Humanize MIDI in Ableton with AI

How to humanize MIDI in Ableton with an AI assistant: take a stiff, perfectly quantized clip and push the notes slightly off the grid so it breathes, all through tools your assistant calls. The whole edit is one undo step.

What it does

Humanize reads a clip’s notes, nudges each note’s start time, velocity, and optionally length by a small random amount scaled to the grid you have set in Live, and writes the notes back. The randomness is the point: run it twice, get two feels. It edits MIDI notes only.

The tool calls

1. live_find_track to resolve the track by name, then live_list_clips to get the clip id.
2. live_get_notes to read the clip’s notes.
3. The assistant applies the humanize transform to the notes (jitter timing and velocity within grid-scaled bounds).
4. live_set_notes to write the whole note array back.

Step 4 is one live_set_notes call, which is one transaction, which is one undo.

Try it

Find my “Hats” track, read the clip in the first slot, humanize the timing and velocity by about a third, and write it back.

The assistant resolves the track, reads the notes, transforms them, and writes them. Press undo once in Live and the original clip is back.

For a deeper, slider-driven version inside Live with a swing control, the Humanize extension does the same work as a right-click action.