Hey friends! BAM BAM BAM! Abledon Push 3 is finally here. And in this video we're going to go over all of its new features, how it compares to the previous pushes, and in the end my personal thoughts on what is definitely one of the most anticipated pieces of hardware for electronic musicians globally. Let's do it. Versus the previous pushes, Push 3 is a quantum leap ahead in so many significant ways. Now a full disclosure, Abledon gave me this push for early review, but they don't have any say in the content of this video. Now I'm sure you want to check this thing out? Let's go. So just like the previous pushes, Push 3 is of course an amazing controller for Abledon Live, but now with Push 3, it can run by itself without a computer attached to it. In standalone mode it runs its own custom designed operating system, allowing you to create music wherever you are. So similarly to a laptop it's got a built in battery, a hard drive, a file system, and it can run max for live patches in standalone. So I fully expect there to be a flood of new Push 3 integrated max for live patches, once folks get their hands on this thing and they realize what this thing is capable of and it clicks that this is a whole new amazing platform for creation. So Push 3 can also connect to Wi-Fi for upgrades and it shows up in Abledon's browser so you can seamlessly drop devices and racks to and from the push, and of course when you open sets that you've made in standalone mode you can finish them on your computer. This for me is one of the most awesome features and we'll get into that later in the video. So another quantum leap ahead from the previous pushes is that Push 3 is also a fully integrated audio interface, whether you're in standalone mode or you're attached to your laptop. It features stereo balanced quarter inch inputs and outputs, a high quality headphone output, a dat for an additional 8 inputs and 8 outputs, and it has two foot switch jacks that can be converted to 4 CV outputs for controlling modular synths. It features MIDI ins and outs as 8 inch jacks so you can connect old school MIDI gear and finally it can even act as a USB host. In case you want to plug in a MIDI keyboard to it and yes, all of this I-O can run in standalone mode. Insane. So next Push 3 has received an amazing upgrade to its pads. The pads can output three simultaneous parameters, slide, per note pitch bend, and polyphonic aftertouch, allowing you to take advantage of MPE or MIDI polyphonic expression features both in Ableton native devices and in your plugins when you're in hosted mode. Maybe now you can see why Ableton has updated so many of its instruments to be MPE ready, as well as releasing drift for anyone that has any version of Ableton live. Check out what I'm able to do just by interacting with these pads. So if you look up in the right hand corner you can see our original controls for the macros and the mix. But you also now have clip view where you can edit clips with this amazing new feature this jog wheel. And then you also have this feature where you can take a look at session view and you can actually see the track names and the clip names and it's really really useful, right? But let's go ahead and look at the clip edit view and I want to show you more about this jog wheel. So maybe it was just me but when using the Push 1 or Push 2 I found that I could play the part that I was trying to create and get extremely close to what I was going for but I'd always end up reaching for the mouse to edit the last little bit of the idea. So having to do this snapped me out of looking at the hardware and put me back into laptop screen land. The jog wheel allows you to select individual notes or groups of notes and edit them quickly so you can finalize your idea right on the push and I got to say it feels really nice. So now let's move on to the user experience. So something that really stood out for me was that the preamps section allows you to tailor the inputs to whatever device you have plugged in like any audio interface. But as an experiment I loaded up one of my Ableton guitar racks into the push stand alone mode. And then I plugged my guitar in and dialed in the gain and much to my delight I now have a fully featured guitar modeller and idea musical idea sketch pad. So since my band tours a lot and I'm away from my studio a lot I realize that this is really going to come in handy. It's not easy or fun to always have to bust out a push a computer an audio interface just to capture an idea but now I could just bust out my guitar and plug it into the push boom I can record the idea that I have anywhere that I'm at right. So you may be a bit skeptical as I was about push three being able to run Ableton and stand alone considering all the complexities of problems and errors you can run into with crashes and so on. But there are some amazing quality of life features that really show how much care and time was put into developing this thing. I was doing something pretty daring I was trying to load a bunch of random third party max for live patches and one of them actually crashed the set. But fortunately push three in stand alone mode gave me the whole Ableton crash unexpectedly do I want to recover my work dialogue and it works perfectly. Another thing that happened is when I switched off my desk after a long night I forgot to switch the push off the battery died in the middle of the night but the push still saved my work. It even has this fun little feature where it'll create an auto generated name for your set and I got to say I like the names that it generates check these out revealing gaze over the tranquility etiquette of time they're pretty cool right. So some of my personal thoughts about push three I've been lucky enough to have songs that I've written reach a lot of ears and those of us that have been creating music for a long time know how important it is to seek some level of limitation when you're songwriting. Like if you have Ableton open on a laptop sometimes it's really difficult just to write a song when you could literally do anything modern DAWs like Ableton present the musician with so many options that you may just wind up tweaking a certain sound and all the sudden four hours go by and you haven't gotten anywhere. In my short time however with the push three I've written so many little jams and ideas and it's not just due to the fact that it's new to me it's that I can quickly bang out an idea without getting lost in the sauce of options but it's not truly limited because at any point I can bring the idea back into Ableton on a laptop and go crazy with adding plugins mixing automation and arranging the tune into a final track. Now the expressive pads are awesome and all the other amazing new features that they've added to push three are great but the secret superpower of push three is not having every single option available to you off the bat but having just enough options to get a diverse set of sounds that can help you get the basics of your idea out of your head. See you can always flesh the idea out later you can always put it back in a laptop. So overall I feel like push three is the fulfillment of the original idea behind the previous pushes that has now finally come to fruition. It takes on the near impossible task of giving musicians tools to create modern electronic productions without a mouse and does it with grace and style. The amount of music that I've created in my short time with this thing definitely is testament to its efficacy as a compositional tool. I'll say this though the cost of push three at $2,000 maybe a bit steep for some but when you take into account that it replaces many of the tools that you already have in your studio and packs it all into one device your audio interface your MIDI controller and even your computer if you want it to it all begins to make sense. So the only real criticism I can think of is that the push three has no active fan ventilation. When it's running in standalone mode the thing is a computer it needs to have its heat managed. The heat sink is located on the bottom right here right and it has this rad black finish. So while this is totally speculation I don't know if it makes sense necessarily to take the push and perform with it on stage in the middle of the summer at like a festival environment during the day because if the sun's beating down on the thing this is just speculation okay. If the sun is beating down on the thing it might overheat. I haven't run into any overheating issues and I understand the idea why you would put a heat sink on this versus a fan and that's because it's completely silent right you don't want the thing just you know blasting air into your microphone right it makes sense but I'm just kind of concerned about that of course this hasn't happened to me the push has never overheated and I actually haven't even got it to run out of CPU it's never run into any CPU issues either even though I've made projects and stand alone with a bunch of different tracks it's been great as far. There are so many good things to say about push 3. The expressive pads give you articulation over sounds to the degree we're using a controller feels closest to playing a real instrument that I've ever experienced. The addition of the jog wheel in my opinion makes the promise of actually making electronic music in a DAW without a mouse a reality. Push 3 really feels like the actualization and completion of a great idea. So I'll leave you with this fun little jam that I made with the push 3's new expressive pads. My good friend Summit has a drone so we took the push 3 into the forest and shot a little mobile push jam thingy. Anyway thanks for watching everybody much love see you next time.