Play one line. Make a whole rig respond.

What it does

Stage Router lets a single keyboard, controller, or sequencer conduct several MIDI instruments as one evolving system. The original notes and rhythm stay yours; Stage Router changes how those notes are distributed.

A bass synth can receive every note while two lead synths alternate. A pad can enter only on the fourth event, with another destination answering on the other three, while an occasional transposed voice appears according to probability. Change the traversal order and the same performance becomes a different arrangement, without rewriting the source.

One example

Bass on every note, changing lead above it.

Two routes share each active stage. One route always sends a folded bass note to a fixed channel. The other alternates between two lead channels as the stage changes. Every note reinforces the bass, while the lead line moves between instruments, all from one unchanged performance.

Three concepts to start with

• Stages are positions in the routing cycle.Each incoming note selects one stage according to the chosen traversal order. A stage is an event position, not a clocked sequencer step.
• Routes are independent musical layers.Every enabled route assigned to the selected stage runs in parallel. A route can filter, condition, transpose, octave-fold, and reshape the velocity of an incoming note.
• Destinations are MIDI output channels.Each route can send to any combination of sixteen destinations. Every destination can inherit the route's settings or add its own condition and transform.

Conditions, logic, and transforms

A route's key zone decides whether an incoming note is eligible at all, the way a keyboard split works. Route admission then gates the whole layer: always, on a repeating X:Y cycle, on every occurrence except X:Y, never, or with an added chance evaluated after that cycle. Once a route is admitted, each of its destinations makes the same kind of decision independently, so complementary patterns like 1:4 and !1:4can divide one shared four-event cycle between two channels.

Logic adds a further, deterministic dependency on top of that: whether another destination already played for this note, whether this destination played last time, whether a live fill control is on, or whether this is the first note after a reset. Transforms then decide the note that actually gets sent, transposition, velocity scaling, and octave-folding, at both the route and the destination, so one incoming note can leave unchanged on one channel and arrive as a quiet upper accent on another.

Traversal and held notes

Traversal is the policy that picks a stage for each accepted note: linear, ping-pong, odd/even, converge and diverge, Brownian motion, and several random and shuffled orders are all available, with a start-stage control and an optional phrase length that resets the cycle. For instruments with limited voices, exclusive allocation treats stages more like voice slots, with a stealing policy and optional held-note restoration for chords that need to reappear once a stage frees up.

Features