Max for Live · Ableton Live What’s that?
Tuple
Every chord in your key. Always visible.
Play harmony like a drum rack — every diatonic and borrowed chord on one grid, color-coded by degree. Build progressions without menus, popups or theory headaches. Free, open-source, and built right into Ableton Live.
New to building chords? Read the manual — it walks through every control and the harmony behind the grid.
Try it — no install
Play Tuple in your browser
The real chord engine, running live. Click the grid or play your computer keyboard — voicings, voice leading and the color-coded degrees, exactly like the device. Sound starts on your first click.
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Why Tuple
Not a chord generator.
A way to navigate harmony.
Most chord tools bury the music under menus and suggestions. Tuple puts every chord for your key on one grid — so you explore with your ears and hands, not by reading theory.
Traditional chord plugins
Theory first
- Chords hidden behind menus and pages
- Generated suggestions you scroll through
- A piano keyboard you still have to decode
- Learn the rules before you can play
Tuple
Workflow first
- Every in-key chord on one grid, always visible
- Direct exploration — click or play, hear it instantly
- Degree view, color-coded by function
- Play first — the theory is built in
Ableton Live
Built right into
your session
Tuple isn’t a standalone app — it’s a Max for Live device that lives on a MIDI track. It reads your project, plays your instruments and follows you while you write.
Native Max for Live
Drop tuple.amxd onto a MIDI track — no standalone app, no extra setup. It runs inside Live like any stock device.
Plays your instruments
Tuple streams MIDI to whatever instrument follows it — synths, samplers, Rhodes, anything. Pick a sound and play; the device just sends the notes.
Live scale sync
Tuple imports Live’s key and scale automatically when it loads — the grid starts matched to your session. One-click SYNC re-imports any time.
Features
Everything you need,
nothing you don’t
A focused, performance-ready harmonic tool — built around a single idea: give you instant access to every valid chord for your key and scale.
Chord Grid
7 diatonic degrees plus a dedicated Borrowed column. All valid chords for your key, always visible — no hidden pages.
Any key & scale
All 12 keys plus major, minor, the modes, harmonic & melodic minor and pentatonics — switch and the whole grid re-voices to match.
Borrowed Chords
Secondary dominants and modal interchange chords right in the main grid — always one click away.
Color-coded degrees
Five color logics — spectrum, function, tension, fifths, quality — make the whole grid readable at a glance.
Smart Chords
As you play, Tuple lights up where to go next — by harmonic function (what resolves) or by voice leading (what moves smoothest with your current voicing). Brighter means stronger. Suggestions, never rails.
Push 2 & MIDI control
Play the grid on Push 2 pads, and map 8 key controls — octave, voicing, voice leading, strum, humanize, layout — to any MIDI controller, saved with your set.
Progression → Clip
Build a progression as you play — capture chords, drag to re-order, then drop the whole thing into a MIDI clip, one chord per bar.
Voice Leading
Two modes — Anchor and Flow — with common-tone detection and progressive center pull for natural progressions.
15 Voicings
Classic, Piano, Open, Spread, House, Prog, Rootless A/B, Drop 2/3, Jazz, Nu-House, Trap, Trance, Funk — from tight jazz to wide electronic textures.
One-hand voicings
Each voicing is a coherent grip in a single register, easy to play and layer with one hand — only Piano mode spans two hands.
Expression
Strum turns a chord into an arpeggio (up to ±250 ms, with curve & velocity ramp); Humanize adds subtle velocity and timing for a livelier feel.
Voicings
15 ways to voice any chord
Push 2 Optional
Got a Push?
Play it with your hands
Tuple works fully with your mouse, a MIDI keyboard or any controller — no Push required. But if you own a Push 2, the grid becomes a hands-on surface: grab the pads, and the colors mirror the screen.
- One chord per pad. Columns are degrees I–VII + Borrowed, rows are chord families — Push extends the grid, it doesn’t replace it.
- Color-coded by degree, synced with the on-screen Layout. The pad you hit lights up brighter while held.
- 8 controls on the display — octave, voicing, voice leading, strum, humanize, layout — turn the encoders, or MIDI-map them.
Free download
Requires Ableton Live 11+ · Max for Live
Unzip, then drag tuple.amxd onto a MIDI track that feeds a virtual instrument. Keep all extracted files in the same folder.
Support the project
Tuple is free and open source. If it’s been useful to you, a small donation goes a long way — it helps keep the project alive and fund future features.
Contact & community
Get in touch & join the community
Discord
Share presets and progressions, get help, and follow development with other Tuple users.
Join the DiscordContact
A question, a bug, a feature idea? Send a message — feedback shapes where Tuple goes next.