I suspect this is real. It’s little bits of the Circuits, the OP-Z and the older Pushes, which shows Ableton is paying attention to the rest of the portable market. In Drum mode, I imagine the left 16 pads will select the pad and the right 16 will step sequence. In Melodic mode, the bottom buttons will select the step and the top 32 will select the note(s). In Session mode, the bottom buttons will mute/solo as has been suggested. The screen looks right because I hand-drew the pixel art and all of them fit in 16x19, which suggests a 16x32 screen (I didn’t take the time to map the levels width at the beginning, but it suggests a rectangle). Also the levels graphic has a meter and if that is 1 pixel wide, it may be 32x64 pixels. Lastly, I’m hoping for both standalone and as a Note / Live controller, and praying for WiFi to upload sketches to Ableton Cloud. If that pricing is real, this thing is going to Move.
If the leaked image is real (which I’d give about a 90% chance of; it’s just too practical looking and not Photoshop-fantasy enough), I think you’re 100% correct.
Ableton is splitting the difference between the OP-1 and OP-Z with a tiny but useful screen that should make the device much more flexible than screen-less grooveboxes, but still able to take advantage of the much greater power of a phone (through Note).
Where’s this starts to get really interesting is Move as not just a MIDI controller for Note, but a primary mode of interaction with the app. Think sample editing without ever having to touch the screen, just using the encoders on Move.
I have to add to the voices that say…PLEASE let it have proper sample editing.
I am tired of half-baked sample players.
This!
Thank you for your excellent analysis. I believe you are spot on. Looking at how step sequencing works on the Push, your analysis makes perfect sense. This is going to be a powerful sequencing monster!
Maybe if they can get Chubb and Njoku back, and Watson puts it together.
I agree…and really like this. I much prefer step buttons over pads.
One thing to add… I think In DRUM mode the left pads will play the rack’s sounds and the right pads might do 16 levels of the currently selected pad. And the step buttons are the sequencer.
Some good analysis on the UI there. One thing I would add is that the encoders are almost certainly touch sensitive, so the display will show what each one is currently doing when you touch it.
This economical approach also lends a lot of weight to the $499 US price point.
Yes! Standalone and the small screen for jamming AND then always having the ability to plug into iPhone/iPad for total control, finetuning, and seeing everything that is going on. This is going to be super cool!
It kind of reminds me of that new(ish) Yamaha thing that ripped off TE.
Ok, so looking at Ableton Note in the new Beta version basically the version of sampling we get in a Drum rack is the new Drum Sampler which hasn’t been released out of beta yet (perhaps we are getting Ableton 12.1 on Tuesday as well?)
The drum sampler is definitely meant for one shots and there is cool effects that can be used with it but other than start and end point you don’t have much beyond that. It looks like this on Note and has two pages:
Each pad has one effect and the drum rack also only has one effect.
The melodic sampler is even more bare bones on note where you can only edit sample end and start time and volume. Clicking on the sample waveform adds a control to reverse the sample. As with all the other synth tracks you can have two effects on this and of course input notes.
In both the drum sampler and the melodic sampler in note you can record a sample directly in the device, or load up a sample from your phone.
So hopefully the move has a better sampler than this… or maybe an improved one also comes to Note. I really do doubt we’re gonna get a full blown simpler in this thing though. I would love to be wrong.
If this doesn’t have a companion app with full filter/envelope/etc control then it doesn’t really compete other grooveboxes in the price range like the op-z and seqtrak.
And I kind of think it won’t have that because why wouldn’t the note app have those features already?
Alright, so I was hoping for Simpler in a Tracker Mini-esque form factor, and I really hoped that the leaked image was fake. I still kind of do. But if they’re channeling the OP-Z via Circuit Tracks, it would be ESPECIALLY cool if they integrated Live 12’s scales, MIDI generators, and MIDI transformers. The OP-Z had a really great balance of control and randomization, so if Ableton can bring that to a more durable device that can seamlessly drop sets to Live, then sign me up.
That leak is simultaneously real and fake until October 8th…
Just let me take a long Sample and chop it to 16 slices and convert it to a DrumRack…so i don’t have to manually do this operation 16 times for each DrumRack i have in my project in Ableton Note.
Somebody help me! 
Shrödingers Cat Move is it now?
Does anyone know what time the Tuesday announcement is?
10AM Berlin time maybe?
I would think 8am Berlin time would be more appropriate
At least for launch, I think Simpler is probably off the table, but this got me thinking of one way it might not be: What if Move actually doesn’t connect to Note, but a separate Move app?
The more I think about it, the more it seems like Move will have a different enough workflow that maybe “Push for Note” isn’t even the right analogy. There is one very big reason to consider this in the leak:
Note doesn’t have a record button. Note’s entire workflow doesn’t even have the concept of a record mode; it’s based entirely around capture.
And yet this device has a record button, which would suggest that this actually isn’t “Note in a box,” but yet another, subtly different take on the overall Live concept, just like Note is.
At least in Note Beta they now have the ability to copy a drum sample from one pad to the next. So it’s not the most ideal way of doing it but you can slice in a way…
But yeah, as much as the Digitakt 2 got shit on for only have grid slicing at the moment… 90% of the time I only ever use that feature when slicing… I’d be happy with that though I know the internet at large would shit all over it
Having the pads and step buttons separated makes it easier to input chords or polyphonic notes.