Wanted to share my push experience so far:
I have had it for a little more than a year. Actually, I have a new one as of a month ago because the first one had a hardware issue where it would very sporadically freeze when switching between scenes. FWIW Ableton support was stellar in their response and getting me a replacement no-cost in only a few days.
For the first 6 months I didn’t know what to make of it. I enjoyed making beats, and layering a whole bunch of shit, but was making mainly hot garbage in terms of songs. This was mainly due to not getting the interface, and more generally not getting the session view mentality you need to have to use it effectively.
For background, I’m not making EDM stuff really or performing live with it. My goals are more building pop or rock songs, using live instruments (guitar, bass, vocals). My thought was this would get me away from the computer, clear some of the noise about fucking around with plugins and getting distracted.
Anyway, for a while it wasn’t happening for me. In addition to not getting the interface, it felt weird making chords on the pads. Mainly though until I sat down and really got acquainted with session view did things start making sense.
Something clicked at that point. I was able to ‘see’ my whole song laid out. Things started to get faster and faster. I always envisioned this as more of a sketch pad and finishing touches for in the laptop. I lay a drum bed, synths/piano with either the pads or a external keyboard, cycle in guitar and my pbass dry right into the push, use an SM58 using a XLR->1/4 cable, bam bam bam.
Stuff is moving really fast now - I finished the rough layouts, structure, melodic ideas and lyrics for 2 songs yesterday. I’ve have had similar weekends in the past few weeks, where I’m just amazed that I’ve come up with a finished demo so quickly. It’s broken my tendency to have half finished ideas lingering around and ultimately abandoned. Im really in love with this thing (hence the novel sized post here).
Key things I did that improved my workflow:
- started color marking scenes horizontally - for ex, verse 1 in blue, chorus in orange etc. I was getting lost in seeing the overall song structure as you can’t label scenes with text as far as I know. Gamechanger
- shift +record to save a full arrangement view on the standalone, for importing the whole song structure into Live on the laptop. Absolutely crucial. What a great feeling to pull up your laptop and have a full 3 min song structured and ready to go for more polishing.
- Plugged a baby Akai keyboard in when the pads weren’t doing it for laying beds of synths or pianos.
- using the scale feature to set each verse chorus etc. Until I figured out you could do this by scene I was having difficulty with key changes that I wanted to put into the song
- tailoring the input to the instrument/mic I’m using. My vocals were way too quiet until I figure out how to make the input ‘High’ for the SM58.
- using “fixed length” to limit my recording to the length I want. Before I figured that out I would be jumping to try to stop the recording at the right time, with varying degrees of success
Things I haven’t figured out:
- recording acoustic guitars. Something about the session view doesn’t really work for me for doing this. I end up tracking those once I get into the laptop.
- vocal lines that start before the particular scene. Again, just the nature of the session view. If I have those I have to re-record in the DAW or change lyric structure.
- mobility. As noted by many others it’s kind of heavy. It also real square. I bough a backpack for it but it’s pretty bulky. I envisioned when I bought it I’d be sitting in a coffee shop or out in the woods (lol). I have done some of that, but mainly for setting up drums and rhythm stuff.. my work flow involved instruments so I’d really be dragging a bunch of guitars and shit around which isn’t super practical. In my house though I post up in different places, and being free of sitting in my office in an office chair is really liberating