Meatbag Documentation

1. Introduction

Quantised MIDI is perfectly in time and usually sounds dead. Real players are not in time — they lean ahead on some beats and sit behind on others, and they do it consistently enough that it reads as feel rather than as error.

Most humanisers try to fake that with randomness. Random is not human; random is just sloppy. Meatbag lets you draw the groove instead — a curve across the bar that says "ahead here, behind there" — and then applies it consistently, bar after bar.

Two curves

Timing — where notes sit against the grid. Above the centre line pushes them early, below pulls them late.
Velocity — how hard notes hit. Above the line is harder, below is softer.

Draw both, aim them at only the notes you want, and a programmed part starts to sound played.

Meatbag is a MIDI processor. It takes MIDI in, changes it, and passes it out — it makes no sound of its own. It goes before your instrument, not after. See section 2.

2. Installing and Routing

You will need

Windows, 64-bit.
A VST3-capable host that can route MIDI between plug-ins.

Installing

Copy the plug-in into your host's VST3 folder and rescan.

Routing — the important bit

Meatbag outputs MIDI and silence. Your host needs to take its MIDI output and feed it to an instrument. Exactly how depends on the host:

REAPER — put Meatbag above your instrument in the same FX chain. MIDI flows down the chain automatically.
Most other hosts — place it on a MIDI track and route that track's output to the instrument track, or insert it as a MIDI effect ahead of the instrument if your host has a dedicated MIDI effect slot.

If you insert Meatbag after your instrument you will get silence and no groove, because by then the MIDI has already become audio. It has to sit in front.

A 14-day trial begins the first time you load it. See section 10.

3. Quick Start

Route Meatbag ahead of a drum instrument playing a straight, quantised pattern.
Press play. The bar in each lane follows your host's transport.
In the TIMING lane, drag a shape: pull the curve down just after each beat to make the offbeats lay back.
Listen. If it is too subtle, raise SHAPING AMOUNT; if it is too much, lower it. If raising it stops making a difference, you have hit MAX SHIFT — see section 8.
In NOTE FILTER, click the Hihat chip so the groove applies only to hats. Now the kick and snare stay locked while the hats swing.
Draw a velocity curve for accent, and you are done.

Meatbag, dark theme — Figure 3-1. Timing curve (red) and velocity curve (white) drawn across the bar, with shaping controls below each. The keyboard picks which notes are affected; the chips are saved selections.

Start with one instrument in the kit. Grooving everything at once mostly sounds like the whole take drifted. Grooving the hats against a locked kick is what feel actually sounds like.

4. Drawing a Groove

Each lane is one bar wide. Left edge is the downbeat, right edge is the end of the bar, and the horizontal centre is "no change".

Drag anywhere in the lane to draw freehand. Meatbag reduces what you draw to a manageable set of points automatically, so a scribble becomes a usable curve rather than a jitter.

Curve position	Timing lane	Velocity lane
Above centre	Note plays early — ahead of the beat	Note plays harder
On centre	No change	No change
Below centre	Note plays late — behind the beat	Note plays softer

Grooves worth trying

Swing — dip the curve below centre halfway between each beat, so every offbeat lays back. The oldest trick there is.
Push — lift the curve just before each beat. The part feels urgent and drives the tempo.
Drag — pull the whole curve slightly below centre. Everything sits behind the beat and the track feels heavy.
Human drift — a slow, shallow wave across the bar that does not line up with the beats at all. Reads as a player who is not thinking about the grid.

Small is convincing. A few milliseconds of consistent lean is felt rather than heard; twenty is a different part. If your groove is obvious as an effect, it is too big.

5. The Three Shaping Controls

The curve says what the groove is. These three decide how strictly it is applied.

Shaping Amount

How much of the curve you actually get. At zero the curve is ignored; at maximum it is applied in full. This is your master "how much groove" control and the first one to reach for when something is too strong or too weak.

Land on 1

How firmly the downbeat is pinned. Turned up, beat one stays put however wild the rest of the curve is, so the bar always re-anchors and the part cannot drift away from the song. Turned down, the downbeat is as free as everything else.

Keep this fairly high on anything rhythmically important. It is what keeps a groove sounding intentional rather than late.

Groove Memory

How quickly the groove responds to change. Low values make it sluggish, so the feel carries over between notes and evolves slowly; high values make it track the curve tightly and react immediately.

Lower settings feel more like a player settling into a groove. Higher settings feel more like a machine following instructions — which is sometimes exactly what you want.

Loose settings — Figure 5-1. A looser feel: the downbeat anchor eased off, slow groove memory, wider maximum shift.

6. Velocity

The velocity lane works exactly like the timing lane, with its own copies of the three shaping controls. Above centre hits harder, below hits softer.

Velocity is often the more convincing half. A drummer's timing varies by a few milliseconds, but their dynamics vary constantly — and a programmed part with flat velocities gives itself away instantly, however good the timing is.

Velocity Gravity

Meatbag's velocity shaping pulls notes toward a moving average as well as following your curve. Turned up, extremes get reined in toward what the part has recently been doing, so accents stay in proportion instead of leaping out.

Link T/V

Ties the velocity lane to the timing lane so one curve drives both. Notes that get pushed early also get hit harder, which is what a real player tends to do — leaning into a note means playing it slightly early and slightly louder.

It is a shortcut to something that sounds natural. Turn it off when you want timing and dynamics to disagree deliberately.

Timing and velocity linked — Figure 6-1. Link T/V engaged with heavier shaping on both lanes.

7. Choosing Which Notes to Affect

This is what makes Meatbag useful on a real kit rather than a novelty.

The NOTE FILTER section has a keyboard. Click keys to choose which notes the groove applies to. The TIMING and VELOCITY tabs above it hold separate selections — so you can swing the hats' timing while shaping every drum's velocity.

Groups

The chips below the keyboard are saved selections — Kick, Snare, Kick+Snare, Hihat, Cymbals, Toms — covering the usual General MIDI drum mapping. Click one to select those notes instantly.

+ SAVE GROUP stores your current selection under a name of your own, for kits that do not follow the standard map or for selections you keep rebuilding.

The classic move: leave the kick and snare untouched and groove only the hats and percussion. The backbone stays solid while the ornamentation breathes — which is exactly what a drummer does.

8. Lookahead and Maximum Shift

Lookahead

Moving a note later is easy — you hold it back. Moving one earlier is not, because it has not happened yet. Meatbag solves that by running a fixed distance behind the incoming MIDI, which gives it room to release a note ahead of where it arrived.

LOOKAHEAD sets how much room. It is the furthest Meatbag can push a note early, so it needs to be at least as large as the biggest push you are drawing. The default is a sensible starting point; raise it if your pushes are not landing.

Meatbag reports that delay to your host as plug-in latency, and the host compensates for it — so the part stays where the grid says it should be, and a push really does arrive early rather than merely less late. There is nothing to set up, and it follows the knob if you change it.

Live playing is the exception. Delay compensation works by moving recorded material earlier, and nothing can do that to a performance that has not happened yet. Playing in through Meatbag you will feel the LOOKAHEAD as latency. Set it to 0 while tracking — that costs you pushes and nothing else — and put it back up afterwards.

A few hosts do not apply delay compensation to MIDI plug-ins the way they do to audio ones. If your part sits late by exactly the LOOKAHEAD amount, that is what you are looking at — see section 11.

Maximum Shift

A hard limit on how far any note may move, however extreme your curve is. It is a safety rail — it stops a steep curve from throwing notes into the next beat.

Two ways to express it, chosen with the X 1/16 toggle:

Mode	Limit is	Use when
Milliseconds	A fixed time, whatever the tempo	You want a consistent human feel — players do not lean further just because the song is slower.
× 1/16	A fraction of a sixteenth note	You want the groove to scale with tempo and stay musically proportional.

Milliseconds is the more natural of the two for feel. The musical mode is better when a project changes tempo, or when you want the same patch to behave the same way across different songs.

If your groove suddenly stops getting stronger as you raise SHAPING AMOUNT, you have hit Maximum Shift. Raise that, not the shaping.

9. Controls and Parameters Reference

Timing (SEC.01)

Control	Range	Default	What it does
Timing curve	drawable	flat	The groove itself. Above centre is early, below is late.
Land on 1	0 – 1	0.70	How firmly the downbeat is pinned.
Groove Memory	0 – 1	0.50	How quickly the groove responds to change.
Shaping Amount	0 – 1	0.50	How much of the curve is applied.

Velocity (SEC.02)

Control	Range	Default	What it does
Velocity curve	drawable	flat	Above centre is harder, below is softer.
Vel Land on 1	0 – 1	0.70	How firmly the downbeat's velocity is pinned.
Vel Groove Memory	0 – 1	0.50	How quickly velocity shaping responds.
Velocity Gravity	0 – 1	0.50	How strongly velocities are pulled toward the recent average.

Master (SEC.04)

Control	Range	Default	What it does
Link T/V	on / off	off	Drive velocity from the timing curve.
Lookahead	0 – 120 ms	25.0	How far a note may be pushed early. Reported to the host as latency.
Max Shift (ms)	0 – 120 ms	30.0	Furthest any note may move, in time.
Max Shift (× 1/16)	0 – 1	0.00	Furthest any note may move, musically.
X 1/16	on / off	off	Which of the two Max Shift controls is live.

A few controls are labelled differently in your host's automation list than on the panel — GROOVE MEMORY appears there as "Tracking Speed", and VELOCITY GRAVITY as "Shaping Amount". Same controls, in the same order.

10. Licensing

Meatbag runs fully unlocked for 14 days from first launch. The footer shows how many days remain.

Activating

Click LICENSE in the header.
Enter the email address your licence was issued to, and your serial.
Press ACTIVATE.

You only do this once per computer. Activation needs an internet connection; everything else does not.

Activation panel — Figure 10-1. The activation panel.

Moving to another computer

One licence covers three machines. To free a seat, open the LICENSE panel on the machine you have finished with and press DEACTIVATE. The seat is available immediately.

Deactivate before you wipe, sell or retire a computer. Recovering a seat from a machine you no longer have means going through support.

Privacy

Activation sends only what is needed to issue your licence. No MIDI, no session data and nothing about your projects ever leaves your machine.

11. Troubleshooting

Symptom	What to do
No sound at all	Meatbag makes no sound — it processes MIDI. Check it is routed into an instrument and not placed after one. See section 2.
The groove does nothing	Check the curve is not flat, SHAPING AMOUNT is above zero, and the notes you are playing are actually selected in NOTE FILTER.
Only some drums are grooving	That is the NOTE FILTER working. Timing and Velocity keep separate selections — check both tabs.
Groove stops getting stronger	You have hit MAX SHIFT. Raise it rather than pushing SHAPING AMOUNT higher.
Notes are not pushing early enough	Raise LOOKAHEAD. It has to be at least as large as the earliest push you are asking for.
The whole part sits late by exactly the Lookahead	Your host is not applying Meatbag's reported latency — a few do not, for MIDI plug-ins. Check that delay compensation is switched on. Failing that, nudge the track earlier by the LOOKAHEAD amount, or set LOOKAHEAD to 0 and shape with pulls only.
It feels laggy when I play in	That is the LOOKAHEAD, and no host can compensate a performance that has not happened yet. Set it to 0 while tracking and put it back afterwards.
The bar in the display does not move	The visualiser follows host transport. It only moves while the host is playing.
It sounds sloppy rather than grooved	Raise LAND ON 1 so the downbeat re-anchors every bar, and make the curve smaller. Consistent and small reads as feel; large and free reads as a mistake.
Stuck notes	Should not happen — note-offs are kept paired with their note-ons however far either moves. If you see one, note what you were doing and contact support.

12. Specifications

Product	Meatbag
Version	1.0.0
Formats	VST3
System	Windows 64-bit
Processes	MIDI in, MIDI out. Produces no audio.
Curves	Two, freehand drawable, one bar long
Lookahead	0 to 120 ms, reported to the host as plug-in latency
Maximum shift	0 to 120 ms, or a fraction of a 1/16 note
Note targeting	Per-note, with separate timing and velocity selections and saveable groups
Trial	14 days, fully featured
Seats	3 computers per licence

Figure 12-1. Light theme. The DK/LT button switches, and the choice is saved with your session.

13. Glossary

Downbeat	The first beat of a bar.
Groove curve	The shape you draw across a bar, saying where notes should sit or how hard they should hit.
Humanisation	Making programmed parts sound played. Meatbag does it with a drawn curve rather than randomness.
Lookahead	Running behind the incoming MIDI so notes have room to be released early. Reported to the host as latency, so the host puts the timing back.
MIDI effect	A plug-in that changes MIDI rather than audio. It goes before an instrument.
Note group	A saved selection of notes, so you do not rebuild it every time.
Push and pull	Playing ahead of or behind the beat.
Quantised	Snapped exactly to the grid. Accurate, and usually lifeless.
Velocity	How hard a MIDI note is struck.

MEATBAG

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