Space Oddity by Chris Hadfield

This video seems to be everywhere at the moment. I will do my part sharing it. I goes to territory of this blog and I had to post something. Ok, it is quite cool too.

Diego Stocco: Sound Magician

Diego Stocco: Sound Magician

This goes more into sound design territory than music. Short videos with interesting sounds and how they are done. There were couple sounds that you can use in music. Others were pure sound design.

SoundWorks Collection – The Sound and Music of Oblivion

More sound design than music. But interresting anyway.

Prophet 12 Features Overview- Dave Smith Instruments

I am bit disappointed that they went for digital oscillators. I was looking forward for this, but now I don’t see no reason. I can do all that with my software synths and effects. This feels like u-he ZebraHZ on hardware except that ZebraHZ have more functionality. Mopho X4 seems more interesting now.

Email Guitar

That could be fun.

Akai MPC Fly Review

It is hard to believe that Akai would do something like that. I have liked their stuff so far. Push is latest example of their good products and I am planning to buy MPK 88 at some point. Before anyone says Push is Ableton product, it engineered by Akai.

Finally…. Ableton Push

I finally got mine today. After short test run it feels as good as I expected. Pads are not good for playing instruments that have good velocity sensitivity and you want your dynamics to come out. Pads did their job when I played with Ableton’s instruments. With Pianoteq they were terrible. Maybe with different velocity curve Pianoteq could be playable with pad, but with default settings it was terrible. There is still need for midi keyboard.  Pads work with synths. I can see myself preferring pads over piano keys on some synths. With Push you need to put you VST instruments to instrument rack if you want to use them working only on Push.

Drums were the reason I bought Push. They didn’t let me down. They are as easy as you could expect from videos. One thing I don’t remember from videos is that you can have different patterns for drum in one clip. I mean that for example snare could have different patterns in one scene and you can select which pattern is used. Using drum sequencer makes hits almost full velocity hits. For this reason it is better to play drums than use sequencer. Of course you can adjust velocities later with computer.

Session view is similar than in Launchpad. There haven’t been much information on mixing view on Push. So here is little about that. You can select between single track and multitrack views. On Single track view you have all mixing options (Vol, Pan and Sends) for one track. On multitrack view you have one mixing option for 8 tracks. Screen is big enough and has everything you need. If you use Ableton’s instrument or have made instrument racks out of out VSTs you can make songs only working on Push. That requires that you have everything ready.

After first test drive Push feels good addition to my studio. It won’t replace everything but can do almost everything if I need more mobile studio.

EDIT: That one thing I didn’t remember from videos is not as I though it was. You can use it like that but it is actually selecting which bars of session you are playing. Other correction is that you can change velocity in step sequencer by pressing step and adjusting velocity. There might be other errors too.

EDIT 2:  There are selectable velocity curves in Push and there are ones that work with Pianoteq too.