Drop The Pocket on a MIDI track. Click the clip you want to quantize to focus it — The Pocket reads its notes and shows the previewed quantization in the piano roll. Tweak the knobs + grid until it sounds right, then hit COMMIT to write the result back to the clip.
As the clip plays, The Pocket auditions the previewed quantization in real time — you hear the result, not the raw clip (CCs, pedal, and bend still pass through). To hear the original instead, bypass the device. The source clip stays untouched until you press COMMIT.
You opened The Pocket from a MIDI clip's right-click menu (Quantize). Tweak the knobs, grid, and feel — the piano roll previews the quantization as you go. Hit COMMIT to write the result back to the clip in a single undo step, or press Esc (or the ✕) to cancel. The clip stays untouched until you COMMIT.
Extension limits. A few things are only in the Max for Live plugin version: the live-audition preview (in the Extension you see the quantized result in the roll but don't hear it as the clip plays), groove templates, and drum-lane renaming. Quantize, grid, feel, swing, offset, per-note locks, and COMMIT all work here.
AMOUNT — pull strength toward the grid. 100% = full snap; 0% = no movement.
LEEWAY — deadband around the natural note position. Notes within this distance of where they were played stay put; only notes drifting further get corrected. Preserves human feel.
KNEE — softness of the leeway edge. With a wide knee, notes near the deadband boundary get a partial pull rather than a sudden on/off transition.
BIAS — asymmetric correction. Positive bias corrects only EARLY notes (a "rusher" fix); negative bias corrects only LATE notes (a "dragger" fix). The two curves in the knee graph show this.
Drag knobs vertically to change. Hold Shift for fine control (4× slower). Double-click to reset.
Grid — base division (1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32). Click to cycle, shift-click to reverse.
Feel — STRAIGHT / SWING / TRIPLET / BOTH / GROOVE. SWING warps the straight grid into an uneven long-short ratio; drag the % field beside it to set the amount (50% = straight … 75% = hard shuffle), or double-click it to reset. TRIPLET snaps to a triplet grid; BOTH snaps each note to whichever (straight or triplet) line is closer. Swing and triplet are two takes on the same uneven feel, so they're separate modes rather than combinable.
Feel — STRAIGHT / TRIPLET / BOTH. TRIPLET snaps to a triplet grid; BOTH snaps each note to whichever (straight or triplet) line is closer. Straight and triplet are two takes on the same grid, so they're separate modes rather than combinable.
GROOVE feel — quantizes toward an Ableton Live groove template instead of a mathematical grid: every grid line moves to where the groove's pattern puts it, and AMOUNT / LEEWAY / KNEE / BIAS shape the pull exactly as usual — so you can fix the outliers while keeping your own feel relative to the template's pocket. Click the chip beside the Feel rotator to pick a groove: the list shows this set's groove pool (save the project so The Pocket can read it) plus Ableton Live's Core Library grooves. The picker's VEL field applies the groove's accent pattern — the velocity contrast within the template — on top of your own dynamics (templates with uniform velocities change nothing). If the focused clip also has a pool groove actively applied in Live, The Pocket warns rather than stacking the two — set the clip's Groove chooser to None or the pool Amount to 0. After COMMIT the groove is in the notes themselves; Live's own right-click → Extract Groove(s) can turn any committed clip back into a pool groove.
End mode — LEN preserves original note duration (end moves with start); GRID quantizes the end position too; POS keeps the end where it was (so notes stretch or shrink as the start snaps).
View — NOTES is a conventional piano roll (every pitch in range gets a lane, black-key rows tinted). DRUMS is compact lanes per used pitch. The Pocket switches to DRUMS automatically when the track has a Drum Rack; use this rotator to override. Lane labels in DRUMS mode try the track's Drum Rack pad names first (abbreviated to fit), fall back to GM defaults, then to the bare note name. (See DRUMS view — per-lane scope below for how lane labels behave.)
LOOP — temporarily takes control of Live's loop for the focused clip. Arrangement clips: the visible region of the piano roll drives Live's transport loop — pan/zoom to adjust. Session clips: only the clip's looping flag is toggled; the loop bracket is left wherever you set it in Live (this avoids the side effect where moving a session clip's loop_start also moves its start_marker). Turning LOOP off or switching clips restores the loop state that was there before.
COMMIT — writes the quantized notes to the exact clip shown. The button stays on COMMITTING… until Live accepts the write, then the result becomes the new baseline and COMMIT stays disabled until the preview changes. Preserves note IDs + probability / velocity_deviation metadata via apply_note_modifications. (Preview/audition is always on — see Workflow above; bypass the device to hear the raw clip.)
↻ Re-analyze — starts the focused clip over: re-detects its grid & feel from scratch and discards the manual tweaks you made to this clip — its grid / feel / swing / offset / groove choices, dragged notes, flam & roll anchors, per-note and per-lane knob locks, and lane mutes — as if you'd just loaded it. The global AMOUNT / LEEWAY / KNEE / BIAS dials are left alone, and the clip's notes aren't changed until you COMMIT. Affects only the focused clip and can't be undone — so when you have edits to lose it asks you to confirm first (with nothing to lose it re-analyzes immediately). (Switching to another clip and back keeps your tweaks; this is the deliberate way to drop them.)
Default view shows the first 4 bars (or the full clip if shorter). Use the wheel (or two-finger scroll) to pan; shift-wheel to zoom around the cursor. The cream playhead line tracks Live's transport position.
Drag a note to nudge it — it follows your cursor and snaps to the grid on drop, landing in the lane's pocket (the grid line as drawn, offset included). A whole flam / roll drags as a unit: the hit that ends up nearest the grid lands on it, the rest ride along. While dragging: ⌥ = move just the one hit (pull it out of a roll); ⇧ = exact, no snap (drop the note or whole roll at a free spot). Right-click a dragged or overridden note (cream outline / peachier fill) to reset it. Drag is horizontal only; pitch is locked.
Per-note knob locks (both views). Click a note to select it; shift/cmd/ctrl-click toggles a note in the selection; drag empty space to lasso a range — a chord in NOTES view, a run of hits across one or more lanes in DRUMS view. Shift/cmd/ctrl-drag adds the lasso to the current selection rather than replacing it. With notes selected, the knobs write to those notes only — global stays put. Selected notes show a thicker cream outline; notes with their own knob locks shift to a slightly peachier fill so they're easy to spot. Click empty space (or finish a drag that didn't touch any notes) to clear the selection. Double-click a knob with notes selected to release just that knob for the selection.
Single-click a lane label to scope the knobs to that whole lane (the label highlights orange). Now turning a knob changes only that lane's notes — so the kick can be dead tight while the hats stay loose. Click more labels to add lanes; click again to deselect.
A knob readout turns coral when its value is overridden for the selected lanes, and labels with active overrides show coral too. A ↺ RESET LANE(S) button appears when the selected lanes have overrides — click it to clear them. For finer control than a whole lane, lasso individual hits instead (above); note and lane selection are mutually exclusive — selecting one clears the other. Lane scope clears when you focus another clip.
Double-click a lane label to rename it inline (a per-track 4-character label; overrides persist per-track for the session).
Visualizes the correction transfer function as a function of distance from the nearest grid line. Two curves: orange for the LATE side, cream for EARLY. They overlap when BIAS is 0; turn BIAS to see one curve drop toward zero (its side is suppressed).
This clip came from Just Play with its rubato kept — it plays at one project tempo but still carries your performance's push and pull. With this on, The Pocket quantizes against that tempo curve instead of the straight grid, so shaping the feel works with your rubato instead of flattening it. Flip the setting any time:
Swing, Groove, Offset & auto-detect live in The Pocket → rubato.audio
RUBATO AUDIO
This clip came from Just Play with its rubato kept. The Pocket can quantize against that tempo curve instead of the straight grid, so anything you do here works with your rubato instead of flattening it. Use it?
Re-analyzing starts this clip over — it re-detects the grid & feel and discards your manual edits to it: dragged notes, flam & roll anchors, per-note & per-lane locks, lane mutes, and grid / feel / swing / offset / groove. This can’t be undone. (The clip’s notes aren’t changed until you COMMIT.)