But all is not lost. Another enterprising genius has done the legwork of building some really easy-to-use max4live objects that enable us to communicate with the Push while expending virtually zero effort. Please take a bow, Florian Zand with his Ableton Push Development Kit.

 Before we continue, you’ll need to visit the site and download the latest version of the Kit (0.8.1 at the time of writing, compatible with Live version 9.0.4).

 I unzipped the package and dragged the whole folder into my User Library:

Now, it’s just a case of ‘have a play’. You’ll probably want to navigate down to ‘Examples’ - ‘Push Grid Fun’ and drag the ‘Disco’ device into your live set.

Click the lower checkbox, then the upper one.

So (now you’ve recovered) what’s going on here? The key is the p push_grid object that Mr Zand has so kindly built. Essentially it’s another layer between our code (or the code we want to create!) and the Controller Scripts that drive the Push. It deals with all the legwork of finding the Push controller and sending messages to and from the main grid buttons.

(You can double click the object and look at the inner workings, although any explanation of that is for another day.)

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