Some thoughts on the Ableton Move
I’ve been using the Move in various situations over the last week. I have traveled with it and used it in my studio.
Battery: this thing charges a little bit slowly for my taste. I can’t imagine that the battery is really all that big. I’m using a 60w charger so I know it’s not the charger. Also when charging using a normal USB cable it’s really really slow. The battery life is respectable but I wish it had a dimmer LED setting so that I could conserve a bit more battery and also be more comfortable in low-light settings. It’s easy to forget to plug in the Move when it’s not being used in a mobile setting. It’s a bummer when it runs out of battery on your desktop.
Speaker: The speaker is not very loud. It’s ok that it doesn’t have a lot of bass, but the OP-Z is audible in somewhat noisy environments which makes it usable without headphones in an airport lounge for example.
Pads: This is a shining point for the Move. I really like these pads. They are quite playable and lend themselves to melodic keyboard-style play. Little glissando slides and grace notes are all very easy to do. The rubber is not super tacky or grippy so you can slide your fingers across the pads. They are still soft enough to feel good though. I think they got this part right.
Touch knobs: Another good point is the touch-sensitive knobs. Since there is only one screen generally touching a knob indicates its function on the screen. The workflow is pretty nice since you can just look at the screen and brush your fingers along the row of knobs if you can’t remember which knob is which. Also the main jog wheel knob is touch sensitive so you can do things like sample selection in the drum pads by lightly touching the wheel while playing the pads. This is well thought out in my opinion.
Functions: Most of the functions can be accessed using the sequencer buttons and shift. This is a nod to the Teenage Engineering stuff I believe, which is a nice workflow. Lights under the step button indicates things like the metronome being enabled, etc.
Workflow: I’m a fan of random sound assignments when creating new sets. This mixes things up just enough and prevents one of my main gripes with the OP-Z which is that I have to work kind of hard to get different-sounding tracks out of it. The jog wheel makes sense most of the time and there are some hidden gems like adjusting the sample start to chop up breaks. Copy/paste pads is pretty intuitive and deleting clips is too. Being able to undo and capture with a single button is great.
Apparently you can’t rename a set without using the Web interface. There may be some other things too. Some of the sounds seem a little limited in their modulation options. The knobs are hard-coded to certain functions and don’t seem to be editable.
Overall it’s an interesting product and it’s very informative to see where Ableton decided to limit things and where they went deep. Well. They didn’t go too deep anywhere really but some of the limitations don’t seem that limiting.
Increasing loop length should copy loop contents I think. The Elektron machines do this and it’s very handy to keep things flowing. I’m always happier deleting a few things than trying to add them back in when extending a loop.
The arpeggiator could use some more modes. As a controller/instrument this really has some potential. It’s pretty fun to play like a keyboard even though it’s a pad controller. I’d argue that it’s better even. Hitting the pads like an MPC is a little less satisfying on this because there is a stiffer feel to the pads. I’m not going to call this a negative though.
Live Control mode is a nice bonus. I will talk about that next.