Tonalign

There’s an old jazz saying: you’re never more than a half step away from the right note. Tonalign makes that half step for you, in real time, on live MIDI.

Play whatever you want. Tonalign nudges each note to the nearest one that fits the current harmony, and shows you the move it made, so it reads as a musical instrument you can trust rather than a black box quantizing your playing.

The part that makes it more than a scale filter is that the target can move while you’re holding a note. Tonalign subscribes to Scale Navigator Dashboard’s harmonic state, so when the scale or chord changes underneath your hands — because you drew it into the arrangement, or someone else in the session steered there — a held note re-pitches to stay consonant with wherever the harmony just went. You keep playing; the correction follows the room.

Pitch correction on audio is everywhere. On MIDI it’s rare, and where it exists it locks to one fixed scale you set and forget. Tonalign’s target is alive.

Because it listens to Dashboard’s shared harmonic state, the note you’re correcting against is whatever the session is currently in — and that can change mid-phrase. Hold a chord, change the harmony, and the held notes retarget to the new chord without you lifting your fingers. Improvisation stays inside the harmony even as the harmony moves out from under it.

It also refuses to be invisible. A correction layer is, by nature, something you can’t see — so Tonalign draws the note you played and the note it landed on, making the half step legible. You learn where you were and why it moved, instead of just trusting that something happened.

(One honest absurdity worth mentioning: because VST3 makes true MIDI-effect plugins nearly impossible, Tonalign is technically a synthesizer — with a silent, ever-running synth inside it that never makes a sound. It corrects MIDI while pretending to be an instrument.)

A child, a beginner, or even a pet walking across a MIDI keyboard making music that stays inside the harmony instead of a collection of wrong notes.

Turning almost anything into a musical instrument. Plants, weather stations, biosignals, stock market feeds, APIs, cameras, motion sensors, or generative systems can all produce raw MIDI, while Tonalign continuously guides their output into the evolving harmony.

A performer holding a note through a modulation and hearing it glide naturally into the new harmony, allowing improvisation to stay consonant even as the harmonic landscape changes.