You drop a rough vocal into your DAW, call up Bandmate, and EZkeys 2 spits back a chord progression and a groove that actually fits. That’s the gig in one move.
Plugin formats — AU, VST3 and AAX; it slots into Logic Pro, Pro Tools, Ableton Live, Studio One and just about any other host on your Mac.
Standalone — The app icon and project icon now follow the macOS Tahoe style, so it sits cleanly in the Dock without looking like a relic from 2014.
What you hear — A Fazioli F212 grand, captured at Riksmixningsverket in Stockholm. Multiple mic sets and ambiences live inside the core library. It’s a detailed, present sound that takes EQ well when you need it to duck under a vocal.
Songwriting tools — The Chord Wheel is your harmonic sketchpad. Bandmate listens to audio or MIDI and returns chords and grooves. The Grid Editor handles timing and velocity edits the way you’d expect from a piano roll, but faster for quick comping.
Interface — Fully resizable. On a 5K display the vector graphics stay sharp, and the String Machine EKX view now includes an expression pedal knob right in the Keys tab.
Small Conveniences That Sneak Past You
Most people load EZkeys, grab a MIDI pack, drag it into their DAW and call it done. Fair. But a few shortcuts live just under the surface that make the whole thing move faster once you know they're there.
Double-click any chord in the Chord Wheel and it drops straight into the song track at the playhead. Right-click that same chord and you get inversions and voicings without opening a menu. In the Grid Editor, holding Option while dragging a note stretches it without snapping to the grid — useful when you want a phrase to breathe a little before the next bar. And Shift plus arrow keys nudges selected notes by ticks, not beats, which saves a trip to the quantize panel when a performance is almost right.
The Tap2Find window remembers the last rhythm you tapped between sessions. If you're sketching an idea over two days, you don't have to re-tap the same groove from memory. Small thing, but it keeps the flow going.
Audition MIDI Packs Standalone Next to Logic
EZkeys plays nicely with macOS in ways that aren't obvious until you try them. Because it runs standalone, you can keep it open next to Logic without a host running — handy for auditioning MIDI packs while a session is bouncing. Drag a MIDI file from the Finder straight onto the standalone window and it lands in the song track ready for the Chord Wheel or Grid Editor.
With other Toontrack tools, the workflow chains cleanly. A groove from EZkeys can sit under Superior Drummer 3, and since both understand the same tempo map from your DAW, you're not doing math to line things up. The AAX build plays well with Pro Tools' MIDI routing, and the VST3 version handles parameter automation from Studio One's control surface without fuss.
On Apple Silicon, the app runs natively, so the standalone launches fast and doesn't eat battery like a translated process would. That matters when you're sketching on a MacBook Air away from power.
No Sound in Standalone? Check the Output Device
A few things trip people up, and the fixes are usually quick.
No sound in standalone. Check the audio output device in the settings — it doesn't always default to your main interface. If you're on macOS 10.13 through 10.15, switch the output to Built-in Output once, then back to your interface, and it usually wakes up.
Plugin not showing in Logic. Logic scans AU plugins on launch. If EZkeys doesn't appear, a full rescan from Logic's Plug-in Manager clears it. On Apple Silicon, make sure you're running Logic natively, not under Rosetta — the ARM build of EZkeys won't load in a translated host.
MIDI packs not found. EZkeys MIDI packs need a working EZkeys installation to show up. If you install a pack and it doesn't appear, reopen the standalone once and let it rebuild its library index.
Drag and drop stops working from standalone to DAW. Some hosts get picky after a macOS update. Dragging to the desktop first, then into the DAW, always works as a fallback.
Transistor Organ EKX Joins the Keys Tab
Version 2.1.5 didn't add a flashy new piano, but it tightened the daily grind. Support for the Transistor Organ EKX means organ players now get the same songwriting tools wrapped around a very different sound source — the Keys tab pulls up the expression pedal knob where it belongs, so you don't hunt through menus mid-take.
The multi-core CPU improvement matters more on Mac than the release notes let on. Projects that used to spike when you stacked three or four EZkeys instances now spread the load across cores instead of choking one thread. Bounce times drop accordingly. The updated macOS Tahoe icons are cosmetic, but a clean Dock icon is the kind of polish you notice every single launch.
If you're hunting for the ez keys torrent to grab the latest build, this is the version to look for — ARM and Intel are both in the same installer, so one download covers whatever Mac you're on.
Transistor Organ EKX is now supported, so the library list just got grittier. The standalone and project icons on Mac now wear the macOS Tahoe look — cleaner in the Dock, sharper on retina screens. Also fixed: multi-core performance, especially on Mac, where render queues and session loads now spread across cores more evenly.
- macOS 10.13 or later
- Intel or Apple Silicon Mac
- AU, VST3 or AAX-compatible host (for plugin use)
Questions I actually get
Do EZkeys MIDI packs work with EZkeys 2?
Yes. EZkeys MIDI packs need a working installation of EZkeys 1 or EZkeys 2, and they will load directly into version 2.
Which Macs can run EZkeys 2?
It runs on Intel and Apple Silicon Macs back to macOS 10.13, as an AU, VST3 or AAX plugin, plus standalone.
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