How Ableton built Move

A tiny-but-mighty travel buddy. A pint-sized production station. A mini, mobile, music machine. What are we talking about? Ableton Move, of course.

In October, seemingly out of nowhere, the Berlin-based outfit dropped its latest foray into the world of standalone hardware – and this time it’s all about portability. “We wanted to make something more accessible to enable music makers of all experience levels to create with Ableton hardware,” says Johannes Russ, Ableton’s head of product, Move. “We wanted something simpler, more immediate, more joyful.”

Appealing to the small, but not insignificant, demographic of music makers who want to regularly produce on the go, Move boasts in-built speakers, a rechargeable battery, a microphone for quick and gritty sampling, some premium pads, buttons, and dials, and a solid selection of instrumental sounds. It’s also surprisingly robust at just under 1kg, with a tough, slab-like feel that seems to promise longevity, and while there are no immediate plans to weather-proof the Move – “maybe in future generations” Russ laughs when asked – this is a groovebox that will be as much at home on a park bench as on a couch cushion.

Ableton’s vision is for Move to serve as a starting point – ideal for catching a rough idea on the fly, building it up into something with legs, and then taking it to the next level in Ableton’s recently refreshed desktop DAW, Live 12. Once you’re familiar with the unit’s largely intuitive layout, the journey from a vague idea to fully realised production can happen surprisingly fast.

This is no accident. To ensure that Move will become your go-to device for rapid musical ideation, Ableton has taken pains to ensure you can blast past those irksome creative roadblocks “We have this design principle of immediacy,” Russ explains. “We want to get you creating super quick. But something we learned, from talking to people about Push and Live, is that when you start a new idea there can be this feeling of decision paralysis; this is something we wanted to address.”

The team’s solution was to build in some creative variation at the foundational level. Boot up Move and each new set you make will come populated with four randomly selected instruments broadly providing melody, harmony, percussion and bass. It’s a simple but surprisingly effective way of avoiding the decide-o-phobia that can come with a blank canvas “Honestly, it started as a hack when we were quickly building and prototyping,” Russ says of the design feature. “But everyone just loved it, and so we stuck with it. Now people want it for Push and Live as well because it’s such a great idea starter.”

Of course, Russ points out that if you already have a strong idea, or just prefer to start from scratch, then Move can also provide you with a clean slate. “It’s not for everyone,” he concedes. “We certainly don’t want to overrule your creativity – but in the context of Move, it’s just a great way to get started super quickly.”

You might think a device that prioritises accessibility would primarily interest young producers who are still learning their craft, but Russ says that, surprisingly, the people initially seizing on Move’s potential have been the power users.

“It’s interesting,” he muses. “The first wave of people that bought it are on the very prolific end of things; existing Live users that view it as this kind of idea machine.” Russ points out that users have already gotten busy hacking still-experimental features to export Drift and Drum Rack presets to Move from Live – with one user exporting a whopping 196 Drift presets and sharing them with the Ableton community. “There’s a Discord channel where people are starting to share these presets, I have to say it all happened much faster than I expected.”

While the pros are already pushing Move’s limits, Russ says that over the longer term, he sees the device having lots of potential for producers who are just starting out – or even as a tool for music education. “It’s a great way to teach concepts around how loops work, how drum machines work,” he enthuses. “I’ve given it to younger people in my family and they had a great time because there’s this immediate sense of ‘Hey, I can play this!’ So, we are looking into how Move can work in education; we have a partnership with Melodics, and we’ve included some lessons with Move so that you can use Melodics to start playing finger drums.”

Move invites a number of comparisons with its hardware big brother, 2023’s Push 3 standalone, but, in truth, initial ideas for the instrument started percolating through Ableton in 2016 with the release of Push 2.“The question of how to make standalone hardware was quite important at that time,” Russ recalls. “One answer to that is Push, which is based on Live, but we also began building up a completely new technology platform, which now powers Note and Move.”

For this reason, Russ says the frequent characterisations of Move as a ‘mini Push’ miss the mark: “The connotation there is that Move can do everything Push can do. We borrow concepts from Push, obviously, but the better comparison is to see it as Note in hardware form.”

Ableton’s Note app for iOS has fast become a favourite for producers on the go – offering a boiled-down version of Live’s clip-centric Session View, some nice input methods for capturing beats and melodies, and the ability to export projects and port them over to Live via Ableton Cloud. As it’s built on the same engine, it’s no surprise that Move harnesses the same instruments, effects, and workflow – but where the iOS app served as a digital notepad, Move is more of a full-fledged sketchbook.

There’s a row of nine endless-scroll, touch-sensitive encoders, thirty-two velocity-sensitive pads, lots of navigation buttons which give a very satisfying ‘click’ when pushed, and, in contrast to Note, a nicely featured offline sequencer section. Where touchscreen-based music production can still feel a bit cramped and uninspiring, Move takes those same foundations and makes them feel liberating.

“It has this tactility in its workflow,” says Russ of the hardware’s design. “The pads have polyphonic aftertouch so you can express yourself in a much richer way, there are all these direct access buttons, different modifiers, and shortcuts. It’s for people who really enjoy playing an instrument.

“There’s also something about the immersion you get when sitting down on the couch with Move on your lap,” Russ continues. “Speaking for myself, I could easily spend an hour with it and I get really immersed – the Note app is great for shorter moments, like when you want to put down an idea or quickly try out a couple of things.”

While Move may be most closely related to Note, the instrument also fits seamlessly into Ableton’s larger product ecosystem. Achieving that tight integration was a significant design challenge in itself. “It meant many iterations and many conversations with designers from Live, Push, and Note,” allows Russ. “You always need to think about what can easily be transferred to these other products. So, there were prototypes where we had a fantastic feature idea that worked well on Move, but we just couldn’t make them work with the existing concepts of Live. Those ideas we had to take out.”

For the most part, Ableton’s pursuit of seamless integration has paid off. The new Move Manager, a browser-based tool for handling sets, samples, presets, and recordings, lets you wirelessly sync projects to your computer via a local area network, and everything you do on Move can be continued on Live. Of course, taking your projects in the opposite direction – from Live to Move – is not currently feasible, but Russ makes clear that the links between these devices will only get tighter in the future.

“How these products connect and collaborate with each other is something we will look into over the coming years,” he states. “That’s really the next phase because we have these four products now; two based on Live and Push, and two based on the new platform that powers Move and Note. They’re always going to be in slightly different worlds, but there are ways to connect these things.”

It’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to open a fully-fledged Live project on Move, but a safer bet would be a streamlined process for loading on your own presets and samples – something Russ clearly sees as essential. “Move is not just a preset machine,” he emphasises. “There’s a real need for people to personalise it, to enable people to bring their own sounds to it and make it their own.”

Slotting Move into the Ableton software ecosystem was tricky, but perhaps the biggest hurdles lay on the hardware side. Balancing weight, power, portability, and real-time audio performance, while keeping the unit affordable – compared to the mighty Push, which comes in at £1669 for the standalone version, Move’s £399 price point is downright cheap – presented plenty of challenges. Hell, even fine-tuning Move’s wireless connectivity system took the better part of a year, says Russ.

“In all honesty, figuring out the hardware stack took us much longer than expected,” he reflects. “In the end, we realised we were trying to build a computer – with everything that entails.”

Move employs a low-power Quad-core ARM CPU with a bare 2GB of RAM, and has to balance its capabilities against a four-hour battery life. With those kinds of real-world limitations, the team behind Move at times had to sacrifice more expansive feature sets to ensure that the instrument retained the fast and immediate workflow they were aiming for.

“We know there’s a big conversation around why Move has four tracks and not eight,” Russ concedes. “Our top priority was that Move would feel very fluid and very snappy; the UI shouldn’t lag, there needs to be really fast loading times, you can automate any parameter and there’s never any performance issues or audio dropouts. That’s something we prioritised over feature breadth.”

What’s important about those trade-offs is that the team weren’t working in a bubble when they made them; from conception, to design, to prototyping, to production, Russ says user involvement is key. “There’s a whole process around how we think about UX and usability,” he says. “We iterate a lot, we do a lot of user testing to really make every interaction as intuitive as possible, and we listen a lot to community feedback. Our Discord server is open and people put up their wish lists, and it’s something that we actively look at.”

The importance of user feedback doesn’t end on launch day either, Russ makes clear that during the post-release period, users have a lot of power to steer future updates: “The community can really help us shape the future. Of course, we’re always going to factor in our own product vision, our design principles, and things like feasibility — but we actively look at that user feedback to see what the community is wishing for.”

So do people wish for? And what might Ableton deliver? On that front, Russ says we’ll have to wait and see. “Obviously people ask us ‘when is feature XYZ’ coming,” he says ruefully. “That’s something we don’t disclose for a simple reason: we just don’t want to disappoint people. Things are often more complex than people expect, and they just take longer.”

“We are actually not a big team,” Russ continues. “I feel that sometimes people think of Ableton as this huge company which, in the grand scheme of things, we’re not. So, we need to go step by step and take time to get things right.”

He might opt for discretion when it comes to specific features or timeframes, but Russ is unequivocal about the potential Move has to grow in the coming months and years. “It is a very modern software platform that’s powering it,” Russ says as he considers Move’s future. “There’s a lot of potential to bring new instruments and effects and add to the workflow. There’s still a lot of things we want to unfold in the future.”

It’s hard not to love Move once you get your hands on it. It identifies and addresses a musical niche few other companies are touching, and does so with style. For people who want to get creative on the morning commute, sit under a tree and jam some beats, or just need an affordable Live controller that won’t eat up too much desk space, Move is an intriguing option. As Ableton continues to refine and expand its capabilities, it could become an essential.