Ableton Move

The Ableton Move puts a carefully chosen slice of Live into a beautifully portable box.

The Move looks like half a Push, but it’s more like an incarnation of Ableton’s Note app. Yes, it will work as a Live controller, but it’s also a standalone groovebox with four polyphonic instrument tracks assignable as drum kits, samplers or synths. It’s primarily focused on a particular workflow: capturing ideas away from the computer, then opening them for further development in Live, or in Note, using local or cloud‑based sharing. We’ll dive into everything the Move can do, and explore how it’s different from other similar format devices, and who it’s for.

On The Move

The Push is a notoriously hefty bit of kit, especially the standalone version. It does not belong in a beats‑on‑the‑tube lifestyle ad. The Move, on the other hand, is a true portable: light, slim and tough, and with an internal rechargeable battery. I’ve found that if a device is missing one of these factors, no matter how functional it is you’ll probably not use it around the house or take it on a trip. I count a speaker as optional, but the Move does have one. In or out of the studio I love devices with this aspect ratio, comfortable in front of a laptop or between a keyboard and display.

The panel is minimalistic. Musical input and clip launching are courtesy of four rows of eight velocity‑sensitive pads. Above these is a row of touch‑sensitive rotary encoders. A larger push encoder is paired with a small screen for various management, browsing and navigation duties. Miscellaneous mode and function buttons grace the wings, but you’ll probably have been drawn to the 16 buttons along the front: dedicated sequence gate controls, which you won’t find on the Push.

Gear reviews often complain about low‑light legibility. The Move’s screen and every button and mode indicator are backlit, or hidden if not used in a particular view. There’s nothing printed on the surface. Once you’ve learned the symbology, you can operate the Move in the dark. The lights and pads are very bright, aiding outdoor use. I found the second from bottom brightness setting ample indoors.

Continuing the minimal aesthetic, the Move’s back panel features just a 3.5mm headphone/audio output and input and USB‑A and C ports.

Connectivity round the back is also minimal. There’s a single stereo mini‑jack output for headphones or main out. An input is provided for sampling and there’s a built‑in mic hiding behind a tiny hole on the front. A Type‑A USB port is the only MIDI conduit, allowing the Move to host a USB‑based controller directly. It can do input and output, but not both at the same time.

USB‑C is used for charging and computer connectivity. Like the Push 3 standalone, the Move requires a high‑power USB source for external power and charging. It comes with its own 15W charger, but you can use your laptop charger, or a computer port will keep it topped up if it can push 7.5W. It would be more convenient if it could refuel from any old USB port, but there you go. When untethered, you’ll get two to three hours of usage.

Orientation

When booted, the Move presents you with the Set view, where up to 32 projects can be parked. If you tap an empty slot a new Set is created with a drum kit and three instruments with random presets. Sets load almost instantaneously, though not sync’ed or fast enough to be used like scenes.

The Move uses a clips grid Session view for launching the patterns you create on the tracks. To best fit the 4x8 landscape orientation, the Move turns the familiar Session view layout on its side, so the eight clip slots available to each track run horizontally. I was initially disheartened by the lack of scene launch buttons, but quickly realised that you can simply swipe down any row for the same result.

Tapping one of the four track buttons to the left of the grid puts you into Note mode, where you can play and sequence the track. Drum tracks grab the left‑hand side of the grid for 16 channels of sample playback. On melodic sampler and synth tracks the pads display notes in octave rows constrained to the Set’s scale, or in the guitarist‑friendly ascending fourths layout if you switch to chromatic.

Move drum tracks are powered by Ableton’s Drum Rack, with 16 channels of the Drum Sampler device: a new one‑shot focused sampler featuring a multi‑mode Playback Effects module.

Starting with random patches leads to instant jamming instead of the usual round of sound browsing, and is one of the main reasons I filled up the Set bank. However, if you prefer you can dive into the preset library, which allows instant auditioning as you scroll. You can undo patch loading, which is a useful luxury.

There are familiar options for recording clips in real time (preserving your timing unless you quantise after) or via the step buttons. But Capture (aka retrospective record) is where it’s at across Ableton’s growing ecosystem of software and devices. The Move does a good job of guessing your intentions when you hit the Capture button, and turns what you’ve just been playing or tweaking into recorded notes or automation. If you do this from a standing start it will guess the bpm and length of what you played. If you’re playing along to an existing beat it will overdub what’s there. I was initially sceptical about this when it was introduced in Live but was won over by the fantastic, visual implementation in Note, and I now rarely use the Record button.

Unusually for a groovebox, the Move allows the creation of sequences up to 16 bars long. I was able to work the same way as I do in Live: making a longer record pass then selecting a subset of the bars to loop as my working clip. It’s possible to copy sections, but there’s no way to delete bars — I often wished I could trim the start or crop the clip to the loop length.

The step sequencer buttons break you out of the more DAW‑like approach of Note, and to some extent the Push. It’s easy to drop notes and chords onto steps, adjust their length and velocity, and nudge their timing. Parameter‑lock automation works intuitively by holding steps and adjusting encoders. Things are missing that you tend to find on devices in this format. There are no concepts of probability, ratchets, sequence mutations or playback modes. Lanes in drum tracks all share the same loop length so you can’t have polymeters within one track’s patterns, although you can between tracks. However, there are some advantages to the behind‑the‑scenes engine being more DAW than drum machine: you can change the step resolution to up to 64 steps per bar and still have 16 bars (so you can at least program those ratchets), and triplet timings are catered for gracefully.

Instruments & Effects

Like on the Push 3 and Note, the Move’s instruments (and the effects which work alongside them) are devices taken directly from the Live desktop software. Drum tracks host a Drum Rack device with 16 channels, each powered by an instance of the new Drum Sampler module. On the Move this gives you a 16‑track drum machine/sampler packed into a track, with two master effects slots.

The encoders edit whichever pad you last tapped, controlling sample start, envelope and the ‘playback effect’ module. Touching any encoder shows its function on the screen, so I found myself often swiping across them all to hunt for the right control. A slight frustration is that when playing pads with your right hand, the screen tends to get obscured by your left hand reaching for encoders.

A second page of controls accesses settings and filters per channel, although getting to these is slightly awkward, more of a set‑and‑forget procedure than a real time modulation tweak. The drum kit has two effects slots: one send and one insert. Either slot can be filled from the bank of effects: Reverb, Delay, Saturator, Chorus‑Ensemble, Phaser‑Flanger, Redux, EQ and Dynamics.

The melodic sampler instrument leverages Live’s trusty Simpler device, again backed up by two effects. This provides pitched, polyphonic playback of a single sample. On the synth side you get Drift and Wavetable. Drift is quite a recent addition and is a two‑oscillator virtual‑analogue poly. Wavetable is a dual‑layer wavetable synth with a huge sonic range, and multiple filter modes and routings.

Drift and Wavetable are deep, versatile, desktop‑class virtual instruments. The catch is the same as it is on Novation’s Circuit Tracks: user control is limited to eight pre‑assigned macros. You can tweak presets, but not get into real sound design or patch creation on the hardware. On the positive side, the presets are very expressive and playable. The Move might not have the MPE capabilities of its big brother the Push 3, but the poly pressure sensitivity is nicely balanced on the pads, and the presets are set up to really respond to them.

The other saving grace if you’re squeamish about presets is that you can create your own patches in Live and export them to the Move. This includes setting your own macros, which are simply the Instrument Rack macros you know and love in Live. During testing this was only possible for drum racks and Drift patches, and required careful following of the device chain layout, but eventually this should be available for all the types, using templates built into Live’s Library.

Move Manager & Ableton Cloud

Sharing between the Move and a computer can be negotiated over WiFi (yay!) or USB, and just uses your web browser. It’s a basic file manager, with directories for accessing your Sets, recorded samples, sample library and instrument presets. There’s no requirement to assign things to fixed slots or directory structures, you can just make or upload your own folders as you see fit. The manager shows that the Move has over 50GB of onboard space available for user files.

Move Manager is simple and effective, but it’s a slight shame that there’s no direct interface with Live. The Push 3 appears as a volume directly in Live’s Browser. You can grab Sets directly, and drop presets onto the device, without having to go through a file export/import process as you do with the Move. Move Manager does show some signs of intelligence, though: you can export Sets as audio files directly from the browser.

Sets sync’ed to Ableton Cloud can be worked on in both the Move and Note, and imported directly into Live from the Places Browser. The Control Ring around the clips shows the launcher focus of the connected Move.

Sets on the Move can be downloaded and then opened directly in Live, or imported track by track into another session. However, the Ableton Cloud system — which was introduced to support Note app workflows – provides a straight route into Live, bypassing the Manager. The cloud system lets you park up to eight compositions in the ether, which will sync any changes made in the Move or Note, and appear in the Cloud space in Live’s Browser.

Once a Set is opened from the Cloud in Live it can’t go back, and needs to be saved as a local copy. The workflow that Ableton have designed is pretty clear: experiment, sample, capture ideas on your mobile devices, then bring them into your full‑featured production environment to develop further or inject into other projects.

File sharing with the Move is managed over WiFi in your web browser. As well as samples and Sets, instrument presets can be shared between Live and the Move.

MIDI, Sampling & Connectivity

More devices are starting to include a USB host port, allowing you to directly connect a USB‑based controller keyboard. The Move is ahead of the game here in the compact workstation space, as the likes of the Digitakt II, Polyend Play and Novation Circuit don’t offer this. A keyboard connected to the USB‑A port will trigger whichever track is currently focused, with no messing about with MIDI channels.

What’s missing are any other MIDI connections, and the USB port can only do input or output. Again, Ableton’s vision for the device appears to be focused on the standalone sketchpad concept. There’s not much scope for the Move to be the heart of a DAWless jam rig, for example. Compare this, say, to the new Roland P‑6 mini sampler that I also have on the bench: this has physical MIDI and sync ins and outs as well as USB.

Having said this, working alongside a single other device is pretty cool. I connected the P‑6 to Move via USB and set the Move to MIDI Out mode. Not only did the P‑6 take power from the Move, it also sync’ed clock and transport without any set up. When MIDI Out mode is on, you can elect one of the four tracks to output MIDI, and use that track to sequence the external device. The Move also of course supports Ableton Link, so sync can be achieved over WiFi with DAWs and devices that support it.

Plugging the audio output of the P‑6 to the input on the Move, I found audio was also passed through. This persistent monitoring is an option in the sampling settings. Talking of which... Sampling on the Move is really simple. After arming, the Move asks you to press a pad. When you do, it starts recording. In a drum track, the new sample will land on the pad you chose, where it can be trimmed and shaped with the usual drum channel controls. On a melodic sampler track, your new recording is pitched across all keys, with the pad you tapped playing the original pitch.

As well as the audio input, the Move has a built‑in mic that you can sample from, and you also have the option to resample. Resampling records the mix out, and starts playback as soon as you tap your destination pad. If resampling is part of your workflow, this makes it really easy to bounce or capture phrases or loops down to a pad. Unfortunately, switching to Session view stops recording, so this is not a way to capture a full song performance. There’s a ‘lazy chop’ feature, where you can tap multiple pads while sampling to slice across several pads. Each pad gets the full recording with unique in and out points, so you can adjust after the fact.

When connected to a computer via USB‑C, the Move acts as a class‑compliant audio interface, so stereo audio can be passed in either direction. Currently audio output only works when the Move is in Live Controller mode, but apparently a future update will allow sampling directly from your computer or phone in standalone mode. Perhaps Ableton could also address the fact that no MIDI is passed across the USB‑C connection. You couldn’t for example use the Move as a sequencer or pad controller for anything other than Live.

What It’s Not

We’ve mostly looked at what the Move is; let’s look at what it’s not. First, the Move is not an audio recorder or looper, and this is top of my wish list for any future development (as it was with Note). It would be great to be able to throw audio loops into a track, but mainly I’d really love to be able to use the Move to capture audio clips, well, on the move. For me this would be grabbing synth loops from hardware, or recording guitar parts. For singer‑songwriters and rappers this would make the Move incredibly compelling.

You can do a kind of pseudo audio clip recording via sampling. I experimented with setting up clips with a single trigger at the beginning and trying to trigger sampling during playback, but without any sync’ed or threshold detection modes it’s hit and miss. You also need to adjust clip time to match the sample length, and you probably want to switch to gate mode and adjust note length to stop your samples playing out to the end every time you stop the transport. Novation tweaked their Circuit Rhythm to make this workflow easier, but I really hope to see true audio clip functionality added in the future.

The Move is certainly more portable than the standalone Push, measuring 313.5 x 146.3 x 34mm and weighing 0.97kg.

The other thing the Move isn’t is a performance machine. There’s no dedicated mixer, you adjust track levels and pads individually within each track view. There are master effects which you can tweak in Session view, but they’re not particularly aimed toward real‑time creative use. There’s no master filter or beat repeat type effects for example, or performance effects like a step repeat for variations and fills.

Likewise there’s no arrangement or song mode facilities, and you’re limited to eight clips per track, and therefore eight scenes. In fact it’s more like seven as there’s no clip‑stop operation so you need to keep an empty slot as a workaround.

Ableton say that they certainly do want to deliver major feature upgrades to the Move and Note over time, and didn’t rule out any of the above, as well as other sequencing and workflow enhancements. However, design is as much about what you don’t do as what you do, and the vision for the Move/Note is skewed toward simplicity, fun and ideas generation, with the Push and Live providing full production and performance environments.

Like me, your initial objection might have been, ‘only four tracks?’ On the face of it this sounds light when most competitive devices sport eight or more. But there are tracks and then there are tracks. Tracks on a Digitakt or drum tracks on Circuit are monophonic channels. Drum tracks on the Move have 16 voices and channels, and all the synths are polyphonic, so more comparable to something like the Roland SH‑4D in capacity. What’s more, you can play the samples on drum tracks melodically via a 16 Notes view on the right side of the grid, effectively giving you multiple channels of monophonic melodic sequencing in addition to the dedicated tracks.

Also, the tracks are versatile: you can choose to have four tracks of drums if you like, giving you 64 sample playback channels. But yes, it would be nice to have more tracks to make it easy to add layers on different clips for control in Session view. And it’s a shame that there isn’t complete feature parity with the Note app, allowing you to shuffle projects in either direction. You can open a Note set on the Move if they’re both connected to your Ableton Cloud but only the first four tracks will play. Thankfully at least the out‑of‑bounds tracks are maintained if you round‑trip a Set through the Move.

Conclusion

Most of the grooveboxes and beat workstations I’ve lived with are full of the beginnings of ideas and half‑formed tracks that I thought were interesting but didn’t do anything with. I like to think I make music with hardware synths, but tracks I actually finish start and end on the computer. Even with my Maschine+ or Elektron boxes that have clear routes to getting ideas out and into a DAW there’s routing to set up here, an SD card to move there, plug‑ins that need to be in place. The Move removes the friction points by creating projects that are native to your DAW, and are instantly available over WiFi or cloud. So long as you use Live.

The instruments and effects powering the Move are wicked powerful by groovebox standards.

The instruments and effects powering the Move are wicked powerful by groovebox standards, and you can capture meaningful musical moments outside of the typical four‑bar limit. However, if Live isn’t your platform of choice, or you tend to develop and arrange music out of the box, then the Move may not be for you. It lacks the means to develop songs, and the sound design, exploration and performance depth of a standalone workstation.

Ableton have reimagined the groovebox as part of a music creation workflow that extends outside the studio, giving you a little piece of Live to go.