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Lets discuss Ableton Push.

What is Push?

Push is a new instrument that solves an old problem: how to make a song from scratch. With hands-on control of melody and harmony, beats, sounds, and song structure, Push puts the fundamental elements of music making at your fingertips - and it fits in a backpack alongside your laptop.

Basics of Push








I am picking up Ableton live 9 Standard (Because 3 effects and 6 instruments i already don't use aren't worth 250$) along with Push tonight. I can't wait, it's going to change my whole production style and workflow.

I have a few questions

Does anyone have push? Has it changed you? Any tips? Do you work with Ableton GUI or Push more?

If you have any tutorials that really helped you feel free to post them.

Any other information is greatly appreciated.

I haven't heard too many "real" reviews about Push, so I'm curious to know what you think of it. It'd be a complete change of DAW for me, but I've loved Maschine so much I'm curious what the combo of Ableton plus a complex, dedicated controller is capable of...

Is it more than just a slick looking clip launcher?

i was really interested in it when they were hyping it before release. but now that it's out it seems like there aren't that many people raving about it. probably because of the price point, but i still can't help but feel like it just didn't do that great or didn't deliver on some really important feature or something. apparently it's going to get a significant update with ableton 9.1 (dual monitor support, w00t)

Have you used either Ableton or the Push before prior to purchase?

Your OP makes it sound as though you're switching to Ableton. If so, what was your previous DAW and why the change?

the reason you havent heard that much about it, is the fact that its only been available in extremely limited quantities. Every shipment we've had were pre-sold before they even came into stock.

I used it at an audio fare about 3 months ago, and I loved it. And I'm a logic user. I sat for hours making a techno beat and song from its stock sounds.

It's revolutionary.... No joke.

It's like a remote for ableton. You can open a clip and tap in beats, whatever you tap in is written within a clip in ableton. Everything you do on the board opens and effects something within ableton. If you edit the same clip you created on push in your DAW the changes made are reflected on push.

For example, you create drum rack in push. You then select drum sounds to fill the drum kit and create a 8 bar clip. You fill in the clip with a beat. This is all reflected in you DAW and if you edit the beat on your PC, lets say you remove some of the clip, the change is shown on push.

On the board I can open an instance of any instrument, start a loop, set the loop length, then edit the loop in real time. Instead of clicking in the beats on the clip using the mouse, you can do it directly on the board.

Push improves workflow in ableton tremendously. The fact that you can create a whole song without looking at the GUI is insane, you just start with a single element and layer up from there. The chord layout on the pads makes it easy to find chord progressions. It takes some time to get used to but the patterns to make the chord makes more sense then the chord layout on a piano, although ill still probably go to the piano at times.

The feel of the pads are awesome, you barely have to press down to initiate the pad. I've only spent 4-5 hours and I can already tell this device will change the way i produce forever.

Ableton 9 was a great purchase too, I'm going to keep in touch with the dev team at Ableton for sure. That's one thing you can't do when you torrent an application.

I spent most of my time on push though so I can't give much of a review on the new features in Live 9, yet.

I'm open for a Q&A on the device if your curious, Does any DSF member own one yet?

outdropt wrote:Has it changed you?

This is actually pretty cool now that I can watch the video with sound. I thought the drums were gonna be stuck on predefined swing but using the knobs is pretty slick although a bit of a reach. Are the pads basically like MPC pads? They look like they could either be really nice or big globby gell pads that have no response. An 8x8 grid of solid pads though would be pretty dope. Put this on a keyboard pahleez. I wonder if you can hack this to work with other DAWs. Might do something similar in Reaper with rotaries controlling note position and length. Would be useful to ride hihat patterns.

I know it probably isnt, and I tried looking up the answer with no success. But I was watching a video on youtube of someone messing around with the push and noticed it has two 1/4" outputs on the back, does it have an onboard soundcard? If so I think that would be pretty F#@$ing cool, and if not, Ableton should get on that.

Nope, just a hardware controller. No onboard sounds.

Looks like they have some smart features for working on beats, like duplicate and double. You'll find yourself needing to do these types of things all the time, and when you can just press a button and move on, good times. I'd like one, if I could buy it and ableton for like $59.