Ableton Move review: A supreme balancing act£399 / $449, ableton.com
Ableton hardware used to feel serious. Ever since the release of the original Push, the company’s physical offerings have catered to a class of professional musicians who are dedicated, skilled, and ready to invest in an instrument that can match their ambitions.
With the release of Move, Berlin’s premiere music tech company is sending a wholly different message. Portability, affordability, and accessibility are now on the menu.
To be clear, despite its almost toy-like size and feel, there is nothing frivolous about this instrument – the build is rock solid, the onboard sounds are fantastic, and the narrow yet powerful feature set has clearly been given a lot of thought. But, from the second you switch it on, Move has an addictive feeling of fun that borders on gamification.

READ MORE: “We wanted to make something simpler, more immediate, more joyful”: How Ableton built Move

It achieves this in several ways, starting with randomisation. Move has over 1,500 presets and each new Set you create is assigned a dice-roll assortment of drums, bass, melody, and pads. Not only is this a genuinely effective way to get you playing immediately, but it also makes you want to start the next tune – if only to see what new combination you’ll get.
Ableton could have taken this a step further: If you’re unhappy with one of the randomly selected instruments, you’ll have to resort to scrolling through samples and sounds via Move’s 1.3-inch screen and clickable jog wheel. This is a tiresome exercise on any hardware instrument – so why not add the ability to randomise a single instrument independently? An idea for future updates perhaps.

There’s been a lot of online discussion about Move’s number of tracks being limited to four and, for some, this will definitely feel creatively stifling. In my experience, each new random combination of instruments provides a surprisingly expansive set of musical possibilities. This is, in part, a testament to the quality of Move’s included presets – using only Drift, Wavetable, and Drum Rack, it offers a diverse but cohesive sound palette.
You’re not limited to sounds on the device, however. Sampling via Move’s tiny built-in microphone is effective for lo-fi sonics, and there’s a 3.5mm stereo line input if you want to capture external audio. Offering the combined power of the new Drum Sampler introduced in Live 12.1, the venerable Simpler melodic sampler, plus a dedicated button for sample recording and a reliable transient detection function, the whole process of grabbing and manipulating audio is fast, fluid, and, once again, abundantly fun.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Laying down performances is a similarly streamlined experience. You can play live and overdub, but Ableton’s MIDI Capture feature preserves the last few notes you played whether recording or not. In a marked departure from other groove boxes on the market, there’s also a step sequencer that accommodates up to 16 bars and 64 steps per bar.
Taking cues from Live’s Session View, you can build up an arrangement of clips with different variations and switch between them on the fly. Making those variations will mostly involve a new performance – you can copy and paste clips easily enough but, with extremely limited options for editing MIDI, it’s much faster to play something new than try to change things manually.
The effects selection is middling. There are some expected dynamics, pitch, and time-based processes taken directly from Live, but audio samples get a more interesting selection of playback effects – including FM, Ring Modulation, and Granular Time Stretching. A bigger constraint is that each instrument can only have one effect insert and one effect send, while samples get one playback effect.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Learning how to make simple beats and melodies is a relatively pain-free experience. Move has nine dedicated single-function buttons to cover essential features: play/stop, MIDI and audio recording, MIDI capture, loop mode, copying, deleting, muting, and undo/redo.
Somewhat less obvious though are the more advanced features. The shift button, labelled with three dots, opens up a set of extra controls located below the sequencer. Rather than use text labels, Move instead opts for ponderous hieroglyphs – you’ll easily be able to deduce some if you’re already a Live user, but others will require a trip to the manual for further explanation. That said, after an hour or so of tinkering, navigating Move quickly settles into muscle memory.
Overall, Move excels at sparking and capturing ideas. Extending those ideas is where you’ll start to bump up against its limitations. To be fair, Ableton has made this totally clear in its promotional material; Move is for quick-fire ideation, and if you want to go further your next destination will be Live.
Facilitating such a transition is the new Move Manager, a web browser-based interface that enables wireless communication with Move over your local area network. Here, you can load and offload samples and presets, bounce out audio from your sets in WAV or MP3 format, and export project files.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Once you’ve moved a project over to Live, Move works wonderfully as a dedicated controller via a USB-C connection, with encoders auto-mapped to device and instrument parameters. It might be obvious but it’s worth stating: This is Ableton hardware designed to slot into the growing Ableton ecosystem. If your main DAW is Logic or Cubase, then look elsewhere.
It’s also important to know while Move is a standalone device, it won’t get you all the way to a finished track. To really get your money’s worth out of it, a licence for Live is a must-have. Live Intro, which retails for £69/$99, is included for free with Move, and while this is a solid starting point, an upgrade to Live Standard is all but certain for anyone who is serious about making music.
Last but not least, there’s the portability factor. As the name implies, Move is built to travel. It’s hard to overstate how enjoyable and easy it is to take this standalone instrument on the train, to the park, or just to the couch. Under 1kg, with four hours of battery life and a built-in speaker, it has the feel of a musical camping kit, ready to accompany you to strange and exotic locations. Sure, its speaker won’t impress any audiophiles, but knowing that, in a pinch, no headphones, no charger, and no peripherals are needed is really liberating.
The hardware may feel sturdy but, after a few days of throwing it into a backpack, the need for a case becomes obvious. The lack of any official, or even third-party, carry cases at launch is a frustrating oversight on Ableton’s part, but one that will surely be remedied.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Ableton has plenty of competition in the groovebox market. Novation’s Circuit-Tracks’ solid beat-making and similar standalone features come at a lower price of $300/£200. If on-the-go sampling is what you’re after then Roland’s AIRA Compact P-6 offers a more expansive feature set, again at a lower cost. If all you want is a portable Ableton controller, then the Launchkey Mini 25 MK4 will probably meet your needs.
But none of those options manages to pull off the supreme balancing act that is Move. In one box, you have premium-feel hardware at an affordable price, a highly intuitive and musical interface, workflows finely tuned for speedy creativity, take-it-anywhere portability, and a sense of fun that ensures this instrument will not gather dust on a shelf.
On the other hand, this is an instrument with significant drawbacks. Limited I/O prohibits any serious use as a performance device, its symbiosis with Live is great if you’re already aboard the Ableton train but leaves you hamstrung if you’re not. Move’s conception and execution are narrowly tailored to a single use case – generating ideas to be continued on its associated desktop DAW.
That said, if you take Move on its own terms, and meet it on its home turf, it offers a music-making experience that is fast, frictionless, and seriously fun.

Key features

32 velocity-sensitive, backlit soft silicone pads
9 high-resolution, touch-sensitive encoders
16 backlit multifunctional buttons for sequencing and accessing secondary features
1500+ presets
Built-in speaker
Internal microphone
Rechargeable battery with four hours of playtime
64 GB built-in storage
3.5 mm stereo line in and outs
USB-C port for charging and control surface connectivity
USB-A port for MIDI in/out

The post Ableton Move review: A supreme balancing act appeared first on MusicTech.

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