Native Instruments Maschine Mikro MK3

Pretty solid piece of gear for the price. The bundled maschine software is also alright, but a lot less useful and a bit annoying without the screen of the maschine mk3 which makes it difficult to chop samples. I recommend you use Simpler/FL alternative. I sometimes use it to record drum loops but most of the time I just use the midi mode on the Mikro MK3 and the drum rack in Ableton.

The pads are meh - they have some registering issues at times. Sometimes they register double notes at very hard or too little pressure. Most of the time this isn't much of an issue, and when it does happen (not very often) you can just remove the extra note in the midi editor. I don't know if this is common, as this is my first instrument with drum pads.

Overall very happy with it, and feels far more organic than clicking notes in manually as it adds swing and feels natural to play like an instrument. The maschine software (and VST) has some amazing drum kits and some interesting mixing tools built in. It also allows you to drag&drop entire patterns as a .wav. :)

I like the drum pads for the most part but the NI software is pretty awful.
You can't tap to chop samples... which is ridiculous.. You can't transpose octave up/down.. which is even more ridiculous.
Using it in a DAW is possible but nightmarishly badly done.

The rest/mute feature to mute sections and bring them back in again is hardly useful, and visually difficult since the pads only dim when muted instead of going out completely, which makes it really really difficult to tell sometimes if something is muted or not, or just a darker color..

The hardware is fine and it's still a nice drum pad, but NI software and their poor implementations makes me sick to my stomach. :(