Inside the Lego prototype that became the Ableton Push

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia has acquired one of only two surviving prototypes of the Ableton Push — a device built entirely from Lego by Jesse Terry, Ableton’s Head of Hardware. A short film published by the museum, titled “Off The Grid,” captures Terry describing how he built it and why that approach was the right one.

Push has become one of the most widely used hardware controllers in electronic music production, adopted by artists including Flying Lotus, Radiohead, Timbaland, Q-Tip, No I.D., Young Guru, The Roots, David Guetta, and Pete Townshend. The museum acquisition places the prototype alongside historic instruments that defined how musicians made music in their era.

Where the idea came from

Terry grew up in upstate New York in a family that built their own home without electricity or running water. The habit of working with his hands — tinkering, soldering, modifying guitars — followed him into adulthood. He first encountered Ableton Live while writing for a music magazine, and describes the moment of understanding what the software could do with audio as a turning point: “The way you could stretch audio and move it around like a rubber band. I was like, this is the thing that I’ve been missing.”

He bought an electric saw and started physically cutting up hardware to see if he could combine different outputs into something new. The Push prototype grew from that same instinct: take the parts that work, discard what doesn’t, and build something that doesn’t exist yet.

Why Lego

The choice of Lego as a prototyping material was a functional decision. Because no configuration was permanent, the team could move buttons freely, testing layout after layout to find the arrangement that felt most natural to play. Terry describes the process as “playful and not permanent,” and says that quality was precisely what allowed the design to go through enough iterations to arrive at the right result.

“The Lego prototype went through many, many phases of moving buttons around, trying to figure out what was the right ergonomics for it,” Terry says. “Figuring out where and what buttons we wanted to have to do the different functions. It was playful and not permanent. And that’s what allowed us to go through so many iterations to get the right thing.”

The design problem Push was trying to solve

At the center of Push’s design philosophy was a tension Terry had been thinking about for years: the gap between physical, tactile music-making and computer-based production. A mouse and keyboard give precision, but they strip out the micro-variations in timing and velocity that make music feel human. “There are these variations that are off the grid that I think is what makes human music have soul,” Terry says in the film — which takes its title from that phrase.

The goal was to build something that worked across the full range of experience. It needed to be immediately usable by someone with no musical training, while also offering enough depth that a dedicated practitioner could develop genuine virtuosity. “We wanted something that could let both beginners play it without years of training, but we also wanted something that would reward practice and let you become a virtuoso if you did spend the time.”

From an attic to the Powerhouse

For Terry, the arc from building prototypes in his attic to seeing the object displayed in a museum carries personal significance. He had wanted to be a professional musician, and says that becoming an instrument maker has been unexpectedly fulfilling. “Now seeing this product in the hands of some of the best musicians and my heroes makes me really excited to make it better all the time.”

The Powerhouse acquisition frames Push not just as a production tool, but as an instrument in the lineage of the hardware that defined what electronic music sounds like. The full collection record is documented at the Powerhouse’s online collection. The museum also published a longer written piece on the acquisition at powerhouse.com.au.