A €1,600 gap, one variable changed, and five tracks written differently

On the EP Discomposed, the first track was written on a MIDI keyboard. The other five were born on a grid of 64 pads, a Launchpad Pro MK3. Same software, same computer, same room: only the controller changed. That’s a rare setup, and it makes the comparison more honest than most gear reviews, which change everything at once. Here’s what I weighed before buying, what the grid changed in the music, and what it didn’t.

The real need: catch fast, produce slowly

I write in two very different modes. The first is made of journeys and waiting time: a few minutes, a phone, an idea to save before it fades. The second is made of long but rare stretches, a weekend or a holiday, with the computer open and the work consisting of arranging, layering, cutting.

The first mode is half solved. I wrote about it in the piece on how I catch ideas on the move with Ableton Note: the phone is enough to grab an idea, and the sketch turns up in Live once I’m home. Enough to catch, not to produce, and I’ll come back to that.

What was missing sat in the second mode. In front of the screen I drew my notes with a mouse, and a mouse sets its own pace: think, click, listen, correct. That isn’t playing, it’s data entry. I wanted a surface that put the gesture back in my hands, during the few hours I actually have to play.

What I compared, and at what price

Three options had real numbers attached, with Ableton’s Move alongside them. The prices below come from a European retailer at the time of writing, and they move.

The gap between the extremes is therefore over €1,600. Let me put it plainly: with €2,000 available, I would have bought the Push 3 Standalone. This isn’t a purist turning down an expensive machine, it’s a decision made under a budget. What follows holds for someone with the same constraint, not for everyone.

What the Push 3 Standalone actually solved

Two easy objections don’t hold, and I’d rather clear them myself. Weight first: I regularly travel to Paris with two laptops in a wheeled case, so three more kilos wouldn’t have stopped me. Bulk next: the Standalone doesn’t add to the computer, it replaces it, along with the controller and the external drive. On a train, a standalone machine and a pair of headphones is no worse than a laptop and a pair of headphones. I haven’t tried it, so I won’t lean on an inconvenience I’ve never experienced.

What the Standalone did solve is something I can’t wave away. Ableton Note, on a phone, gives you a selection of instruments and samples, not the full range of Live. A sketch brought back from a journey arrives with a narrow palette, and often has to be rebuilt once you’re at the computer. The Standalone, running Live itself, removed that break between the idea and its material.

I also looked at the Move, cheaper and lighter. Its grid struck me as too small for tracks that stack pads over several minutes, and the distance from how I work was too great to ignore.

So there was only one reason left, and it was price. No machine solved both the mobile palette and the amount I was willing to spend. I settled it by giving up on extended mobility: Note keeps its job, catching the idea with whatever is to hand, and the €275 went where my production hours actually are. The Standalone wasn’t pointless, it was too expensive for the time I’d have given it. A budget decision, not a theory about the right way to compose.

The Launchpad Pro MK3 had one last argument, less obvious. It carries a four-track, 32-step sequencer and two MIDI outputs, which lets it drive hardware with no computer at all. I don’t use that yet. It’s a door left open, not a reason to buy.

What the grid changed on tracks 2 to 6

A keyboard is a line. The eye looks for octaves, the hand finds learned positions, and the fingers end up replaying what they already know. A grid of 64 pads is a surface: intervals become moves in two directions, and keyboard habits are no use.

Two functions mattered more than the rest. Scale mode locks the pads to a chosen scale, which makes a wrong note impossible and turns improvising into risk-free exploration. Chord mode builds chords straight from the grid instead of note by note. For someone who isn’t a keyboard player, the difference is obvious: you try progressions you’d never have had the patience to enter by hand.

The grid also changes how a track gets built. The eight rows map onto the tracks of Live’s Session view, so launching a combination of loops becomes a movement of the hand rather than a run of clicks. You hear the assembly before you write it down, and you keep what holds. Arranging stops being an editing job and becomes listening.

In practice, tracks 2 to 6 more often start from a harmonic loop played in one go than from a melody placed note by note. The pads that open Half Step were found that way, by feeling around inside a locked scale rather than by writing.

I may as well admit it: that suits me. I like testing a run of hypotheses, keeping what stands up and throwing out the rest. The grid turns composing into a series of trials, and that’s closer to how I work than writing on a stave.

What the grid didn’t change, and why I’m saying so

It would be easy to credit the controller with everything that separates those five tracks from the first. It would also be dishonest, and any reader who produces would spot it immediately.

First, the sound palette didn’t change in kind. All six tracks were made in Live, on the same computer, with the same library. No instrument became available because I was playing on pads.

Second, another variable muddies the measurement: tracks 2 to 6 came after the first. Learning the tool, and learning the record as it took shape, may explain part of what I’m putting down to the grid. I can’t separate the two, and I have no single moment to point to where the Launchpad produced a result a keyboard wouldn’t have. The change came by accumulation, not by revelation.

What holds up fits in one sentence: the controller changed how the idea gets caught, not the sonic means available to work on it.

A fine object, and a flaw that turns up every session

The pleasure of using a machine deserves a mention, because it decides how long you stay in front of it. This is a fine object: a plain square, light, powered by a single USB-C cable with no power brick to carry. The pads give under the finger with a firmness that lets you meter velocity, and enough give to play for a long stretch without fatigue.

The lights do more than decorate. Each colour marks a state, a mode, a track, a probability, and you end up reading the grid out of the corner of your eye instead of looking at the screen. It’s an efficient interface, and it’s also what makes you want to switch the thing on.

The real complaint lies elsewhere, and it concerns my favourite function. Capture MIDI, in Live, retrieves what you just played even when recording wasn’t armed: you improvise, something works by accident, and you get the notes back afterwards. It’s the function that saves the most ideas, and on this controller it has no button of its own. It lives behind the Shift key, like the other secondary functions printed in small type under the buttons. So it takes two hands and a learned reflex, right after a moment when you were playing. A function designed to catch accidents deserves better than a key combination.

Two lesser limits. There’s no screen, so everything runs on colour, and it took me several sessions to stop checking the computer. And the pads, good as they are, don’t match a weighted keyboard on a slow, exposed melody: there I go back to the keyboard, as on the EP’s first track. Beyond that, it does nothing without a computer running, except as a MIDI sequencer. That’s the price of the €1,600 saved.

What would change my mind

Two things would reopen the file. The first would be a change of regime: if the long stretches disappeared in favour of fragmented but regular time, a standalone machine would stop being redundant.

The second comes from the market. Ableton’s Move got a major update in 2026 adding audio tracks, something it had lacked since launch. It does nothing about the size of its grid, which remains my objection, but it shows these machines gaining capability without gaining price. A well-negotiated second-hand Push 3, or a version of Note with the full Live library behind it, would reopen the question more surely.

A gear decision is never final. This one holds for one budget, one working rhythm and one record, which is already a lot to ask of a €275 object.

Hear the difference, then keep going

The simplest test is your ears. The two excerpts below open and close the argument: Discomposed, written on the keyboard, moves in lines that answer each other; Half Step, written on the pads, moves in harmonic blocks that overlap. Listen to the first thirty seconds of each, that’s where the difference in gesture comes through.

To put all this inside a longer story, the one of the machines that shaped electronic music, the Electronica – Electronic Music Anthology playlist follows that lineage from the 1950s to today. And closer to home, ten French artists worth hearing work the same material with other tools.

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