PUSH 3 MPE from Ableton

Seems the controller sold out first day of release- MPE mainstream? Anyway- it looks very powerful and very expressive. Stand alone as well so portable MPE, lots to talk about!

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The one and onlyā€¦

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It supports pitch bend between pads in ā€œin key modeā€ layouts.

I canā€™t think of anything else which does, outside of perhaps an iPad.

That is not a small thing.


(the only thing Iā€™ve ever wanted to build for Linnstrumentā€™s user mode was a multi-zone version of exactly that, and itā€™s the only thing that Linnstrumentā€™s user mode explicitly doesnā€™t support.

Iā€™ve been fuming over that for most of a decade - itā€™s achievable, but only by maintaining a custom firmware, and requiring that users install it. As a result, I really never use mine. And it should have been my primary controller.

Granted, I donā€™t know that what I want will be achievable in Push 3, either. It probably is, if I disable the Ableton remote script. And it might be once their own User Mode is released. But if history is any indication, the right answer will be to wait for Novation to release the next Launchpad, and buy that instead.)

I have bought the standalone PUSH 3, I think itv will make an excellent MPE Drum machine/groovebox to use with my Osmose- A Dawless/live MPE setup- who would have thought!

Initial feedback for the MPE side seems very good, scale mode makes it far more playable for me and it isnā€™t ā€˜justā€™ an MPE surface, it is the full package, midi and audio recording, fx, controller etc.

Honestly, I think the Osmose and PUSH 3 Standalone my be the perfect pair! Maybe the holes on the Osmose are to mount a PUSH 3!

One of the best videos so far for me as I am interested in the CV side as well (about 19 minutes in)

Iā€™d hold off until we know with more certainty how much weight those holes can support.
(Push 3 brings a lot of that to the table, as well.)

Got mine today, the standalone one. Pads feel great, very sensitive, this and the Osmose are now my go to MPE controllers.

Iā€™ve tried it with a WIDI Bud Pro plugged into its USB hots port so that I can use it as a wireless MPE controller and that works fine too. I also used an Osmose to control some of the Live MPE synths, again using WIDI stuff. Also used WIDI to connect to standard bluetooth on an iPad and play iPad MPE synths with it.

More broadly there seem to be various bugs with the wider system, as we might expect being an early adopter for this sort of complex device. Most of them are not MPE-related, maybe one or two MPE ones will show up given more time.

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Got mine today, love it- My Osmose new best friend :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:
Those pads are great, very playable - this feels like a high quality MPE instrument/workstation.

Updated firmware and installed a few packs- had about 5 hours solid on it with no issues at all (I am sure there will be bugs but I havenā€™t come across any yet just jamming around)

I wonder if the firmware I installed to day is the same as people, were downloading a few days ago (or even yesterday!) as havenā€™t see a changelog!

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I expect there havent been any updates since the one that was made available at launch. We can check version numbers, and people will certainly talk about it online when new updates are available for their device via the ā€˜check for updatesā€™ routine, etc.

Today by hacking around with other peoples existing Push 2 code, I was able to establish that in controller mode third parties can still draw to the screen of the Push 3 in the same way they could on the Push 2. Just a USB Device ID change and USB MIDI port name changes.

I have no doubt the P3 will be ā€˜hackedā€™ (supported by Ableton or otherwise) to work with Bitwig etc. Standalone it could be just about anything with MAX!

Yeah. I figured out how to get the screen working in DrivenByMoss, but now the real developer will have to work on it.

Iā€™ve also started to figure out what sysex commands are used to change pad mode to MPE and change the various expressivity MPE settings for the pads.

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Sounds promising - I noted there was a PUSH 3 standalone update today (1.1.1) but no idea whatā€™s changed (edit- Only provides compatibility with some control surface that was mistakenly left out of the v1.1 , no bug fixes or anything yet- from Ableton mod)

I missed the continuous pitch bending in scale mode. I guess that is missing from the Linnstrument, and sounds like it could pretty cool to have.

I was a bit worried about the limited octave range versus the Linn but I suppose scale mode would get you another octave or two :thinking:

Great to hear all the positive feedback so far. May break down and get one eventually.