Max for Live MIDI Voice Router for Giant Polysynth Setups
Analog Dessert’s Pie Plate is a Max for Live MIDI Voice Router / MIDI Chord Splitter for Ableton Live that chains the synths you already have into one giant, playable polysynth.
It intelligently routes incoming MIDI notes to other tracks, deterministically, so each note can go to a different synth/track, letting you build massive evolving chords, unison stacks, bass/lead splits, etc.
Yes, there are many Free “MIDI Splitters”, but they’re not intelligent. When your hand plays a chord, certain notes might arrive nanoseconds or milliseconds before other notes, and that can change, with each chord that’s played. With Pie Plate, chords and chord shapes can be ‘stabilized’, so the root/lowest note always is routed to Track/Synth 1, middle note to Track/Synth 2, and the highest note to Track/Synth 3, etc — even if they arrive out of order. No other MIDI Chord Splitter does this. This way, your chords & pads can sound consistent across a stack of synthesizers.
GAS was only a problem because there was never a good routing strategy. Until now.
Turn polysynths into super-mega polysynths. Or monosynths into a polysynth.
What you can do with it
Put the chord on the plate. Pie Plate will handle the portioning.
Turn monosynths into a true polysynth
Play chords and have each note land on a different voice/synth—no more choosing which mono gets to speak.
Create “one chord = many evolving voices” pads
Use slightly different patches per slice so every note has its own envelope curves, filter motion, LFO rates, drive, FX, and modulation personality.
Bass + lead duophonic splits
Lowest held note becomes bass, highest becomes lead, with musical retrigger behavior when the extremes change.
Massive unison stacks
Send one note to every slice for huge leads, with optional mono/legato behavior.
Round-robin / random voice spreading
Rotate notes across slices for variation, movement, and “not the same voice every time” life.
Minimal-movement voice leading
Hold big chords without constant voice jumping and re-attacks—perfect for sustained textures.
One-finger chord memory
Capture a chord shape, then trigger it from single notes for fast performance and writing.
How Pie Plate differs from basic voice routers
A lot of voice routers are essentially: “take the next note and send it to the next output” (or “first free voice”)—often using a simple gate-style approach. That’s great for quick splits, but it’s not the same thing as musical voice allocation that’s intuitively expected (or configurable) by a musician or sound designer.
Pie Plate is a full voice-allocation engine, not just a MIDI Chord Splitter / MIDI Voice . Basic routers tend to blindly distribute notes. Pie Plate interprets the chord and assigns voices using musical rules—and gives you controls to decide exactly how that assignment behaves.
What that means in practice
Stable, chord-aware routing (the big one)
In Pie Plate’s stable modes, the lowest note can always be Slice 1, the next note Slice 2, etc. (or by play order). You can also control whether notes are allowed to move on releases. This is how you get predictable “this synth is always my bass note” behavior.
Multiple routing “personalities,” not just one
Pie Plate includes a deep set of routing modes (poly-by-pitch, chord-position, minimal-movement voice leading, unison stack, round-robin variants, random variants, chord memory, bass/lead duophony, and more). Basic routers usually give you one simple strategy.
No re-attack chaos (when you don’t want it)
Pie Plate has dedicated controls for voice reassignment behavior, so releasing a note doesn’t cause other notes to jump voices and re-trigger unless you want that behavior.
Musical overflow handling
When you play more notes than voices, Pie Plate can keep lowest notes, keep highest notes, or keep edges instead of stealing voices unpredictably.
Performance tools built in
Panic/reset behavior, predictable mode-switch safety, and optional “settle” behavior for cleaner chord attacks when your fingers don’t land perfectly together.
Why this matters
If your goal is simply “split notes across a few synths,” a simple/free router can be perfect.
If your goal is turning many monosynths (or plugin instances) into one playable polysynth—where voice assignment is consistent, musical, and controllable—that’s what PiePlate is for.
You didn’t buy eight monosynths by accident. You bought a polysynth in installments.
Download / Purchase
Purchase includes the device and the full documentation below.
