How to split a piano part into left and right hand
You recorded both hands in one MIDI clip and want them on separate instruments. Here's how to split a two-handed piano part into clean left- and right-hand tracks — without a pitch cutoff's crossover errors or the note-by-note slog of editing it by hand.
You recorded a two-handed piano take in a single pass, and now you want the parts apart — the left hand on a deep electric bass, the right on a bright keys patch, or just each hand on its own EQ and compression. One clip, two voices, and no obvious seam to pull them along.
Doing it by hand
Ableton Live can get you part of the way there with note-selection tools — pitch filters, key-track selection, invert selection — especially if the parts stay on opposite sides of a pitch boundary. But it still has no one-click way to split a MIDI clip into two hands, so by hand it’s two chores: deciding which hand played each note, and then actually separating them.
Deciding, you can use those tools to select a range or pitch lane quickly, which works when the part is cleanly separated. The trouble is musical piano writing: close voicings, overlapping registers, and lines that pass near the cutoff force you back to judgement calls note by note. And either way, there’s no convenient way to hear a call before you settle on it.
Separating them is its own slog. Duplicate the clip onto a second track and you have to delete the other hand from each copy — two passes, once per hand. Cut and paste one hand into a new clip instead and you save a pass, but you risk dropping the take’s CCs and automation — and it’s all or nothing, so unless you get every note right the first time, you’re starting over.
Let Counterpoint do the split
Counterpoint gives you the accuracy without the tedium. It reads the whole recorded clip at once and assigns each note a hand from the musical signals a pitch cutoff ignores — register, but also the continuity of each hand’s line, how dense the texture is around a note, and its velocity. Where that cutoff miscounts every crossing, those extra signals let it carry a hand across the register boundary; and where they genuinely conflict, it still makes its best call — but surfaces the note for you to check. So in REVIEW mode you don’t audit the whole take — you just check the calls it was least sure about, queued up for you.
Step through that queue and flip any note you’d place differently, or lasso a phrase in the piano roll to reassign a whole run at once. Your corrections become anchors — re-run Analyze and they hold, while the notes around them re-settle to fit. When it looks right, COMMIT rewrites the take into two clips in place: the left-hand track keeps the left-hand notes, the right keeps the right.
Here’s the real device running in your browser. This take walks down the keyboard through both hands — as they descend, the same middle-register notes hand off between them (a low G is the left hand at the top of the phrase and the right hand by the end), so a fixed split line slips on those hand-offs while Counterpoint follows each hand down. Left hand teal, right hand orange. Press Play to hear the split, left hand in your left ear and right in your right. Step through the calls it flagged as close, flip any you’d call differently, and press Analyze to re-run.
Credits & demo notes
Teal is the left hand, orange the right — press Play to hear them split to opposite ears, each on its own instrument. COMMIT does nothing here; in Ableton Live it writes the split back to your two tracks. One instance stands in for a whole rig, 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 own playing 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.
Do it in Ableton Live
- Put Counterpoint on the track holding your recorded piano clip and focus the clip.
- Hit Analyze — it reads the whole performance and shows its split, teal for the left hand, orange for the right.
- Walk the queue of calls it was unsure about. Flip any you’d place differently, or lasso a phrase in the roll to reassign several at once, then re-Analyze to fold your corrections back in.
- COMMIT. Check the destination preview, then let it write the two parts onto their tracks — each ready for its own instrument, EQ, and processing.
Two parts, without the tedium
Counterpoint splits the take for you and flags only the calls it wasn’t sure about — so a clean separation is a quick read, not an afternoon of note-by-note editing.
Splitting an already-recorded clip is REVIEW mode. If you’d rather separate your hands onto two instruments as you play, see the live side of Counterpoint.