Pie Plate

There are free MIDI splitters for Max for Live. I tried them. None of them did the one thing I actually needed: stable voice assignment.

When you play a chord, your fingers don’t land at exactly the same time. Notes arrive nanoseconds or milliseconds apart, in whatever order. Free splitters take notes as they arrive, so the lowest note of your chord ends up on a different synth every time you play. That makes consistent layered sounds impossible.

Pie Plate fixes this. In stable mode:

• Lowest note of the chord → always Synth 1
• Middle note → always Synth 2
• Highest note → always Synth 3
• …up to 16 voices

Voice assignment can be determined by pitch order, not arrival order. That’s what I needed, so I built it (and more).

Pie Plate revoices on note-off as well as note-on, with count-safe release tracking, so releasing one voice doesn’t shuffle the others.

10 routing modes for different musical situations:

Turn monosynths into a polysynth. Play chords across a rack of monos. Each note gets its own voice with its own envelope, filter, and FX.

Build evolving pads where each note goes to its own polysynth. Slightly different patch on each voice. One chord becomes a moving texture instead of a flat block.

Stack up to 16 soft synths into a super-synth. One keyboard, every note going to a different instrument.

Bass + lead splits. Lowest held note routes to your bass synth, highest to your lead. Musical retrigger when the extremes change.

One-finger chord memory. Capture a voicing, then trigger the whole chord from any single key. Fast for performance and writing.

Massive unison. Send one note to every voice at once for huge stacked leads.

Round-robin or random spreading. Rotate notes across voices for movement and variation, so the same note doesn’t hit the same synth every time.

• Ableton Live 11 or 12
• Max for Live
• Windows or macOS