Ableton Push 3, Max for Live

Next week I’ll finally order my Ableton Push 3 to complete my little desktop studio setup a bit. I set aside some money for it ages ago, then things happened (the gates of hell opened. Not really that just sounds dramatic), had to use this pot to cover them and wait for savings to recover. Bang! Something else needs paying that’s £1000 or so. Everything is £1000 these days. Nothing drastic has happened for a while, none of the stuff was actually drastic (apart from the gates of hell) but there we are.

I was a bit torn for awhile between the Push and the Akai Live 3 but for me the system is something I’m very very familiar with and the Push has a better MPE system great for legato and expressive performances and access to Max - that won for me.

Max is one of those things I’d love to learn in order to build some interesting tools for Ableton but I’ve never had the time or decided on a starting point.

I’ve bought or downloaded other people’s custom devices. A “device” being an instrument, effect or utility that extends your Live setup. There are some brilliant ones such as https://fors.fm/dyad which is a drum synth and a great choice if you wish to avoid the static four to the floor kind of sound and come up with something that sounds more like the great artist Four-Tet who only uses Ableton and probably a Push.

I should write a roundup on these and share some audio examples.