The brainchild of wunderkind synth designer Tatsuya Takahashi, the series kicked off in late 2013 with the trio of the lo-fi Volca Beats, the 303-like Volca Bass and the paraphonic Volca Keys, featuring proper analogue oscillators and filters along with voltage-based sync, making it easy to get grooves properly locked. While the Minilogue and Monologue are quickly becoming mainstays in dance production rigs, it’s the Volcas that found their way into the hearts of techno producers, worldwide. This makes it far more than just a controller. Of course, everything in Ableton Live can be harnessed via Push, often without even glancing at your computer display. While Push can integrate with any plug-in that’s compatible with Live, one of its most popular uses is serving as a hardware controller for Ableton’s iconic softsynth, Operator: This synth has its own cult-like following as an essential part of countless techno tracks, Skrillex’s early sound, and now trap and hip hop. Ableton’s attention to seamless user interfaces shines with Push, which is why it’s finding its way into non-dance music-based rigs, too. In addition to its enormous 8x8 grid of velocity-and pressure-sensitive pads, one of the most compelling aspects of Push is that it can be used to control nearly every aspect of Live’s workflow, without a lot of arcane menus and searching for parameters.

Two years later, Ableton amicably brought the Push 2 hardware in-house, updating the screen to a graphic-centric OLED that allowed users to sample, edit waveforms, and adjust effects or synths in a much more cohesive manner. The first Push’s character-based LCD screen was reminiscent of the original MPC, which should come as no surprise as the hardware was actually a collaboration between Ableton and Akai.

But while Maschine started as a plug-in that expanded into sequencing and production, Push was designed from the ground up to be a hardware controller for the myriad components of Ableton’s immensely popular DAW, Live. Considering that Ableton’s Push arrived four years after the Maschine Mk I release, it’s hard not to draw comparisons.

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