Can I ask about slicing breaks on it - did you use pre-sliced samples or do any slicing with the drum sampler? I notice the resolution is not so high so you could only do 4 slices but maybe you had a way round it. Not the end of the world to bounce down slices but thought I’d ask…
I just ordered one, I think it looks like a brilliant tool for serious work and for fun messing about. I assume it’ll slowly be updated with more synth engines and workflow tweaks, but even as is I reckon I could write a set in on it pretty quickly.
My future upgrades would be:
Simpler for slicing/sample instruments
Audio over USB for each track
M4L
Better midi (4 more tracks dedicated for midi pls)
Some caveats. It’s really easy to do on instrument tracks and per-pad on Drum Rack tracks, provided your loops are a maximum of four bars long— just press Loop Select, hold the step keys for the bars you want to move notes in, and tap the arrow key to nudge all notes by 10%, Shift + tap the arrow key to nudge all notes by 1%, or hold the arrow key to nudge all notes by 1 step.
It’s a two-handed operation and only works on bars for which you’re holding the step key. This is probably preferable in most cases, but you’ll need to perform the operation multiple times if your clip has more bars than you have free fingers.
For Drum Racks, it only seems to move notes for the currently-selected pad and I haven’t found a way to move multiple pads at once (although I’m still working my way through the manual). Again, this is probably preferable in most cases — say you want to move your hi-hats to create variation, but you want your kicks and snares to stay put. That’s how I work most of the time. But it’s really not ideal if you’re working with, say, a chopped sequence.
Unless you have an active bass, you’re going to want an amp simulator with headphone outputs. I had a really good time with the Fender Mustang Micro, which isn’t super customizable but is cheap and sounds surprisingly good. They issued a new model with a display and more options so the originals have gotten even cheaper — I lent my v1 to a friend and I’m debating whether to ask for it back or just buy the v2.
If you want something nicer, the Strymon Iridium doesn’t have a dedicated bass amp but it supports quite a bit of low end. I’ve also heard great things about the Boss IR-2.
Mine arrived today. All I can say is WOW!
The workflow is lovely.
Pads are dope for fingerdrumming, and I have big hands.
Chopping samples it totally doable with that screen. You can load a Rhodes loop into Pad 13… set it to choke, gate, etc… then duplicate pad, move start point… BAM! 2 chops. If you press Shift while scrubbing the sample it zooms. Double click Shift and it locks.
But man… the cherry on the top of the cake… being able to use http://move.local on my phone (yes the page is mobile optimized), to upload samples from iCloud is ba-na-nas!
Case is hard plastic, but doesn’t have the stupid sticky coating. Instead it looks like a translucid plastic which is either painted or smoked before hardening. Bottom is metallic so it cools the device. At least it felt colder.
Honestly… this compared to MC101, Seqtrack, OPZ, Circuit Rhythm (I had all and still have some)… there’s no comparison if you add all the features, the worflow, the Move Manager, Integration with Live & Notes & Ableton Cloud. Best bang for the buck!
Having Cloud run directly on the device is way better I expected, and I expected it to be good. I also love love love that the Undo button tells you what it’s undone. I hope both of those features come to Push ASAP.
I’m not sure if everyone will appreciate this, but I REALLY like that the Workflow settings persist across sets. I always want 80% quantize; on Push 3, I need to adjust that every time I power it on. Here, that’s just my setting.
Move also has a lot of subtle nice-to-haves that are great to see at launch:
If you hold the Session View button rather than tapping it, it puts you back into Note mode.
You can double-tap Shift rather than holding it down.
The sequencer works in Controller mode!
Copy/Paste, Duplicate, and Double Loop work identically to Push as far as I can tell, so the core workflow translates almost 1:1.
Still lots of room for improvement — sample chopping, MIDI control, a less-bodgy way to share presets, etc. But this thing launched three days ago and I’ve yet to smash my head into any limitations — the limitations are there, but coming from Push, their corners are very smooth and easy to see.
Same situation here from Spain (I just registered to reply lol). I ordered on 8th afternoon too and it is still processing. But even worse, I made a mistake with the city because I moved and I changed all the data (postal code, street, etc…) but the city. So I sent a message to support immediately on 8th as well… and I got no response.
They’ll get to ya I guess, I got a response from support within a day but no updates since then. They probably didn’t expect such an inflow of orders and support requests lol
Yep, I did an extremely un-scientific test: put sixteen steps across each track (including four drum pads, so a total of seven sequences each running eight automation lanes), added random p-locks and/or recorded live automation for every step, and doubled the pattern until it hit sixteen bars. I then uploaded it to Cloud and opened the project in Live Suite 12.1.
All of the automation appears to be in place and the project sounds identical (horrible, but identical). I can’t say 100% for certain that there’s no upper limit, but I can confirm that everything is recorded into a Live clip and parameter locks are saved into automation lanes. Based on that, I expect you will be able to automate every parameter on every step for the full sixteen bars without losing any data. Hope this helps!
That’s could suggest no set limit of automations / p locks. They’re using Abletons way of writing this data in memory which probably translates to mere bytes of info per automation which then Live is able to open up . How many lanes did the live project spit out? Sorry to make you count it Hehe if there’s no limit like 30-50 that would be really great
It’ll probably never happen, because I don’t picture Elektron as a “me too!” reactionary type of company, but the more I read about Move, and as fun as Move seems, the more I would love to see an Elektron version of an all-in-one (sampling + synthesis) battery-powered groove box.
I’m in Spain, still waiting for shipping confirmation.
I ordered about 10 minutes after it dropped.
I’m in the Balearics as well, so everything takes about a week to get here anyway, although it’s usually quicker to ship things from Germany than from mainland Spain.
Wouldn’t it make the most sense for Ableton to re-use their standard code base for recording automation wherever possible (CPU and memory limits allowing)?
What does 100 lanes of automation tell you that 56 lanes don’t? Not meant as a critique, I’m just honestly curious what you’re trying to infer about the implementation via this test…