First, could you provide some context and background on Move's development? You mentioned that it had been in development for more than five years?
Yeah, it's been many years. We've gone through many phases with this product, but the vision that we initially had is what we stayed true to. Of course, some things change, you learn new things, but Move is still the thing that we wanted to make from the beginning. One of the reasons it took quite a long time was that our team isn't very big. We had different phases where we planned to release this earlier but then Push 3 [Tape Op #157] came along, and we made an internal decision to allocate hardware engineering resources to Push.
People tend to forget that Ableton is still owned by the same musicians who started the company over 20 years ago. There are limited resources for development cycles, right? And building hardware is extraordinarily hard.
What added to the time it took is that we got ourselves into a lot of complexity with Move and Push. We were set on making something standalone from the outset, as we wanted that instrument quality – something that you can pick up and use unencumbered by wires, allowing you to get going quickly. That meant we had to solve things like building a standalone software stack and integrating Wi-Fi, which took us a really, really long time. Essentially, the company was getting into the business of building computers. It's a completely different type of engineering model, but this effort was worthwhile. I suppose everyone was also a bit naive about it, but it was simply something that required a great deal of patience.
As a standalone product, was Move conceived of and designed before Push 3?
They happened around the same time, but they are two different software platforms – the main difference really is that Push 3 runs Ableton Live inside. Both are Linux-based, running what we call "Ableton OS," but Push 3 runs on an Intel processor and for Move, we have an ARM processor. What's inside Move is actually the same software core that we have on Ableton Note, our iOS app. We've been developing this together, actually, from the start, so it's the same engine, same file formats, same sound structure, and same instruments, which is cool because now we have [that framework]. Basically, both products will benefit from additional development in the future. So, Move is like "Note in hardware," you could say, and Push 3 has Live inside. Two different ecosystems.
Was the retail price [USD $449] a factor in the early development of Move?
We always aimed to create something for under $500, which also meant making certain hardware choices, such as the processor inside. That's often the driving factor (which processor you choose). But also, we wanted to reach a different audience. I think it's still not an impulse purchase at that price point, but it's something we wanted to get into as many hands as possible. Plus, for people who are starting out or coming from different musical backgrounds, maybe they tried Live or Push and felt like, "This is maybe a little too much for me at this point in my music-making journey, but Move is something I can actually use," and later, grow into Live and Push.
Move's superpower, is its immediacy, right?
From a creative standpoint, yes, because Note has been designed to allow users to be creative quite quickly. Both excel at sketching rather than finishing.
I was talking to a friend who is a music educator who was saying, "I wish I had something that I could bring to the classroom, have all of the kids working on a piece of hardware that they can physically interface with rather than their laptops or phone screens so that they're using their ears." However, he wants their work to be able to sync to the cloud, much like a shared project that they are all iterating on. So, there's a tremendous amount of potential in the music education market for a device like this. Combined with Note, you have a powerful educational tool for harmonic theory and songwriting. Ableton Cloud and Note were released in parallel, right?
Yeah. At that stage, when Note came out alongside Ableton Cloud, we internally already knew we would have the same features set for Move and that we wanted this type of continuity. What happened is that they came out earlier than Move because we were able to move a bit faster on the mobile platform and had no hardware to engineer. So, from the ground up we had to make key decisions. As an example, how do we look at a drum rack and the effects [per track] – [on Note] we have a rack; you have the two effects, and it's the same for Move, one track, two effects. So, the way this simplified structure appears on Note was also actually informed by having Move around, much, much earlier – internally – and then we looked at things like, "What can we do, processor-wise?"
By that, do you mean the form factor or the software stack?
