Uitgebracht
November 2015
- This past November, Ableton dropped a surprising announcement at the conclusion of Loop, their inaugural producer conference: they revealed a new generation of Push hardware, which had been secretly in the works for some time. The first generation of this dedicated Live controller enjoyed a successful two and a half years of life as a collaboration, with Akai running the hardware production side of things, but Ableton apparently had a singular vision for what Push could become. To achieve this vision they hired a Head Of Hardware tasked with bringing hardware production capabilities in-house for the first time. The tighter level of control over that process resulted in a unit designed both to address some of the weaknesses of the original Push and to take advantage of Live 9.5, a new release announced at the same conference.
At this point the physical differences between Push 1 and Push 2 have been well documented, but here are the highlights. The Push 2 pads and touchstrip have a lower profile than the original, which adds to the overall minimal aesthetic and increases accuracy and playability. Many people complained about the dust-catching rubberised coating of the original, so that has been replaced by a smoother anodized aluminium plate. While the overall control layout remains largely the same, the tempo and swing encoders and many other buttons have shifted around to land in a more organised way. The two small rows of buttons which sat below the display on Push 1 (which Ableton called State and Selection control buttons) grew into a set of bigger, multi-use buttons which now sit above and below the Push 2's new display. And what a display it is—in place of the original's somewhat lackluster segmented LCD is a larger multi-colour TFT screen that shows more detailed info and can be viewed from more angles. These changes result in the the overall dimensions of Push 2 having swelled slightly to 378 mm x 304 mm, which is important to note when it comes to custom cases made for the original.
The first benefit of the new display is immediately evident when you load a new track and click the Browse button. In addition to a better organised browser, which allows you to load from your User Library, the higher resolution of the display can show you twice as many characters as the original without having to truncate file or preset names. This is immensely helpful, especially when browsing samples with long file names, a process that was nearly impossible on the original. Navigating the browser is easier too. You can use a combination of the encoders, the directional buttons, and the rightmost two upper display buttons to quickly jump through the menu hierarchy. This same browser also pops up when you use the Add Device or Add Track buttons, and you can now reorder and enable/disable the devices on the selected track straight from Push 2, which is a great addition.
When you load a sample from your browser, Live drops it into the Simpler instrument for playback and the Push 2 display flashes to life with a visual representation of the sample's waveform. While some folks have requested the option to load a sample directly to a clip on an audio track (a feature which does not yet exist on Push), the power of the newly upgraded Simpler in Live 9.5 makes it the best choice for most users. Ableton beefed up Simpler with this release, which now features sample warping with different modes, non-destructive sample slicing with transient detection, and a new set of filter algorithms from Cytomic. All of these features are controllable straight from Push 2, which makes it truly feel like a playable instrument. Without leaving the controller, you could feasibly record a new sample from an external source (assuming you've set up your track routing correctly beforehand, as that's not yet possible via Push), then select the Convert button to load that new sample into Simpler and manipulate the sample by zooming into the waveform and setting start/end/loop points and transpose/spread amounts. If you want to trigger different parts of the sample independently, you can enable slicing or take it even further by using the Convert button to switch from Simpler to a drum rack which allows you to process and mix each slice independently.
This is all pretty powerful stuff, but there are a few odd limitations or feature gaps with the workflow as it stands now. For example, you can quantise individual notes of a MIDI clip as long as the clip is controlling a drum rack, but the same is not true if you're controlling a melodic instrument. Also, the slicing within Simpler is either manual or by transient detection with control over sensitivity; there is no option to slice by beat grid. For example, it would've been nice to slice a sample by eighth notes.
Another area where Push 2 and Live could be improved is third party plug-in control. In order to control a plug-in's parameters you need to use the Configure button in Live to select up to 128 parameters to be controlled and automated. Then when you select the plug-in on Push, those parameters are displayed in banks of eight in the order that they appear in the Live plug-in device. Live lets you reorder those parameters via mouse, and you can save the result as a "default preset" to be loaded each time the plug-in is loaded, which for some purposes is enough. However, it would be nice to be able to organise further by giving the banks meaningful names, having less than eight parameters per bank, and being able to map more than 128 parameters overall. This is an area of considerable conversation in Ableton's forums, with complex workarounds being formulated and developed by the user community that require various levels of tech savvy to pull off.
Despite these minor complaints, I came away very impressed with the leaps in usability that Ableton was able to achieve with the combination of hardware tweaks and new software features. On the hardware side, the more sensitive pads and granular control over that sensitivity makes it way more playable, especially for those with a lighter touch. The reorganised layout of the buttons makes for a more seamless and intuitive experience that requires less memorising and left-brained thinking to get things done. Finally, the new display and updated Simpler make Push and Ableton feel more like an instrument than ever before.
Ratings:
Build Quality: 4.9
Cost: 4.0
Versatility: 4.2
Ease of use: 4.5