Push for Ableton Live was a breakthrough product allowing unimagined control over a DAW and delivering a whole heap of fun in the process. Push MKII simply improves on the original concept and takes this even further.

The Freelance Soundlabs studio is a modest but high-tech space where we can work on creative projects. Additional studios are run by our partners that cater for digital art design, commission sketch work, video production etc.

So you can feel confident in our abilities please take the tour to see how we operate.

The Presonus Central Station Plus is a rack mountable monitoring management system designed to assist in routing audio from a mixer or DAW to multiple monitor speakers and headphones. 

Ableton Live has probably more dedicated control surfaces available for performance than any other DAW but the Push controller is the first actually designed and engineered by Ableton specifically for integration with Live and for lovers of Live (such as myself) it finally adds some much needed creativity and control that is not just aimed at "live" performance. 

MIDI keyboards and controllers are like wild flowers, found everywhere and in a variety of flavours. So to make something that actually stands out in the crowd takes some forward thinking and this is what Akai have attempted to achieve with the Advanced range of keyboard controllers. 

The AKG K712 Pro headphones are semi-open reference headphones sitting in the middle to upper range of the K series monitor and reference headphones. These headphones improve on the sound from the K240/K701 while still following the same design and feature sets of previous headphones.

Ableton Live (or just Live as it's known) is a digital audio workstation where its initial focus was on performing Live. In recent years the software has expanded in capabilities to become both a full Live performance tool and studio production workstation and with the release of a dedicated Live controller (The Push) the lines between a computer software sequencer and a hardware instrument are ever more blurred...

Rode are an Australian company who manufacture microphones. That is pretty much all they do. From years of research and limited funds I am personally drawn to the Rode range for their high quality and affordable prices.

The NT4 is a high quality, condenser mic with matched capsules making it a convenient choice for recording stereo sounds. Apart from looking great, it is simple to use and does exactly what it is designed for. In the world of microphones there are many, many choices which cover a huge range of quality, application and price range. For single stereo microphones on a professional level though, the options are much fewer which makes the choice a little easier.

The Frontier Design Alphatrack is a single channel DAW control surface that offers channel and DAW control in a nice small footprint. One of the key features of the controller is the 100mm touch sensitive motorised fader that offers an immediate visual feedback and ability to adjust and automate a channel quickly. But is 1 fader enough?

Mackie have long been an industry standard between DAWs for mixing surfaces and many new knock offs use the Mackie protocol for talking with the DAW. The previous Mackie Control went unchanged for years and there was rarely a complaint about this as it was a great design and a winning control surface for many DAW applications. 

The latest release will have a keen eye notice that there is little that has changed apart from a new and updated style. The actual control options and layout are exactly the same. So how does it perform? Well I have updated my original review from 2 years ago to include information relevant to my last 2 years of experience with this product.