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The Bookmarks bar has gone; instead we now drag folders from our desktop to appear in the list. Overall, this Browser feels much more evolved than the old model. Live 9 and Live 9 Suite now include Glue, described as an '80s-style console bus compressor. Glue sounds good, adding a little bit of punch and warmth to individual tracks or the entire mix.
It's simple to use and fills a gap in Live's range of plug-ins - one which many users have previously filled using third-party compressors. Elsewhere, Gate and EQ Eight have been updated to show the audio waveform within each device to help visualise what's going on. Live's 'other' Compressor, meanwhile, has also had an overhaul. At the risk of compromising Live's ease of use, more flexibility has been added to recording features; this could also be a result of changes necessary to accommodate the Push controller.
And yes, that means Session automation recording within Live's Session View clips - a much-requested feature! This new array of controls is confusing initially, but after a few sessions it becomes second nature. They're all MIDI assignable, so you can always set up your favourite controller to simplify their use.
The New button is interesting; it stops clips in armed tracks and moves to the next location where empty clips are available to be recorded into. A new Scene will be created if necessary. It lights orange when you launch Session View clips and break your timeline arrangement, just like it always did.
It also appears in the Arrangement View, near the top of the screen, but it appears when it's needed. At the same time, there will appear individual buttons to reset specific tracks back to the Arrangement. Converting audio to MIDI is totally fun and completely inspiring. Right-click on an audio clip and choose to convert as Harmony, Melody, or Drums and Live takes its best shot at creating MIDI clips based on these parts, complete with default instrument presets.
You can get lost forever, feeding all kinds of samples into this: field recordings, song sketches, vocals, ambient noise - it's all good. This is the standout new creative feature in Live 9. MIDI editing has been expanded. A Legato switch stretches notes as necessary so their ends meet up with the start of the following ones. A single click in an automation envelope now adds or removes breakpoints, and hitting B is now all it takes to enter Draw mode. Overall, Push is giving a bit more visual feedback, the button text is easier to read — the backlights are brighter, and the Repeat and Metronome buttons now blink when active.
Alongside that, latency compensation has also been improved for third party plug ins and Max for Live; there are also latency fixes for specific devices, including Redux and Saturator. Warp Speed Warping is claimed to sound better in Complex and Complex Pro modes, with punchier transients, and downbeat detection is said to be improved, with an overall increase in warping accuracy.
Ableton Live DAWs. Transpose moves notes within the folded selection only, rather than chromatically. Invert swaps note pitches within the folded pitch selection as well. This is useful: everything is kept in key or, for drum sequences, within the kit , allowing quick, 'what-if' edits to be tried out.
When a time region, or note range in time, is selected, two MIDI stretch markers appear at the limits of the selected region. These resemble warp markers in audio clips, and behave in a similar manner. Drag one marker to scale both note positions and durations of the selected area relative to the other marker.
You can even drag one marker past the other to reverse the selection. Click and drag a point between the markers to stretch or squash notes on each side of the point.
Rather cleverly, if you stretch a section of time using the markers, clip automation is also stretched to stay in time with the moved notes. Push is Ableton's first foray into hardware design.
Although it was engineered by Akai Professional, it has Ableton's name on the front, and was designed in-house to integrate deeply with Live 9. Many of Live 9's new features were clearly designed with Push in mind. Obviously, Push isn't the first dedicated controller for Live.
Akai's own APC devices and Novation's Launchpad have been around for a while, and there's a selection of Live controller apps on the iPad, but Push offers a level of integration that's not been seen before.
Ableton's motivation for Push was to liberate the musical creative process from the computer and to place it onto a well-designed, focused control surface that could be regarded as an instrument in its own right. An obvious example is the touring musician with down time in a hotel room who doesn't want to stare at a computer screen, but still wants to try out musical ideas. Push is aimed at a particular phase of the music-making process: exploring and capturing new ideas in Live's Session View.
There's no access to the linear Arrangement View at all, and there are no dedicated faders for mixdown, although Push's encoders can edit the mix. Just as the Session View has conventionally been regarded as one stage in the creation of a finished work, so Push can be thought of as one component in the creation of ideas in the Session View. In fact, Push's feature 'coverage' of the Session View is extensive, and it's possible to create and edit quite complex sets on Push without looking at Live on screen at all.
At a recent demonstration session, the team from Ableton were quite insistent on hiding the laptop screen completely! Even though, obviously, Live's on-screen interface is a much richer and more powerful environment, creativity comes from constraints, and working with a focused, tactile device can really help the creative flow. Playing and editing support for MIDI clips, specifically those playing drum racks, is extensive and versatile, and device editing and automation are well supported, but there's very little support for audio clips.
You can edit loop, pitch and gain settings, and change the warp algorithm, but that's about it. However, if you are using audio clips to capture or play material, you can still set up, configure and automate effects processing. Whether Push can be regarded as an instrument in the sense of something that can be used to perform music live is somewhat open to debate. Personally, I'd regard the creation and execution of a performance to be a different, follow-on process, and would treat Push as a tool for creating the musical ideas in the first place — and, let's face it, that's the hard part.
My first impression of Push was that it's big: at mm wide, it's the width of my inch MacBook Pro, and it's also a couple of inches deeper. It will squeeze into a standard rucksack, but only just. At 3kg, Push is also heavy, so if you fly to gigs on budget airlines, watch your carry-on weight allowance! Part of the reason for the weight is the build quality. Push is a solid and hefty piece of kit, putting other controllers to shame.
The unit is striking in appearance, wrapping Bang-and-Olufsen-style Scandinavian designer chic in a stealth-bomber matte black finish, and boasts some nice design touches. All the rotary encoders, for example, are truly touch-sensitive, meaning that you can simply touch an encoder to display its parameter's current value without changing anything.
This is perfect for seeing what's what without, for example, accidentally punching in while recording automation. The top part of the front panel sports a large, column by four-row LCD custom-designed for Push. This is topped by nine infinite rotary encoders, the rightmost dedicated to master output level and cue volume. The left-hand edge of the device sports various edit and transport buttons, dedicated encoders for tempo and swing settings, and a long vertical ribbon controller.
On the right, there are more editing buttons and navigation arrows. The footswitch inputs for my early review unit were undocumented and there was no obvious configuration procedure on the device itself.
Ableton tell me that the inputs generate hard-wired MIDI controller messages. The main grid and the two rows of buttons below the display, are full RGB backlit, and are exceptionally clear and bright. For full brightness, Push needs to be powered from an adaptor, although it will function perfectly well at reduced brightness on USB bus power. Colour consistency across the grid was somewhat variable on my unit, but LED colour consistency is notoriously hard to ensure, and Push is no worse than other products in this regard.
The edit buttons are mostly mono-colour backlit, the exception being the note interval buttons to the right of the grid, which double as scene-launch buttons. When a button's feature is disabled, the backlight is off and it's not even possible to read the text legend, which makes for consistent interface behaviour but is slightly frustrating at first when learning one's way round the controls. State and toggle buttons use half-intensity for off and full-intensity for on.
The difference is a little hard to discern in bright light conditions, but clearer in subdued lighting. The ribbon controller also sports a column of LEDs, which indicate the centre position for pitch-bend and are also active when the controller is operating as a selection interface, as we'll see. The edit buttons, being silicone, are slightly squishy but have a discernable click. Personally I was not greatly fond of the feel of them, but for this type of button they're probably the best I've encountered.
The main pads themselves don't move, being purely pressure-based. Some drum machine-style pads I've used are too unresponsive to be comfortable to play, perhaps because I'm a wimpy keyboard player, but Push was pretty good in this regard, and with the sensitivity level turned up to 'Super-Sensitive' I found it easy to play. There's nothing magical about this template, which contains a kit, a bass and a grand piano on three MIDI Instrument tracks in a Session containing a single scene.
The Push's display lists eight sound parameters across the top, each of which can be altered by its corresponding encoder,while the bottom left corner of the display features a couple of labels which, curiously, will resemble 'Kit Core ', the name of the first track. At this point, if you're not the kind of person who likes reading manuals, you can go ahead and start hitting the unlit pads forming the top half of the grid.
Live will start playing, and you'll find yourself step-sequencing one of the drums from the kit. Turn an encoder and the corresponding sound parameter for that drum will change. Jjust touching an encoder will bring up a row of graphical histogram displays showing value ranges. The 16 drums of this kit are selected for sequencing, or played, using the yellow-lit pads to the bottom left of the grid.
We'll examine exactly what's happening here shortly, but now might be a good time to quickly look at the rest of the edit controls. A key point is that the display area of Push — the LCD, the encoders and two rows of illuminated control buttons — can change mode independently of the main pad area. The top-right group of six buttons switches the display mode between tracks volume, pan, effects send , current clip details, and the device chain for the selected track.
The first row of selection control buttons below the display work as soft menu buttons to select whatever's shown above them, which is usually tracks or devices.
For the pads, the two main modes are selected from the white-illuminated buttons towards the bottom right. A glance at Live's Session View on screen will reveal a marquee surrounding the Clip Slots currently addressed by Push's grid. Session mode is fairly straightforward, and will be familiar to Launchpad or APC owners. Each pad represents a clip, and is even illuminated in the same colour as the clip in Live's Session View or the closest approximation available to the LEDs.
This is a great improvement over the red-green display of other devices. Pressing a pad launches a clip: the pad flashes in green when its clip is cued for playback, and throbs gently when actually playing. For recording, the active colour is, predictably, red.
Recording is enabled by the red-circled Session Record button to the lower left — you may notice a similarity to the button in Live's Control Bar — and can be toggled on and off for overdubbing notes or automation. When Session Record is enabled, recording starts for all Clip Slots in armed tracks in the current scene.
Herein lies a slight problem, because Push gives no indication of which tracks are armed or which scene is selected. If you're working on one clip at a time in Note mode — the mode where Push is most useful — the selection follows the current clip, but in Session mode I found I was getting a little lost, and would frequently start recording into what seemed like a fairly arbitrary slot. Keeping one eye on Live's Session display seems to be the only solution.
It's pretty easy to correct mistakes such as accidentally recording. Holding down Delete and tapping a pad deletes its clip. Even better, there's my absolute favourite feature of Push: a dedicated Undo button, linked directly to Live's indefinite undo stack. This works everywhere — clip recording, sequencing, device editing, automation changes — and practically removes all chances of losing any of one's work. Pressing Shift-Undo performs a Redo. This is so useful that every control surface should provide it, by law!
In Session mode, if the display is in one of the track modes, the second row of soft 'state control' buttons provides track functions, namely mute which Live itself refers to as Track Activator , solo, or Clip Stop, according to the selected function on the buttons to the far right.
Curiously, there's no access at all to the record-arm setting of a track. One is expected to use the Session Record button to create or overdub recorded material, and Push record-arms tracks behind the scenes as required. Press the Note button, and Push switches its pad mode to show a single clip. The clip lives in the currently selected track and scene. To change track at any time, you can put the display into one of its track view modes and then press the soft button below the track name, or use the left or right cursor button to navigate.
Cursor up and down changes the selected scene, and launches it if there are Clips present, but there's no indication on Push as to which scene is current. When a clip is displayed, the configuration of the pads depends on the type of track and what devices, if any, are loaded into it.
If it's a MIDI track with a drum rack, the the pads are set up for drum sequencing, while any other MIDI track brings up a two-dimensional tonal keyboard, and an audio track, understandably, delivers a completely blank grid. In all cases, pressing the Clip button brings up the most important clip parameters on the display for editing with the encoders. The Push's drum sequencing mode is the most sophisticated musical creation environment offered by the device.
In this mode, the pad area is divided into three sections. The top four rows form the sequencing grid, the lower-left four-by-four square presents 16 drum pads, and the lower-right square is a zoomed-out time-based grid showing up to 16 bars of clip time.
Both real-time and step-time sequencing are provided for. Step time provides instant gratification: simply select a drum from the drum pad area and press pads in the upper area, which light up blue. Playback will begin automatically. By default, all notes are created with the same duration and velocity, but holding down the Accent key plants notes with MIDI velocity rather than Cleverly, note velocity is also indicated by colour saturation on the pads.
A note can be edited after the fact by pressing and holding its pad until parameter options appear top-right in the display. Velocity and duration can be altered, and notes can be nudged forwards or backwards, within limits which keep them in their grid slot. To record in real time instead of step time — or even simultaneously! Notes can be quantised at record time by holding down the Quantize button and selecting options from the right of the display, and any recorded MIDI can be quantised after the fact.
The Repeat button invokes a quantised note auto-repeat — a feature I remember from my trusty R8 drum machine years ago. The Swing encoder adds a variable amount of swing while notes are recorded using Repeat, and pad pressure can be applied to create velocity swells, leading to some nice roll effects.
Whereas step recording will loop a clip, real-time recording will extend a clip indefinitely unless it has already been looped, and the Fixed Length button described later will loop such a clip on demand. As always, any mistakes can be removed with the Undo button. The drum pad area represents a window onto 16 note pitches out of a possible The column of LEDs embedded into the ribbon controller show the current selection area as three bright LEDs, while dim LEDs show which other parts of the entire note range contain occupied slots — fewer LEDs mean fewer allocated pads in the grid.
Octave Down and Octave Up buttons shift the selection, or you can touch or drag in the ribbon area to instantly move the current selection, which is a nice touch. Drag while holding down Shift to navigate one row at a time.
The innovative pad-based keyboard in default diatonic mode left and chromatic mode right , where illuminated pads are notes that are in the song key. As always, editing and navigation changes made on Push are reflected immediately in Live's on-screen display, and vice versa. The time interval of the sequencing grid can be changed using the dedicated interval buttons just to the right of the pads. The clip length and loop are indicated by the lower-right grid.
Here, each pad represents one bar: white pads represent the entire loop, blue pads the area currently in the sequence grid, and the green pad the current playback position. The loop is set by pressing two pads to indicate start and finish.
It takes a little while to get used to how this part of the interface interacts with the sequence step division, but you can always hit the Clip button to check the clip's loop parameters in the display. A dedicated Double button copies the the loop with all its contents and pastes a copy directly after it, doubling the loop length and allowing short loop ideas to be developed into longer ones. The pad-based loop editing is slightly restrictive: the clip's start position always coincides with the start of the loop, for instance.
To be fair, unless you want lead-ins for your drum loops this is probably what you need, but I was hoping that there was some facility to 'rotate' a loop to change which part of it coincided with the downbeat. The clip start can be edited in Live, but there's no access to it in Push. Navigation between clips in the Note mode is easy, using the cursor up and down buttons to change scene, or left and right to change track.
Changing scene selection actually launches the new scene; clips are always triggered in Legato mode, so you can switch the playback immediately between different clips without regard to their launch quantisation settings. I confidently predict that this will become a live performance technique.
It's even possible to record the result into a single clip on another track while scenes are being changed. I leave this as an exercise for the reader. A dedicated Duplicate button copies the state of all playing clips into a new Scene, mirroring the Duplicate edit command in Live.
The drum sequencer is probably Push's most compelling feature. It's versatile and easy to use, and the use of dedicated pads to set loop position and length is a very nice piece of interface design, while the ability to shift quickly between scenes while working on drum clips allows complex musical ideas to be built up easily.
As mentioned earlier, though, the lack of any indication of the current scene is a curious omission. If you go into Note mode in a MIDI track containing anything other than a drum rack, in place of the drum sequencer Push presents a grid containing a rather attractive blue and white pattern.
This is a novel, two-dimensional keyboard layout, intended to make the best use of an eight-by-eight grid of pads while providing an environment that can be used by musicians not necessarily trained on a conventional piano-style keyboard. The default keyboard layout is for a C-major scale. The bottom row provides an octave of major-scale notes starting from C and ending at C an octave higher. The row above provides notes a diatonic fourth higher for music theory fans, that's five semitones, except from F, when it's six.
The third row up is a diatonic fourth higher again, and so on to the top. Since the range of an individual row is greater than the pitch difference between successive rows, each note appears more than once in the grid; the blue pads are multiple occurrences of C over the four octaves.
As a note is played, each occurrence lights up in green. Cleverly, this even happens when notes are played in from a separate, conventional, keyboard. While playing one row of notes is not terribly interesting once you're past the 'Three Blind Mice' stage, the real strength of this system lies in the way that chords can be voiced across rows.
The diatonic fifth is one pad up and right, for instance, and the various triads and seventh chords are easy-to-reach pad clusters. Many chords that are hard or impossible to finger with one hand on a conventional keyboard are easy to play here. Various kinds of scales and runs which, on a piano, are considered fingering exercises, are ridiculously easy to play on Push.
On the down side, the black keys on a piano provide a tactile indication of finger position, and since Push doesn't, you're likely to have to look at your hands more often than if you were playing a conventional keyboard. Instrument types, Live Packs and presets can be recalled from Push's device browser. Switch the keyboard from In Key mode to Chromatic, and the grid presents a truly chromatic keyboard where pads for notes not in the current key are not illuminated.
This mode allows playing in any key just by shifting your fingers left or right. Transposition doesn't alter any of the notes played, just the pad colours showing which notes are in the selected key. Pressing on the pads generates channel aftertouch — although these days, sadly, not many instruments respond to it — while the ribbon controller provides pitch-bend.
Although Push's keyboard setup options are extensive, step sequencing support is basically non-existent, compared with what's offered by the drum sequencer: you just turn the metronome on, punch in Session Record, and start playing. There are some features which help, though. Firstly, the Fixed Length button attaches quantised loop points to a clip while you're recording it, so you can 'warm up' by playing a few takes into a clip and then enable a loop once you have a pass that you want to keep.
The clip's notes can be quantised after the fact, or record quantise can be enabled ahead of time. Once your clip is looping you can overdub as many times as you want. As ever, Undo can come to the rescue, allowing you to unwind overdubs that you don't want to keep. Finally, I was pleased to notice that Repeat mode works for keyboards as well as drums, making it possible to record some simple arpeggio-like sequences with variable velocity, which threw up some ideas.
Of course, you're free to add MIDI effects to a track to generate further ideas. The only way to see your work once you've recorded it, though, is via Live's Clip View.
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