- Product: Harmony Engine v1.2.1 — Chord, Bass & Melody Generator for Ableton Live 12
- Developer: NA7AN
- Format: Max for Live MIDI Effect (.amxd)
- Requirements: Ableton Live 12 with Max for Live
- Source: na7an.gumroad.com/l/harmonyengine
You know the sound in your head. You open a MIDI clip and spend forty minutes finding the four chords underneath it — and by the time you have them, the idea is gone. Harmony Engine gives you the whole harmonic bed in one press: chords, a bassline and a melody, all derived from the same harmony so they actually agree with each other. They land in Live as three named MIDI clips on three tracks. Real notes. Edit them, chop them, throw half of them away. Not a live effect. Nothing to freeze, resample or record.
The difference is lock
Generate. Like the chords, hate the bass? Lock the chords and hit GEN on the bass. Now the bass reworks itself around harmony that is not allowed to move. Lock that too, and push the melody until it sings.
VAR gives you a near neighbour rather than a fresh idea — the key, the length and most of the harmonic skeleton survive, so you can circle a part instead of starting over.
Click any chord card to reshape that chord in place. It stays on its scale degree, and it survives every regeneration after that.
That loop — generate, keep, reroll the rest — is how an idea turns into a track.
It knows your key
Set a Key and Scale in Live 12’s control bar and the device follows it. Change the Set’s key and the device is already there. Or switch to DEVICE and pick from 16 scales yourself: Major, Minor, all five remaining modes, Harmonic Minor, Melodic Minor, Harmonic Major, Phrygian Dominant, Lydian Dominant, both pentatonics, Minor Blues, Whole Tone.
Chord symbols are spelled for the key you are actually in. In C Dorian you get Bb, not A#.
Thirteen styles, ten moods
Melodic Techno · Progressive House · Melodic House · Deep House · Organic House · Afro House · Indie Dance · Tech House · Minimal Deep Tech · Minimal House · Ambient · Electronica · Trance
Each one carries its own harmonic vocabulary — which chords it reaches for, how far it moves, how much tension it holds, how the bass sits. Tech House leans on triads and repetition. Ambient lives on sus chords and four-bar changes. Trance pulls hard towards the dominant.
Then ten moods bend the style rather than replacing it: Dark, Emotional, Hypnotic, Euphoric, Dreamy, Warm, Tense, Mysterious, Uplifting, Melancholic. The same mood reads differently on every style.
Five presets to start from: Dark Hypnotic, Emotional Lift, Afro Deep, Deep Warm, Melodic Club.
Four macros that actually do something
TENSION — how unstable the harmony is allowed to be: dissonance, borrowed chords, chords from outside the key.
- COMPLEXITY — triads and suspensions at the bottom; sevenths and ninths in the middle; elevenths and thirteenths at the top.
- MOVEMENT — how far the harmony travels and how many chords it uses.
- DENSITY — how busy the bass and melody are.
All four are real Live parameters, so they appear in the automation list and take MIDI mapping.
The harmony is tested, not just tuned
Every build runs 322 automated tests, plus two audit passes over thousands of generated progressions. They check the things that are easy to get wrong and hard to hear one bar at a time: leading tones resolving upward, sevenths resolving down, parallel fifths and octaves, augmented seconds, chord symbols spelled against the right key signature, every note inside the scale — and whether each knob on the panel actually changes the music it claims to.
That is why the output sounds like a part rather than like a random chord generator.
New in v1.2.1
The defaults were rebuilt against the genre. The harmonic settings were measured against a corpus of 4,336 real MIDI files from Tech House, Melodic Techno and Minimal / Deep Tech. The old build wrote a tense chord 60% of the time; the music it targets does not. It is now 21%, and plain triads went from 7% to 32%. Nothing left the vocabulary — turn TENSION up and every altered chord is still there. What moved is where the middle of the knob sits.
All three parts on the first press. Chords, bass and melody land together on three tracks. Want to work on one at a time? The layer name is the switch — click BASS or MELODY to turn one off, and everything keeps being generated underneath either way.
VAR reads as a variation. It keeps 77% of the chords where GENERATE keeps 37%, so circling an idea sounds like circling it instead of starting over.
Already own v1.0, v1.1 or v1.2? This is a free update, and it is already in your library.
Reproducible, and it survives saving
Generation is deterministic: the same seed with the same settings always gives you the same music. Your Live Set stores a small set of numbers rather than a blob of notes, and regenerates the identical material on load — locked layers included.
Drag the SEED field to scrub through ideas. Hit the dice for a fresh one.
Created by Na7an. Questions before buying? Message me here — I answer.