New Ableton Push 3 (Standalone) - Force Competitor?

stonecoldgroove wrote:Aren’t these two things different devices at their respective core?

Force was never marketed as “a DAW in a box”.. lots of us try to use it that way because we can see how to do it.

Force is an amazingly spec’d drum machine performance platform.

Push 3 is literally a daw in a box. Made by the people who make possibly the most popular DAW on the planet.

Literally the inverse is true. Push was not advertised as DAW in a box, but marketing is kinda irrelevant.
Push is just a kickstarter for ideas, while Force was made to be truly standalone.

Sorry for resurrecting this thread, but I am in a position where I have been through the Maschine and then the MPC Live 2 and neither workflows got me to a place where I am truly satisfied. The MPC is just awesome when you want to jot down quickly ideas, but the whole concept of sequences and no arranger is killing me.

I have been evaluating getting a Force but, again, I am not entirely sure the workflow will let me create fully-fledged songs just on the device, which is actually what I have been looking for. That will sound like I am looking for a standalone DAW and yes, that is one part of the deal. The other part of the deal is that I want the device to be musician's friendly, just like the MPC with no need to start messing around with mouse and keyboard. Can anyone share his experience with the Force when trying to come up with songs from beginning to end?

Or is the Push 3 a viable (maybe the only, although super expensive) option at this point in time?

Push 3 is basically Ableton Live in Clip Mode... it works fine... and sure you can "arrange" here by launching a row of clips and kind of working your way down... it's what I'd do to record to arranger view a lot of the time...

but... Push 3 doesn't *have* an arranger. Sure, it can play arrangements if you load up a session with an arrangement in it... but you cannot "officially" create an arrangement as of now on a Push 3. So yeah, you can definitely get a lot of work done ahead of going to arranger view... but to actually arrange you'll likely still end up at the computer.

Force compares pretty well to Ableton Live Clip Mode and Arrangement Mode. It functions a lot like the MPC for many tasks, but has what many consider to be a superior mixer experience... and swaps out Song Mode for Arranger Mode.

Where I think a lot of folks trip up on the Force is not realizing that it can really function as 3 distinct and separate parts of the machine... with split pads, alternative views/modes for the touch screen, etc. Seriously, it can get pretty wild when you start using Macros. While the MPC controls and touchscreen all track together to serve whatever function you are in, the Force can get rather split brained there... very flexible, but easy to confuse people who aren't understanding what it is doing.

Personally I had both... returned the Push 3... it's got some *really* nice features... but it really wants your home to ultimately be back at the PC. I am sure some smart folks with come up with M4L modules to do fancy arranger tricks... and Ableton *may* drop an arranger eventually for the Push 3... I mean it is software after all... but I wouldn't keep my fingers crossed... the Push 3 is *very* similar to the Push 2, and the Push 2 never manifested an arranger so I suspect it may be out of the cards... but what do I know.

I did also sell off the Force... but mostly because I am trying to reduce the amount of gear I own. The Force is a solid piece of gear... but I figured I'd pass it along and stick with the MPC for now... and when I get down to something more manageable I might hop back onto the Force.

Hope that helps.

I've made maybe two songs with the Force's Arrange mode as a dogma sort of experiment, and for me it's not worth the trouble.

Imagine an Ableton Arrangement where each track has exactly one clip, from the beginning of the project to the end. You cannot divide the clip, you cannot move it, you cannot delete it, you can only edit the notes inside. Or like, if you had one launch scene that you just call "arrangement". One clip is one track. That's the Force's arranger for you. It is an arranger of individual MIDI notes. Not an arranger of any sort of blocks, let alone song parts. Why would anyone want to use such a thing for producing entire songs? I do not know.

You can use the arranger for recording a launch scene performance, and then fine-tune the details. But you can't, for example, copy a set of launch clips directly to the arrangement, you have to record it in realtime, kind of like recording on tape.

NearTao wrote:Push 3 doesn't *have* an arranger. Sure, it can play arrangements if you load up a session with an arrangement in it... but you cannot "officially" create an arrangement as of now on a Push 3. So yeah, you can definitely get a lot of work done ahead of going to arranger view... but to actually arrange you'll likely still end up at the computer.

This is already a no-go in my case. I would like to arrange on the standalone hardware. If I have to go back to the PC, I might as well just use the MPC to create my sequences and then switch to the PC to arrange and change them as sort of clips.

NearTao wrote:Force compares pretty well to Ableton Live Clip Mode and Arrangement Mode. It functions a lot like the MPC for many tasks, but has what many consider to be a superior mixer experience... and swaps out Song Mode for Arranger Mode.

Ok but how is the arranger mode working? Can you use it like Cubase or any other DAW where you can just pick a MIDI track, select a clip, make a ghost copy or make a copy and edit that copy and move all those clips around as you want?

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:I've made maybe two songs with the Force's Arrange mode as a dogma sort of experiment, and for me it's not worth the trouble.

Imagine an Ableton Arrangement where each track has exactly one clip, from the beginning of the project to the end. You cannot divide the clip, you cannot move it, you cannot delete it, you can only edit the notes inside. Or like, if you had one launch scene that you just call "arrangement". One clip is one track. That's the Force's arranger for you. It is an arranger of individual MIDI notes. Not an arranger of any sort of blocks, let alone song parts. Why would anyone want to use such a thing for producing entire songs? I do not know.

That sounds crazy. It sounds like it's only useful for recording a live performance of clip launching and fiddling around with macros by the look of it.

In this regard, the Maschine arranger sounds light-years ahead. I can't believe the Force does not allow having different clips or patterns or sections or however we want to call them in a single track

The Force's "arranger" isn't.

It's an event recorder. You are the arranger. You prepare your track, then you perform it into the event recorder, then render that.

I wish they hadn't called it an arranger, because people get all aggro about how it's not what they expect, instead of understanding how it works.

btw the way you describe the arrenger on the Force is pretty much the same as when you process a song in MPC to a new sequence. You end up with a new sequence which is the same duration as all the sequences you put in your song and you have the tracks that carry the whole structure in a single item... so if you have to modify the notes you are actually working on the single notes of the whole track and no longer on sections you can repeat. It really looks like a lousy way of naming something already existing on an MPC differently and pretending it is something different even if it is not

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:You can use the arranger for recording a launch scene performance, and then fine-tune the details. But you can't, for example, copy a set of launch clips directly to the arrangement, you have to record it in realtime, kind of like recording on tape.

You can go into the clip editor & copy all data & paste it into the arranger. You'll have to do it 1 clip at a time, but once you get fast on the Force it's not that bad.

B-Wise wrote:You can go into the clip editor & copy all data & paste it into the arranger. You'll have to do it 1 clip at a time, but once you get fast on the Force it's not that bad.

But that does not give you flexibility. If I have a section that is repeating and I want to make a change to that section and see it reflected in all the places it is being used (a typical use case with a DAW), I will have to go over every single place and apply the same change. It can get really tedious.

You mean like "ghost copies" of clips like old Cubase. Or like Reason's song mode. I don't think Ableton has that either, at least version 9. But in Ableton you can copy entire blocks with a few mouse clicks.

Then again, it's not necessarily a bad workflow if you have to make decisions and commitments. Write the damn arrangement and record it. Done. Next tune. No?

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:You mean like "ghost copies" of clips like old Cubase. Or like Reason's song mode. I don't think Ableton has that either, at least version 9. But in Ableton you can copy entire blocks with a few mouse clicks.

Then again, it's not necessarily a bad workflow if you have to make decisions and commitments. Write the damn arrangement and record it. Done. Next tune. No?

Yes, you are right. That would be like ghost copies. I am pretty sure Ableton 11 does not support that. But as you said, as long as making a change and duplicating it over with just one click is easy, that's cool.

The problem I see with the Force (and I have been watching some videos of people changing the arrangment manually between yesterday and today) is that you lose completely track of the sections as you get a track with all the notes and no divisions where they repeat. And since the screen is small you have to zoom in and it's really easy to lose the focus of where you are in the song just by looking at the screen. You can use markers but the markers are only visible if you stay at the top of the view (what a bad UX decision!).

BTW if I had the whole arrangment already in my head, I wouldn't even need to go back and change anything in there But I am one of those guys who keep playing around with the parts, cutting stuff, moving it around, until I am satisfied

When arranging on the MPC, I use an extra display on the side - paper & ink technology, or sometimes a laptop with a spreadsheet, where the missing arranger view (sort of) goes !

More seriously, the real no-nonsense solution is to use something that actually works for the purpose, like Ableton. The Force makes sense for improvising and playing stuff live. But if the end-result is a complete finished song, audio file, do it with a desktop computer.

Ableton Live seems to be a must-have companion for the Force. If you're preparing a live set, prepare it in Ableton, export to Force. If you want to finish an idea started on the Force, export to Ableton. If you want a multisampled keygroup instrument, make it in Ableton's Sampler and export to Force. If you want to convert a Kontakt sample program, load it into Ableton's Sampler first, cut it down to Akai limits and export to Force. If you want warping/stretching, do it in Ableton and export to Force.

Jean-Marc Liotier wrote:When arranging on the MPC, I use an extra display on the side - paper & ink technology, or sometimes a laptop with a spreadsheet, where the missing arranger view (sort of) goes !

Is this a commonly used crutch or am I ridiculous and in need of accepting that a DAW would suit me better for final assembly ?

HouseWithoutMouse wrote:More seriously, the real no-nonsense solution is to use something that actually works for the purpose, like Ableton. The Force makes sense for improvising and playing stuff live. But if the end-result is a complete finished song, audio file, do it with a desktop computer.

You are right in that sense. What I would actually like is something like a DAW coupled with a controller in a single hardware piece that I can take with me.

Ideally the Push 3 should be that item... but that doesn't really look like the case. The Force has potential but is missing some core song-building functionalities. Maybe the Maschine+ could fill that gap, in the sense that the arranger of Maschine is pretty feature-complete. I don't know if there are other contenders at that level.

The iPad is also an option I evaluated but I find that Cubasis and BeatMaker are quite unstable. The plugins even more so.