Sometimes all musical inspiration needs is a different view on things. So what better than to refresh your Ableton Live vibes than an injection of 90s-tinted color themes inspired by the Silicon Graphics workstation?

Drift is a friendly, MPE-ready, hardware-inspired synth that’s now included in Live 11.3. Since anyone with Live 11 – even Live Lite users – will get it free, let’s go straight to the source to understand the instrument. We took the chance to talk to Marc Resibois, the instrument’s creator, about how Drift was developed – and get his tips on sound creation and some of the sound features you might otherwise miss.

XP for Ableton Live delivers a complete real time spatial audio experience inside Live for just 80€ – and it now does head tracking with hardware as accessible as this £69 Head Tracker hardware.

How does the new Ableton Push perform as an instrument – with those new expressive pads? We invited artist Kyoka (Raster) to try out Push in live improvisation.

The new Push represents a technical leap forward for Ableton, both in terms of its upgradeable, Intel-based standalone architecture and its new pad sensor tech. I got a chance to speak to the folks at Ableton about some of those details, and how the hardware evolved. We also have some early answers for those curious about connecting gear or developing in Max for Live.

Ableton today introduced their long-awaited third-generation Push hardware. The layout and functionality are familiar, but there’s new hardware including new pads, MPE support, and audio + CV + MIDI connectivity, plus standalone operation and upgradeability. CDM has talked to Ableton and tested the gear with prerelease software.

Speaking of live visuals, Tarik Barri has been composing some quick 1-minute demo/tutorials in Videosync, the software he contributes to for Ableton Live / Max for Live on the Mac.

Elisabeth Homeland’s wrappers let you use popular effects plug-ins as if they were native Ableton Live device UIs – saving you from opening floating windows. The latest collection is the most ambitious yet, with the skeuomorphic Arturia effect interfaces.

You’ve seen various Max Devices for Ableton Live; ever wanted to try building your own? Ableton has just released a complete step-by-step tutorial with examples. And there are some 90 free Devices in there to play with and start to tweak, too.

Iftah Gabbai has a new freebie, and it’s a total gem – a polyphonic modeled string instrument that pairs perfectly with his Microtuner (or other tuning tools).