“Sometimes, my inner skeptic is proved wrong, and Move has succeeded in that. And I have to hand it to Ableton: That’s not an easy thing to achieve.”
One of the biggest challenges I’ve had — and continue to have — as a musician and producer is translating the concepts, ideas, rhythms, and melodies in my head into something that I can develop into an actual finished musical product. For me, at least, that process is excruciating, and prone to failure; to describe it as frustrating is an understatement.
Every time I hear a pitch from a company framed as an idea to make that exact process easier, my eyebrows rise, my ears perk, and I keep hoping I’m going to hear the solution to the problem. Unfortunately, every one of these pitches to date has left me disappointed. Whether a software tool to let you hum a melody or beatbox a rhythm track into a mic and turn it into MIDI, or software that promises the world, but ends-up being a glorified clip library, I have yet to meet a “solution” that truly makes it easier to extract things from my creative brain, or make the overall creative process any easier.
The latest pitch along these lines comes from none other than Germany’s Ableton, and it’s called Move — keeping with the company’s penchant for four-letter product names. Move is Ableton’s second entry into the hardware market, following Push (which is now in its third generation), but also its second attempt (following their Note app) at something that promises to let you capture musical ideas anytime, anywhere. In fact, on the surface, Move feels a lot like Note, just arranged differently, and packaged up into a dedicated hardware device.
When Ableton talks about Move, it’s hard not to read things like, “Catch the first flashes of inspiration as quickly as they come.” Or, “Create faster than you can overthink,” and not believe I’ve heard this all before. I love Ableton Live – like many, it’s my DAW of choice – so I’m a bit biased when it comes to Ableton products. I really want to believe in the promise of Move, but it’s tough to put aside my healthy skepticism.
The Basics
Taking an initial look at Move, my skepticism is reinforced by the fact that what dominates the device are 32 backlit rubbery pads. Some quantity of these now seems to be a standard feature of every DJ- and EDM-producer-focused piece of hardware that comes to market — which immediately causes me to question the idea that Ableton is really innovating with Move. Surrounding the pads are a bunch of mostly unlabeled buttons and knobs, with a tiny LCD display in the upper-left corner. Some buttons do sport some iconography, and the 16 buttons along the bottom seem somewhat obviously to be for sequencer steps (because they are). But not many of the controls on Move make much sense without digging into the documentation.
Having to dig into a manual would seem to suggest that the design choices made by Ableton have the net result of making Move almost completely unintuitive for a new user, but that’s only partially true. To their credit, the company rolled out Move with a series of short videos that serve to quickly get new users rolling in easily digestible chunks. Still, Move might be viewed as an instrument in its own right, meaning that there’s both a learning curve and what I might call a “practice curve” required to be effective in using it.
But it was in watching these videos and following along with them that I began to see Move in a different light; this was in large part because, as I could have guessed, looks alone can be deceiving.
In Use
First off, Ableton has apparently used the same high-quality hardware for the pads that they’ve used on the Push, meaning that their sensitivity and accuracy are unusually good, and worthy of being considered part of an instrument. Secondly, there was clear UX (user experience) design effort put into the function and placement of the buttons, along with contextual features, like symbols that selectively light up under the front-most row of small (sequencer) buttons as you navigate functions.
Most interesting, though, were the knobs. They’re no ordinary twisters; simply resting a fingertip on any of them changes the unit’s little display contextually. For many of the knobs, its function and a setting level are revealed, so you can immediately see what’s what, and how your turning of a knob is affecting things. For the main control knob, this behavior is built into the overall UX approach itself, adding an interesting and intuitive aspect to using the device.
At this point, more of my skepticism began to subside. And as I progressed through the tutorials, even the limitations of Move — like the availability of just four tracks per set, a fairly narrow array of on-board sounds, a maximum of 32 sets — began to make much more sense in light of Move’s actual objectives to make it easy and quick to construct some musical ideas.
The thoughtfulness of the design of Move started to come into focus as well. Even something as simple as pre-loading a new set with four randomly selected tracks from within traditional categories (one percussion, three melodic) seems tailor-made for inspiration. (Of course, any of the chosen sample sets can be changed as desired.)
The general approach of Move is clearly modeled after Live’s session view, and in fact, Ableton uses the same nomenclature throughout. As a result, building a set becomes more intuitive than I would have guessed by doing nothing more than getting the lay of the land of Move, and then adding in years of hands-on experience with Live.
Programming beats can easily be done through finger-drumming or just tapping slots in the sequencer, while melodic elements can easily be tapped into place; for either type of musical content, you can enable the metronome to guide you and quantize as desired. For melodic elements, as with Push, you can choose between an in-key layout for the pads, or a chromatic layout that opens more creative possibilities. And one surprise? Move makes it easy to undo changes that you tried but disliked, whether clips you’ve recorded, or even things like effects parameters you changed, but don’t want to keep.
Ableton seems to have taken advantage of the portable, rechargeable-battery-powered nature of Move. (According to the company, a single charge gives you four hours of use.) There’s a built-in mic and a built-in speaker (plus built-in jacks for headphones and audio-in), so not only do you not have to use headphones with it, but you can also sample found sounds and incorporate those into your projects.
Ableton also seems mindful of the sort of ecosystem it’s creating with its combination of software (Live, Note) and hardware (Push, Move). With Move’s on-board WiFi connectivity, you can easily use Ableton Cloud to (bad pun alert) move your projects from the device and into Live for further development. You can also use Move as a controller with Live; simply tether it with its USB cable to your desktop computer, and off you go.
Speaking of which, it probably goes without saying that the material you initiate on Move is nowhere near release-ready as-is, but that’s the point: Capture inspiration and play with ideas whenever and wherever the mood strikes, and then develop those ideas further on the desktop, adding more richness, more effects, more instruments, more sounds, more flare — and finally see your random ideas through to the finish line.
Conclusions
I’m not convinced that Move is necessarily going to help me with my biggest musical challenge: Truly extracting ideas from my head, and into something I can use to actually create something. But perhaps that doesn’t matter; as I used Move, my skepticism subsided, and I can clearly see its value as a creative tool — as a method of synthesizing and playing with ideas in a low-risk, low-stakes environment that (with practice, anyway) is far more intuitive than I believe at the start.
Ableton has done a much better job than some of its contemporaries in offering a piece of hardware that actually delivers on its promise of inspiring creativity, perhaps owing to its aforementioned ecosystem, but moreover owing to some extremely clever design choices. This includes some real focus on what matters, and restraint with not adding everything they might have dreamed up. It seems to have a similar mission as Ableton’s own Note, but in the case of Move, it feels like they achieved it.
With a $449 entry point for Move, it’s not going to fit every budget. But, for me, even at this early stage of my using it, Move offers something special; it’s a legitimate tool that fits the way my brain works, doesn’t push me outside my comfort zone, and that offers real, tangible value.
Sometimes, my inner skeptic is proved wrong, and Move has succeeded in that. And I have to hand it to Ableton: That’s not an easy thing to achieve.