Arpa

Arpa is an arpeggiator Ableton Live MIDI Effect that's made to play midi notes in an unquantized manner.

What is Arpa?

Arpa is build to act as a layer between your MIDI input - either a device or a clip - and your sound source - be it melodic synths, rythmic samples or both. It strictly modulates MIDI timing, not pitch nor velocity, to be as simple and effective as possible. Pair it with a chord generator, slap on some effects and layer it with more Arpas and melodies to create beautiful bleep bloop blop music.

Why I created this? Why another plug-in?

I really love arpeggios but I hate the robotic and quantized feel electronic arpeggiators have. I wanted to create a modular device that sparks new ideas, rythms and arpeggios in a simple way so that it can easily be used in a composition context or a live setting. This plug-in is the result of 2 years of exploration towards this goal of creating my ideal arpeggiator.

Compatibility & Requirements

• Arpa is a Max for Live device and requires Ableton Live Suite (or standard with the Max for Live add-on) to use. It is not compatible with any other DAW.
• Designed with Ableton Live 12 (12.2.6) and Max 9 (9.0.6). Backwards compatibility not guaranteed.
• Arpa is fully compatible with Push 2 & 3 + standalone.
• The device parameters are fully mapped to the Push interface and all functionality can be controlled from the hardware without needing to interact with your computer.

Keywords

Arpeggiator, Human-like humanizer, Swing, Sequencer, Fluency, Ping-pong, Lego-like, MIDI, Rhythmic manipulation of drums or melodies, Euclidean-like patterns, Non-quantized, Live, Syncopated, Groove machine, Off-the-grid

Thanks

To Stijn Cools, Roel Das, Lucas Lebrun and Andreas Papagiannis for their guidance, testing and thorough feedback. Thanks to everyone else for their continued support ❤️

Changelog

- 1.0 (Released 08/11/2025):

    - Initial public release