quantize

quantize pulls your onsets onto a time grid as you play.

For a grid that follows your tempo instead of holding one, see snap.

It is the metronomic snap of the drum machine and the DAW piano roll, brought to a live stream, with one honest difference: a recording can be nudged backwards and forwards, but live quantization can only wait, never rewind. Each note-on is aimed at the nearest grid point, and the correction is clamped forward; a note whose nearest point is already behind it passes unchanged, while a note leaning toward the next point is held until that point arrives. The grid is anchored at your first note, which passes untouched and becomes the origin: you set the downbeat, the grid follows from there.

strength blends between you and the grid. The emitted time is arrival + strength * (target - arrival): at 1 notes land square on the grid, at 0.5 they move halfway there (tighter, still human), and at 0 the effect is a bypass. A note held to a future grid point keeps its release ordered after it (the note-off waits at least 10ms past the emitted note-on), so nothing sticks.

Parameters

grid= takes a duration string like "250ms" or "1.5s", or beats= against the tempo, never both; left out entirely, the grid is a quarter of a beat. See Time and tempo.

Parameter	Type	Default	Range
grid	duration string	a quarter beat	positive, "250ms" or "1.5s" form
beats	number	none (instead of grid)	finite, greater than 0
strength	number	1.0	0..=1

Example

miditool.kdl

input "Roland"
output virtual="miditool Out"

tempo 120

// Full snap is a drum machine. At 0.7 a third of your rubato
// survives, and the grid reads as feel rather than correction.
quantize beats=0.25 strength=0.7

Try this

Tighten without robotizing. At strength=0.6 your rushing and dragging survive at reduced size, which reads as intent rather than error:

tempo 96

quantize beats=0.5 strength=0.6

Then push it the other way: a coarse grid at full strength (beats=1 strength=1) turns any keyboard noodling into a solemn processional, one event per beat at most as far as onsets go.