The Portable Orchestra
Philipp von Lintel, head of industrial design at Ableton (all images by Jonas Holthaus).
It’s 17 October, 2012, and Gerhard Behles emerges from the shadows and arrives stage right at the Jazz Institute Berlin. Tall and svelte, the German entrepreneur stops near centre stage with his arms outstretched, taking in the crowd’s applause in a simple black suit with a nude headset microphone curving round his jaw. He’s here to take a victory lap: it’s been 13 years since he launched music software company Ableton with Robert Henke and Bernd Roggendorf. As he stands before the crowd, Ableton Live – the company’s primary product – is one of the most popular electronic music programmes in the world. Behles is poised to announce the latest edition of the software, but he takes a short detour instead.
“I’m going to talk to you real quick about something much bigger than us: the Ableton community,” Behles says earnestly as he finds his footing in front of a projection of the New York skyline. As he speaks, the words “1,697,421 Ableton Live users” stretch across the night sky. “That’s almost exactly the population of Manhattan,” Behles notes. “Isn’t that mind-boggling? Imagine a city the size of Manhattan where everybody is making music with Live, and what kind of place that would be.”
The Ableton Push 3.
“I was drawn to [electronic music] for one reason, really,” Behles continues. “The promise that you can make the whole sound, the whole song, from scratch.” Rhythm, melody, harmony, sound, and form: these are the five components of music, he explains. An electronic musician’s job is to choreograph these elements as carefully as a ballet. But existing instruments are clumsy and hard to handle, he notes. Ableton Live helped streamline this process, but Behles wants more. He wants an instrument with which artists like him could easily layer a synthesiser chord over a drum beat, and line up the resulting clip as a sequence to be played at will. He’s after an electronic orchestra the size of a drum machine, or a full studio kit that’s as easy-to-use as a synth – an instrument powerful enough to play electronic music live at a club, but compact enough that you can carry it off backstage by yourself too.
As he explains his vision for the future, Behles walks back to stage right, then kneels by a nerdy black backpack that’s propped up against the podium. He draws from it a slim black console, not much larger than a PlayStation, and apparently not much heavier: Behles easily turns the console around in his hands until a multi-coloured grid of silicone buttons faces the crowd. In a recording of the event uploaded to YouTube later in the month, Behles proudly holds the device up to the camera like a trophy as a hammy grin steals across his face. He says, “I want to introduce you to the Ableton Push.”
Philipp von Lintel (left) consults with Moritz Paul, a UX designer at Ableton.
“We wanted to make a hardware product, but nobody knew how,” explains Jesse Terry over a recent Zoom call. Terry is Ableton’s head of hardware and the co- creator of the Push, but he’s logging onto Zoom from his home studio in Pennsylvania, far from the company’s headquarters in Berlin. He’s been with Ableton for nearly 20 years, and moved back to the States a few years ago to be closer to family. Behind him, there are four electric guitars mounted on the wall. To his left, there’s an impressive collection of vintage synthesisers that he’s fiddling with between work tasks. “I’m not a hardware engineer or anything like that,” Terry confesses, “but I like to tinker with things, and to fix them, hopefully.”
Still, Terry is perfectly positioned to tell the story of the Push, just as he was perfectly positioned to bring it to life over a decade ago. When Terry joined Ableton in 2005, it was still a software company best known for Live, a popular digital audio workstation that remains an industry standard to this day. But as Behles prepared for Ableton’s first foray into hardware, Terry was a natural choice to lead the way: he worked in artist relations and business development, and had collaborated with consumer electronics brand Akai in 2009 to develop the APC40, a dedicated controller made-to-measure for musicians working in Ableton Live. The Akai controller had represented a new horizon for Ableton. Using it, musicians could easily navigate Ableton’s software both in their studios and on stage. And while the Push was designed in collaboration with Akai, it was the first hardware product released as a part of Ableton’s portfolio, transforming the Berlin- based software company into a leader in music tech.
Work in Ableton’s hardware workshop.
When it came to designing the Push, form followed function: Behles and Terry were after an instrument that could arrange singular units of music (“samples”) to be played either in a predetermined order (“sequenced”) or activated by a single keystroke (“triggered”). It seemed straightforward enough. At the time, you could find drum machines and step sequencers on the market that did approximately this. Behles proposed, however, that their instrument should be equally adept at composing and arranging melodies and harmonies, and maybe even editing sounds. Armed with sawn-apart MIDI controllers, a soldering iron, and a box of plastic toys, Terry got to work. As the scope of the project expanded, so did the design, with Terry and Behles experimenting with a few different layouts and key patterns. At the time, Lego offered corporate accounts to order custom sizes and shapes, of which Terry took full advantage. The kids’ toy made it easy to arrange and rearrange the buttons he salvaged from older controllers. He attached each button to a Lego brick, then snapped them into place on a grey Lego baseboard alongside Lego miniatures he made of the Ableton executive board. “The first Push was really a Frankenstein product made of Legos,” he says. Before he knew it, he was at Akai’s offices in Rhode Island to review the official Push prototypes and, by March 2013, the Push 1 was ready for commercial release.
Ableton’s history as a software company proved to be both the Push’s most exciting proof-point and one of the most formidable challenges that it faced. Ableton Live’s Manhattan-sized community came from around the world, spanning Grammy winners and dilettante teenagers alike. The Push needed to anticipate and meet their many needs, and to do it with the style and ease-of-use to which Ableton fans had grown accustomed. Part of Ableton Live’s appeal is that it makes making music simple: previous digital audio workstations helped producers manage recorded samples, but Ableton Live allowed them to record and produce new and novel sequences either in the studio, or live on stage. The software was designed with users in mind. It stripped electronic music of coded jargon so that musicians could focus on their craft, not computer science textbooks. With the Push, Behles wanted an instrument that effectively did the same.
“It’s about the size, the touch, and the feel of the buttons.”
Terry was also perfectly positioned to carry this out: his work managing artist relations meant he’d seen firsthand how artists from around the world used Ableton Live, so he knew which features to pursue and how they might be used. He took early iterations of the Push directly to artists for their feedback, with DJ Jazzy Jeff and Flying Lotus among the first to play around with a prototype. Today, Terry estimates that he’s sat in on thousands of user research sessions like these – they’re still a central pillar of the Ableton design process, and one that shaped both the Push 2, which was released in November 2015, and the newly released Push 3.
Conducting these user research sessions is both an art and a science, Victor Mark says. As the principal designer behind the Push, Mark is in charge of user experience, and these research sessions help him explore unforeseen challenges and new opportunities. Teasing out these surprises is key. “You can’t just ask people what they want,” he says, before reciting an apocryphal quote from Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”
At Ableton, design is an ongoing process, and the Push is no exception. Patches and software updates bridge the gaps between individual product releases, but new products are spare and sparse. When the Push 2 was released just two years after the Push 1, the newer device met a few major milestones: its pads were touch sensitive, its layout was more intuitive, and Behles had finally found the perfect on-device display screen.[1] After that, the company waited nearly eight years to introduce the Push 3 in May 2023. There was no rush to flood the market with a new toy, anyway: Ableton’s instruments are built to last (a second-hand Push 1 will still set you back at least £100 on eBay). Instead, Terry’s team wanted to break new ground.
The Push 3 has been designed such that it can be converted from a model with an inbuilt CPU to one without.
While the Push 1 was designed in collaboration with Akai and the Push 2 was engineered in-house at Ableton, the Push 3 was the company’s first attempt at both designing and engineering an instrument on its own. Driving much of this process was Philipp von Lintel, who joined Ableton in 2017 as the company’s first in-house industrial designer. He had spent years building his product portfolio for Muji, Herman Miller, and Mattiazzi while a designer at London’s Industrial Facility, and the novelty of his new role came as no surprise to him. After having heard from a friend that Ableton relied on external consultants to produce the Push, he approached Terry’s team himself with a pitch: if they wanted to improve the design, they should have someone in-house to handle it. To von Lintel’s surprise, the team agreed with him, and he quickly got to work.
When von Lintel joined Ableton, the Push team was going back to basics. To Terry and Behles, the Push was meant to be its own musical instrument, and one that could be played both with and without a computer. They dreamed of an instrument that you could get lost in, far from an LCD screen, and with which you could sketch out ideas on its pads without worrying about incoming emails or notifications. “If you watch early videos of the Push 1 and Push 2, the team hid the laptop, which acts as the brain of the Push, because they wanted to focus on the instrument,” von Lintel points out. “I always wanted the Push to be a standalone instrument,” Terry says, “but if we had said we would make it a standalone instrument from the beginning, we’d have never released a product.”
The Push 3’s cardboard packaging doubles as a carry case. Also pictured are custom power and accessory cables.
To start the design process, von Lintel joined Mark and Terry on a trip to Japan and China. The trip’s purpose was twofold. While overseas, von Lintel could meet with potential suppliers and manufacturers, and the team as a whole could meet with end users to learn about how, when, and where they played with the Push. They were used to artists using the device on festival stages, in DJ booths, and in studios. But watching artists work in compact Tokyo flats drove home how crucial it was to keep the Push both powerful and portable.
Back in Berlin, von Lintel began building a proper hardware workshop in Ableton’s headquarters with a CNC machine, painting booths, and exhaust hoods to boot. The team was going back to the drawing board for the Push 3, salvaging what they could from previous editions while implementing new design standards that allowed the Push to function as a standalone instrument without the support of a computer. Von Lintel needed somewhere to rapidly iterate prototypes for testing, while still keeping new designs confidential. “If you have to ask another company to design a prototype, you need to get a quote, and you need to get it signed off and you begin to wonder if it’s really a good design, so you spend a bit more time on it,” he explains. “When you have the space to build it with your own hands, you can just make it.”
The hardware workshop was even more helpful to orient the rapidly expanding team. While Terry and Behles had sketched out the Push 1 themselves, the Push 3 involved members of the software team, the UX design team, the now-growing product and industrial design teams, logistics and operations, and the sales team too. The workshop allowed for these cross- functional teams to align on key aspects of the project, especially when introducing new features. “It’s about the size, the touch, and the feel of the buttons,” von Lintel stresses. The team frequently reviewed visual mockups and renderings, but for bigger changes, they needed to feel the difference between buttons and keys, and to understand how these feelings could fit into the flow of music making.
The touch and feel of the design work was especially important in shifting the pad design between the Push 2 and Push 3. The pads on the earliest Push devices were hard and less responsive than the team had wanted: in early demos, you can see Terry’s phalanges flex as he presses down hard to trigger a sample or compose a new beat. With the Push 3, the team upgraded the pads to include sensors for both the finger positioning and the force applied, allowing the act of pushing them to replicate the experience of playing an analogue instrument. There are 12 musical notes that make up the chromatic scale, but experienced musicians can dip and glide between these notes for dramatic effect: the slide of a trombone, the twang of a guitar, and even the broad vibrato of an opera singer help add colour and feeling to a composition. With the Push 3, users can do the same. As your fingers slide between the grid of pads, individual notes bend and tighten, breaking out of the 12-note scale and into the range of blues, jazz, and full expressive freedom.[2]
The biggest changes to the Push came from the company’s shifting priorities, however. Ableton was interested in instruments built to last, and ones that were designed to reduce their environmental impact. As such, a number of changes were incorporated. The Push 3’s cardboard packaging doubles as a sturdy travel case, for example, while the body’s design uses as many single-material components for durability and waste reduction as possible. But these changes seem superficial compared to the conceptual leap between the second generation Push, which relies on an external computer, and the third generation Push, which can function on its own. “The idea was that the Push should draw you away from the computer,” von Lintel explains. He says that this shift brought with it a new set of design challenges: “If there were a computer inside the device itself, what would that mean in terms of its thickness and construction? How would we cool it?” And what about the artists who prefer using their Push in tandem with a laptop?
It took eight years, but the team reached a working solution. They released two different set-ups for the Push 3. The first configuration includes an internal CPU and a heatsink that let it function as a standalone instrument, while the second set-up is tethered to an external computer. Ableton also designed and released a do-it-yourself upgrade kit with all the parts needed to move between the two different set-ups, in hopes of extending the product’s lifespan. Von Lintel points out that it would have been easier to design two separate devices, but a customisable model made more sense for Ableton’s goals. “If you use a device for four or five years instead of two or three years,” he says, “its carbon footprint grows smaller and smaller.”
Designing the Push as a standalone instrument was a technical challenge as well as an ideological one. With limited time and resources, the team was tasked with bigger-picture questions about how they envisioned their device being used. For example, as the Push transitioned from an electronic instrument to a tool also capable of computing, how should they handle data and privacy? They could devote their time to developing a more intuitive interface, or they could spend the same time encrypting the device, protecting it from being accessed externally. They imagined Beyoncé and her producer as an end user. As Beyoncé takes the stage at a festival and her producer connects the Push to the local wi-fi network, what would happen to her unreleased tracks? Could the Push be hacked? Mark says the team quickly decided that upgrading the security protocol was worth the investment, adding that, “At some point, it was just called the Beyoncé Feature.”
This is how design can work. Together, discussions precipitate decisions, and these decisions become changes. But if you zoom out, you can see how these changes paint a complicated picture of what a modern musical instrument should be. The Push 3 is expressive in its function, but exacting in its form. It’s at once a powerful playground; a tool with which you can programme intense sequences of melodies and harmonies; and a device with which you can noodle around on a drum kit while bored in your bedroom. It’s made for use on the stage and the studio, and to be carried through an airport as well. If Behles wanted an electronic orchestra that could fit in a backpack, he’s finally found it in the Push 3.
[1] Behles and Terry wanted to include a full-colour display in the Push 1 to allow users to edit, sample, and splice audio with greater precision. Ordering a made-to-measure display would have cost a small fortune, but Behles found a mass produced display screen that matched the exact width of the Push pads in a rental car.
[2] A similar effort to introduce this kind of expressive quality
into new instruments was explored in designer Roland Lamb’s Seaboard, which writer John L. Waters described as a “fretless piano” in his exploration of the device in Disegno #4.
Words Nathan Ma
Photographs Jonas Holthaus
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.