One screen, all your harmony.

Tuple lays out every valid chord in your key as a playable grid — always visible, never hidden behind a menu — and lets you place those chords in time on a bar ruler, then write the result to a clip.

Getting Tuple onto a track.

Installation

Choose the method for your OS:

Windows

1. Download Tuple-Installer.exe from tuple.live and run it.
2. The installer places the Tuple folder in your User Library › Presets › Max MIDI Effect automatically.
3. Restart Ableton — Tuple appears under Max MIDI Effect in the browser.

macOS

1. Download tuple.zip from tuple.live and unzip it.
2. Double-click Install Tuple.command. If macOS blocks it, right-click → Open first.
3. Pick your User Library › Presets › Max MIDI Effect folder when prompted.
4. Restart Ableton — Tuple appears under Max MIDI Effect.

Manual (all platforms)

1. Unzip tuple.zip and keep all files in the same folder.
2. In Live, drag tuple.amxd onto a MIDI track.
3. Place Tuple before the instrument in the MIDI effect chain.
4. Arm the track: the chords you play feed the instrument.

Your first progression in 60 seconds.

1. Set the tonality. Click KEY and SCALE, or press SYNC ♭♯ to import Live's current scale.
2. Open the grid. Click OPEN to reveal the full window with every chord.
3. Play a chord. Click a cell in column I — it sounds and its notes appear in the Monitor.
4. Move on. Jump to columns IV, V, VI… With Voice Leading on, transitions stay smooth.
5. Record. Arm the track, hit record, and perform the grid live.

The control strip.

Inside Live's rack, Tuple sits in a compact strip: controls on the left, Monitor on the right. The full grid opens in a second window.

Figure 3.1 — The compact strip in Live's device rack, at its real size.

1Tuple — about, version, updates

2SYNC — import key & scale from Live

3KEY — the root

4SCALE — the mode

5OCTAVE — −2 to +2

6LEADING — Off / Anchor / Follow

7VOICING — the spacing

8The screen — degree, chord name, notes, keyboard

9OPEN — lifts the full window

The full window (grid).

One click on OPEN unfolds the whole grid: seven degree columns and the BORROWED column. Nothing shares the space with them — the controls are on the bar above, the progression on the screen below.

Figure 3.3 — The grid in C Major: seven degree columns I–VII + Borrowed, every valid chord for the key. The chord being played is outlined; borrowed chords sit in the last column.

The eighth column

The Borrowed column. Same shape as the seven degrees, one colour apart — violet in every layout, so a borrowed chord never passes for a diatonic one.

A cell, up close

One cell, close up. The head carries the roman numeral and the degree name; every cell in the column repeats its colour as a dot on the right, so you can find a column without reading a single word.

The control bar, cell by cell.

Ten cells, four groups, one row. Every one of them carries its own label, so nothing here needs to be memorised — this page only says what each one changes.

Figure 3.4 — The control bar at its real size, 1200 × 66.

Settings — set once, forget.

Figure 3.5 — The SETTINGS plate, opened from the far right of the bar.

Switch	What it does
Layout	The degree colour logic: Spectrum, Function, Tension, Fifths, Quality. Ch. 7
♭/♯	Flat or sharp spelling for every name on the grid.
EXT	Extended: enriches the borrowed chords from what you play. The diatonic grid never changes. Ch. 6
Avoid notes	Filters the tensions that clash with the chord. Switchable, because some styles want them.
Always on top	Keeps the full window above Live.
Theme	Night or Day. Tuple opens in Night; this manual is shot in Day.
About	Version, links, and the update panel when a new build is out. Ch. 15

Key · Scale · Sync.

The Tonality section defines the harmonic world: the whole grid is recomputed the moment you change root or scale.

Key — the root

Choose one of the twelve chromatic roots, from C to B. This is the tonal center the degrees I–VII are built around.

Scale — the mode

The scale sets the color of the degrees and the available chords:

Why these? They cover the everyday major and minor modes plus the jazz minors and the two pentatonics. For colors outside any scale, reach for the borrowed chords in the grid — secondary dominants and modal interchange, always one click away.

Sync & accidentals

The SYNC lamp

SYNC and KEY, side by side. The lamp under SYNC stays lit while Tuple follows Live’s scale; it goes out the moment you set KEY or SCALE by hand.

Octave · Voicing · Voice Leading.

Four settings, in this order: the register, then how the notes are spread, then how they move from one chord to the next.

Expression (full window)

The full window adds four performance controls. Drag or scroll each; center / 0 = off.

Where the four controls live

The EXPRESSION panel. It opens from the control bar. Each fader is a Live parameter and also leaves on a MIDI controller — drag, or scroll on the value.

What Voice Leading changes.

Voice Leading is the craft of moving between chords with the least motion: keep the notes two chords share in place, and let the rest step to the nearest note instead of jumping. It makes a progression sound connected and legato rather than blocky — and Tuple applies it automatically, re-laying each chord to sit close to the one before.

Every valid chord, never hidden.

Tuple's principle: show the maximum number of valid chords for the chosen scale, and keep borrowed chords inside the same grid.

Figure 6.1 — With EXT on, the seven diatonic columns stay exactly as they are; only the Borrowed column takes its color: D♯add9, Fm6, G♯6…

The Borrowed column, enriched

The Borrowed column, EXT on. The same chords, each with the extension that fits after your last chord. After Dm7, Fm6 becomes Fm9.

Layout — reading the grid in color.

The LAYOUT switch, in SETTINGS, opens a plate of five color logics — or scroll on it to cycle. The grid stays the same; only the way you read it changes.

In every logic, borrowed chords stay violet.

The heads of the eight columns

The eight heads, in Spectrum. Each carries its roman numeral on the degree’s own colour, and every cell below repeats that colour as a dot. Change the logic and only these colours move — the chords stay where they are.

Figure 7.1 — The same grid read in Function: tonic (blue), subdominant (green), dominant (red), borrowed (violet).

Where to go next.

Turn SMART on and, as you play, Tuple lights up the chords that follow naturally from the one you just played. It’s a guide laid over the grid — every chord stays playable; nothing is hidden or forced.

How to read it

The hue is always the degree color of your current Layout, so the grid still reads the same. The brightness carries the suggestion: brighter = stronger. Empty cells stay dark, and the chord you just played stays highlighted as the anchor.

Figure 8.1 — Smart in Function mode after playing the I: the strongest follow-ups glow, grouped across functions.

The SMART button cycles Off → Function → Voice leading. Suggestions are grouped by harmonic function, so you always see a spread of options — a few resolutions, a few tension moves, a few colors — never a whole row lit at once.

What a suggestion looks like

Three columns under SMART. A lit cell is a chord worth playing next; the brighter it is, the stronger the pull. The hue stays the degree’s own, so a suggestion never hides which column it belongs to.

Six spacings, one axis.

The voicing decides how a chord's notes are spread across the register. There are six, and they read as one axis — from no voicing at all to the widest grip. Every one is playable with one hand, root included; only Two Hands is deliberately two-handed.

Figure 9.1 — The VOICING menu, open in the full window.

Spacing	What it does
Default	No voicing at all: every chord tone at its default position, in order — root, 3rd, 5th, 7th, then the extensions. Voice leading never moves it, so it is the reference to compare the others against.
Closed	True close position: from the bass up, each note sits as low as it can above the one before. No chord tone can slip into a gap.
Open	The root stays at the bottom and the chord opens just above it. Air between the voices, clarity for pads.
Section	Drop 2 — the horn-section voicing. The second voice from the top drops an octave: the muddy middle clears and the top note gets air.
Chord Melody	Drop 3 — the solo-guitar voicing. The third voice from the top drops instead. Needs four notes; on a triad the cell falls back to Section.
Two Hands	The bass note alone, the rest of the chord about an octave above it. The only one that asks for two hands, and the only one that reaches below C3.

What happened to the old styles.

Tuple used to ship twenty-nine voicings: the six above, plus twenty-three genre grips — House, Trance, Funk, Jazz, the Rootless family, Quartal, Soul, Rave and the rest. They were removed in v1.5.0. Here is what that means for a set you already have.

One parameter

Voice Spacing is the Live parameter that holds the style: six positions, from Closed to Default, automatable and MIDI-mappable. v1.5.0 also kept the old Voicing parameter, with all twenty-nine of its entries, so that an old set could reopen on the nearest surviving spacing. That bridge is gone now.

What an old set sounds like now

• A set saved before this version reopens on Closed, whatever style it used. Open it, listen, and pick the spacing that fits.
• An automation lane on Voice Spacing written with v1.5.0 is one step off: that version had an extra entry, (from Voicing), at the top of the list. Redraw the lane, or shift its values down by one.
• Closed itself changed in v1.5.0 — it is genuinely close position now. A set that used it on a ninth chord or richer will sound different too.

The chord families.

Each column stacks these families, in the priority order below. The engine only shows a family when the scale makes it valid for that degree.

See & organize.

Figure 10.1 — The full window: control bar on top, the whole grid, and the progression drawer carrying the screen.

Figure 10.2 — The compact strip: six keys and the screen stay in view inside Live's rack.

Build it, then bounce it.

Stack chords into a progression inside Tuple, then write the whole thing straight to a MIDI clip — no re-playing your chords into a record track.

Figure 12.1 — The progression drawer with a captured progression (I · vi · IV · V): each chord is a card on the bar ruler, and the selected card opens the inspector underneath. Place them freely, then press CREATE CLIP.

The transport keys

CAPTURE · PLAY · STOP. The lamp on CAPTURE says whether the next chord you play lands on the ruler. PLAY and STOP drive Live’s own transport — Tuple does not have one of its own.

The status line

The status line. It names the clip Tuple is writing to, and what the next press will do. When no clip is linked it says so, rather than leaving you to guess.

The grid, under your fingers.

With a Push 2, play the chord grid straight on the pads — one chord per pad, the colors mirroring the screen.

Enable

1. Connect the Push 2 and open Tuple's full window.
2. Click PUSH on the control bar: Tuple grabs the pad grid. Its lamp says whether it holds it.
3. The pads light up according to the current color logic (Layout).
4. Hit a pad: the chord plays, voiced and voice-led, just like on screen.

Push extends the grid, it doesn't replace it: columns = degrees I–VII + Borrowed, rows = chord families.

Figure 13.1 — Tuple on Push 2: one chord per pad, the colors mirroring the grid, and the pad you hold outlined. The Push screen stays Live's — Tuple lights the pads and nothing else.

Pads & MIDI

A pressed pad lights up brighter while held. Tuple exposes 13 controls as Live parameters — Octave, Voicing, Voice Spacing, Voice Leading, VL Mode, Strum, Strum Ramp, Humanize, Layout, Capture, Write Clip, Clip Target and Borrowed Page — MIDI-mappable (Cmd/Ctrl+M), automatable, saved with your set. Push is optional; everything works via the mouse too.

Build a progression on the pads.

Press PROG and the Push becomes a progression companion: the bottom row holds your progression, and the rows above develop the step you select — substitutes, what comes next, or a fresh voicing.

The layout

The bottom row is your progression, one chord per pad, left to right. Select a step and the column above it fills with options for that step — a blank row separates the progression from the options. Every step keeps its own column, so you read each one straight up.

Three modes MODE

Substitutes	Chords that can replace the step at the same harmonic slot — function siblings (I ↔ iii ↔ vi…) and quality variants.
Suite	Where to go next — the same Smart suggestions, offered as a chord to follow this one.
Voicings	Every voicing the engine can produce, to re-voice this step in place.

Figure 13.2 — The Progression screen drives it: PROG turns the Push companion on, MODE cycles Substitutes · Suite · Voicings.

Editing is gated by Capture

With CAPTURE on, picking an option edits the progression: Substitutes and Voicings replace the step, Suite inserts a new step after it. With Capture off, the options simply audition — you hear them without changing anything.

Reading the colors

Options start neutral; a pad takes its chord’s degree color the moment you press it, so you always see what you’re about to commit.

Capture the take.

For a fixed progression, the linked clip is the fastest route: build your chords as cards and let Progression → Clip (Ch. 12) write and rewrite the clip as you edit — voicing, order, duration and expression stay editable after the fact. To capture a free live performance instead, record Tuple’s output onto a second track, as follows.

Record a live performance

To capture a free performance (especially on Push), record Tuple’s MIDI output onto a second track: add a MIDI track, set MIDI From to Tuple’s track / Post FX, set Monitor to In (the step most people miss), arm and record. In Push mode, also set the record track’s MIDI To to No Output so notes aren’t echoed and doubled. For playback, give that track its own instrument and mute Tuple’s.

What you are recording

The screen, while you play. Degree, chord name, the notes going out, and the same notes on the keyboard. It is what lands in the clip — nothing else is added on the way.

Staying current, from inside Ableton.

Key terms, in one place.

A quick reference for the words used throughout this manual.