24 Hours With Push 3 Standalone

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Tarekith
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24 Hours With Push 3 Standalone

Post by Tarekith » Thu Jun 08, 2023 2:36 am

So it’s been a little over 24 hours since I got my Push 3 Standalone, and thought I’d share some thoughts as someone who uses a Push 2 A LOT. It’s pretty much my main interaction with Live these days, so I’ve spent a good number of hours putting the new one through it’s paces over the last two days.

The Good:

It’s solid AF. No more slimy plastic, encoders feels more consistent, all the buttons are still soft to touch but way more firm to press. It weighs a f**king ton now. It can get warm, but not crazy hot (so far).

The improvements to the button layout I enjoy more than I thought I would. Things like adding a hot swap button makes what you’re trying to do so much easier. One of my favorite upgrades going from Push 1 to 2 was the new button layout, and here again they’ve made it easier to use based on how people are actually making music on Push.

A SAVE BUTTON!!! Hallelujah, my number one wish fulfilled at last. Also, loading songs is faster than I expected, more like 5-10 seconds versus 45-60. Guessing more complex songs than mine take longer to load though, but for me that’s fine.

Editing Clips feels a lot easier. The jog wheel is something I usually ignore on gear when there’s other options (cough MC707 cough), but here it’s intuitive and actually does make things like selecting notes a bit simpler most of the time. Not perfect but a good bit better anyway.

Charging is quicker than expected. I know some people were a little upset the battery life is only about 2.5 hours, but I do find that it charges back up pretty quick. At over 8lbs it’s not the kind of portable device I’m going to take backpacking or mountain biking, so I don’t mind that I need to be closer to power to top it up. Speaking of that…

IT’S A PORTABLE PUSH! So great to be able to just grab the Push 3 and some headphones and go sit on my deck to make music. No messing about with power cables or PSUs, no USB cables, just grab the unit and some cans and start making music. As a long time groovebox musician, blows my mind in use to see how much power you can just take with you to the couch or some park nearby to make music. Love it. The Standalone version is well worth it IMVHO, easier to make music means I’m more likely to make music and not play TOTK these days…

Integration with Live on the laptop has been flawless so far. The set up steps worked fine right away, and since then it’s been easy to transfer sets back and forth as needed. Except for one thing, but we’ll get to that in a bit.


The Undecided:

The new MPE pads. Don’t get me wrong, they are WAY, WAY more sensitive now and you can definitely get a lot of expression out of them you couldn’t on Push 2. Aftertouch is so easy to fade into compared to before where you had to press pretty hard to trigger it. But now the pads have almost no springiness to them, it’s a much shorter amount of travel each of them has. Doesn’t affect how it reacts to your playing (like I said, huge improvement here actually), but it does mean you don’t get as much ‘bounce’ from the pads. It’s hard to describe, but even though the pads size and layout is the same, I feel like little of my usual Push 2 technique is transferring and I have to learn a new instrument. Not a bad thing, just a little unexpected when you keep going to play in a certain way you’re use to and it doesn’t react the way you expect.

Slide and PB sensitivity per pad is great though, those aspects work just like you’d expect. At the same time, I can’t see myself ever wanting to slide across multiple pads for long pitchbends, so…..

Speaking of MPE, there’s not actually a ton of MPE patches that come on Push 3, even with Suite, maybe just 2-3 dozen? Let’s hope more arrive soon, as I think there’s a lot more that can be done to show off how expressive the MPE capabilities are on Push 3.

Oh yeah, the white in between the pads is growing on me. At first I was annoyed as I thought the black looked better, but in person it’s a little more appealing.


The Bad:

Took me 4 hours to get it actually to turn on, then update the software, and finally authorize everything properly. No idea what the issue was, but it would refuse to turn on, then it would turn on but kept crashing and rebooting trying to load the default Set it ships with. Eventually it all worked, but it took a lot of trying to get there. Bleh.

It definitely feels a bit buggy in places, but not as bad as I was expecting reading some other user comments. I’ve had a couple weird issues now and then, but no crashes and for the most part I’ve been able to just get my ideas down with no issues.

The touch strip went from being under-sensitive in places on Push 2, to being way too over-sensitive on Push 3. You don’t even need to touch it, hovering your finger a few mm above it will cause it to snap to your finger. I’ve accidentally trigger pitchbend a few times due to this, so hopefully some kind of threshold can be implemented.

Pack support. I wish saving Sets on the Push 3 standalone would also collect samples from any Packs you’re using. I didn’t have a pack on my laptop that was installed on Push, and it took me awhile to track down which pack it was, download, install on laptop, resave the project, then transfer back to Push. Also, installing Packs is incredibly tedious as you have to do them one by one. Let us select all the Packs we want to install in one go.


The TL:DR Verdict:

The fact that I can easily take this much power and all these great sounds anywhere I want now to make music is pretty wild. The Standalone version is a good bit of money, but for me it’s a no brainer and is well worth it. The hardware itself is a step up in quality yet again, and the new pads are likely going to be a big improvement for most people.

But, it’s important to remember this is not the full Ableton Live application running on a hardware box. You’re getting the exact same Push experience as with Push 2 (plus a few new minor additions like the tuner and clip view), just without the laptop running it all. If you didn’t get on with the Push workflow in Push 2, I don’t think there’s anything about Push 3 that would change your mind.

That said, there’s obviously a lot of room for improvement and a lot of good ideas floating around already. So I’m curious to see where this all heads going forward.
Tarekith
Ableton Forum Administrator
https://tarekith.com

drez
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Re: 24 Hours With Push 3 Standalone

Post by drez » Thu Jun 08, 2023 5:24 pm

Thank you so much for the review, good sir! Sounds like a very fair assessment of the state of where push 3 is _right now_. I'm encouraged by Ableton's track record of improving the Push products over time as the application changes, and I see no reason to believe that doesn't continue.
http://www.soundcloud.com/dreznicek
MacBook M1 Pro Max, 64Gig RAM, 4TB internal SSD, Live 11, Push1/2/3, Reason, VST O'Plenty

Tarekith
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Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2005 11:46 pm
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Re: 24 Hours With Push 3 Standalone

Post by Tarekith » Thu Jun 08, 2023 6:40 pm

There's definitely more to come!
Tarekith
Ableton Forum Administrator
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