does not. Under my Dronal moniker I’d like the option to play fairly long form field recordings as backing tracks, as well as potentially using some long form slowly modulating pad stems and then jamming over the top of these.

But I think the Maschine+ would win out in the studio primarily because it would allow me to load the Maschine VST into Studio One and it would run in controller mode and give me separate outputs directly into Studio One - so it would be easy to integrate into my current workflow. Unless I’m mistaken, there’s nothing in the Force that would work in this way - I’d need to export wavs from the force and import them into Studio One.

But I’m just not sure that the Maschine+ would give me as good a live performance capability.