One controller, two voices. Hand separation, automatic.
A Max for Live device that automatically splits two-handed MIDI into separate per-hand parts and routes each to its own instrument — no controller splits to set up, no Instrument Racks to build. Separate the hands as you play in LIVE mode, or analyze an already-recorded clip in REVIEW.
This is the real Counterpoint engine, running right here in your browser — no install, no purchase, no Ableton Live required.
Teal is the left hand, orange the right. Press Play to hear the split — left hand in your left ear, right in your right. Flip any call it got wrong, then hit Analyze to re-run. First time? Hit Show me around to label every control.
COMMIT does nothing here — in Ableton Live it previews the destination clips, then writes the split back to your tracks. One instance stands in for a whole rig: in a real set you'd run one Counterpoint per instrument, so OCT shifts both hands at once and LISTEN: BOTH does the job of two instances (one L, one R). Toggle to LIVE to separate your hands from a connected MIDI keyboard — needs Chrome or Edge.
Credits: the left hand is our own sub-bass synth, the right hand a CC0 acoustic grand (Kawai, Versilian Community Sample Library); the demo is a real two-hand take of our own — a phrase that descends through both hands, so the same middle-register notes hand off between them as the hands sweep down.
The interactive demo is built for a bigger screen. Open this page on a desktop to try Counterpoint live.
Most desk-bound producers work with a single MIDI controller. The problem is that two-handed playing — left-hand bassline plus right-hand melody, say — gets recorded as a single MIDI stream on a single track. To use different instruments for each hand, you either play the parts separately, set up a split on your MIDI controller, build an Instrument Rack with key zones for each hand, or just compromise.
Counterpoint solves this automatically. Put an instance on each of two tracks — one set to LISTEN: L, the other to LISTEN: R — give each its own instrument, and play two-handed as you normally would. The algorithm weighs the musical signals that separate the two parts — register, dynamics, the motion of each line — to decide which hand each note belongs to. In LIVE mode it classifies notes as you play; in REVIEW it analyzes a whole recorded clip at once — so it can also weigh each hand's texture, telling a chordal part from a single melodic line — then COMMIT previews the destinations and rewrites the take in place so the left track keeps the left-hand notes and the right track keeps the right.
Set up a track per hand, play or analyze, then commit the split.
Put a Counterpoint instance on each of two MIDI tracks — set one to LISTEN: L, the other to LISTEN: R — and give each track the instrument you want for that hand.
In LIVE mode, play two-handed and Counterpoint classifies each note as you go, with a scrolling roll showing its calls — and you can calibrate it to your controller (play your lowest and highest note once) so the split is tuned to your keyboard, which especially helps on smaller controllers. In REVIEW, point it at a recorded clip and analyze the whole performance at once.
COMMIT previews the destinations, then rewrites both clips in place — the LISTEN: L track keeps the left-hand notes, the LISTEN: R track keeps the right — each playing back through its own instrument.
No key splits to draw, no instrument racks to wire. Counterpoint assigns each note a hand for you — in real time as you play in LIVE, or across a whole recorded clip at once in REVIEW.
REVIEW queues up the notes it was least sure about so you can step through them and flip any it got wrong. Lasso a range in the roll to reassign a whole phrase at once, and your corrections become anchors that carry through if you re-analyze.
Hit COMMIT, check the destination preview, and Counterpoint writes the split straight onto your two tracks — left-hand notes on one, right on the other — keeping each clip's color and length intact.
Built as a Max for Live device. Drop it onto any MIDI track — no separate app, no exporting and re-importing files. The whole workflow lives inside Live.
It weighs several musical signals together: each note's pitch, the density of what's playing around it, its velocity, its register, and the continuity of each hand's line — how smoothly it follows from that hand's previous notes. Lower-register notes moving in their own pattern, separate from the upper-register material, typically get assigned to the left hand.
Register is the strongest cue, so the split is cleanest when your hands sit in clearly separate ranges. REVIEW mode helps when the hands overlap but differ in texture — chords in one, a single line in the other — since it reads the whole clip and weighs texture alongside register (LIVE, classifying each note as you play, stays register-led). When the music wants them close and playing alike, you can play them further apart than they'd naturally sit and use each instance's OCT control (±5 octaves) to transpose that track's output back to the right register — the classifier sees clean separation while the music lands where it should. OCT applies to LIVE, REVIEW, and COMMIT alike. You can also calibrate the LIVE split to your keyboard so cold starts are tuned to your controller's range.
A little — but below what you'd feel. Counterpoint classifies each note in a single pass (a handful of comparisons, no look-ahead) and passes it straight through. The delay it adds is a millisecond or two at typical buffer sizes — it tracks your audio buffer, like any real-time MIDI processing in Live, so a smaller buffer tightens it further — comfortably under the point where a player senses lag. REVIEW's analysis runs on the clip before you press play, and once you COMMIT, the result is ordinary MIDI clips that play back with Live's normal sample-accurate timing.
Usually, yes. LIVE classifies each note the moment you play it, with only what came before to go on. REVIEW reads the whole clip first and works through it in both directions — forward and backward in time — so it can use where a phrase is heading, not just where it's been, and pick up patterns that aren't clear note by note. Both modes follow where each hand sits as it moves; REVIEW just has the full picture to weigh, so it settles the close calls more reliably — and flags the ones it's still unsure about for you to confirm.
In REVIEW, Counterpoint surfaces the calls it was least sure about in a queue — step through and flip any it got wrong, or lasso a phrase in the roll to reassign several at once. Those corrections become anchors that hold through re-analysis. After COMMIT, the two parts are ordinary MIDI clips, so you can also nudge notes by hand like any other edit.
It's a two-way split at heart, and the analysis is tuned for left-hand / right-hand separation — that's what it does best. But you don't have to point it at hands. In REVIEW, minimize the queue and the flip and lasso tools become a general-purpose splitter: carve any track into two parts on whatever basis you like. Need three or more? Split into two, COMMIT, then run Counterpoint again on one of those parts — repeat to taste. The one catch is auditioning: you can only hear a two-way split at a time, so building up more voices is a commit-as-you-go process rather than something you preview all at once.
Scroll to pan and Shift-scroll (or Option/Alt-scroll) to zoom, with 0 to reset the view. One heads-up: scrolling over the device can also nudge Ableton Live's device chain when it's long enough to scroll — so if you'd rather not touch the wheel, turn on Show the REVIEW time-scrollbar in the gear (⚙) Settings and drag its minimap strip to pan instead.
No — Counterpoint operates on MIDI only.
Yes. Once you've bought Counterpoint, updates are free for the lifetime of the product.
Counterpoint is available now. Buy once, use it forever. Updates to Counterpoint are free. Ships as a signed, notarized installer with a license key, delivered immediately after checkout.
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