Having spent some time now with my Push which arrived on Thursday, I thought I'd give you my impressions and hopefully the folks at ableton are taking some notes.
So let's start with negative stuff which almost made me think of returning the unit. The biggest turn off for me is that you can't really edit all the parameters of the synths. There appears to be a selection of important parameters but that really doesn;t work for me. I use Operator extensively and inside out, and there isn't a way to control something as fundamental as the waveform of the oscillators!!!! So if you load the deafault patch and you don;t wannna use the mouse, all you've got is sine waves. Of course, I know that there is a way to map that to a macro, blablabla, but that's not the point. If you are following the dictum 'create songs from scratch' it is fundamental that you are able to control all of the parameters of the synths. Otherwise, what do you end up with? Using pre-programmed presets? Thanks, but no thanks! Or alternatively you have to spend time first designing the sounds you want to use, and then turn to Push just to play around, record some automation, etc. Sorry, but for me and for many other users the sound design is an essential part of the creative process. Otherwise, this device is just aimed at preset flicker type of 'producers'. I think it should not be such an issue to implement all of the parameters in the Push interface - sure you'll have to go back and forth between menus, but that's much preferable than having to spend separately some time with the mouse making sounds and then putting them to creative use. With time I can imagine getting really fast finding the parameters I need. And really what's the problem of having simply more pages of menus on the Push interface? (I am sure there is even a clever way to implement the powerful additive features of Operator of being able to build custom wave forms within push - it takes 4 fields - harmonic No, Harmonic level, next harmonic, previous harmonic) Anyway, I sincerely hope Ableton figures this out, becuase that's a major turn down.
I use Operator and Analog extensively and the way I work is by starting with a blank patch and creating the sound up to my taste and what works in the context of my track. I'm not interested in any presets.
Other minus points go for Drum racks limitations - like - there should be a way to control everything that you can do on the screen. Like creating nested effect chains and sending signals from each of the sample slots. Also, when you're building, a drum rack from scratch, the hot-swap function should work like it works in Live. When you click the Browse button and you are able to flick with the up and down green buttons, you should be able to hear the samples just by going up and down, and not having to load the samples. It should work like it does on the screen when you hit the hotswap button and you can flick witht he arrow keys to listen to the samples. I know it may seem like a minor point, but this slows down the workflow tremendously.
A big minus point goes also to the step sequencer mode when you want to edit the velocity of the notes. Why show relative changes in the value? what does this bring me, I can't figure out...just show the 1-127 values. I wanted to create some interesting ghost notes type of fills and I found it impossible to work with this relative values - if I know which note is playing at what velocity it would easier.
I sincerely hope these are all a matter of software tweaks and they will be implemented in future updates. If I have to be very crude, I'd say at it's current state Push is pretty much useless for advanced sound design type of work, when it comes even to the native Ableton instruments and devices. I won't even start with third party VSTs.
On the bright side, Push is very well built and is very responsive. If ignore that Velocity problem mentioned above, the step sequencer and the Drum Programming implementation is great and is very fun.
The Instrument mode is also very cool and I don't know if it was on purpose or not, but it is very intuitive for guitar players like myself! Basically when you swithch on the chromatic mode, it looks like a guitar fretboard layout at least for the note relationships in of the EADG strings
that's very cool!So Push, not too bad for a start, but you can do much better! "Creating songs from scratch" marketing message does not deliver at this point.
So far my score is 2.5/5
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