Grooves inner working

[sefable]

Hello,

The documentation on grooves (https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/using-grooves/) is quite confusing.

For instance : 

Notes in the groove that fall exactly on the grid aren’t moved at all, so the corresponding notes in your clips will also not be moved.

"Notes in the groove [...] aren’t moved at all"

I assumed that grooves are used to move notes in a clip.

Why is the documentation talking about moving notes in a groove?

I can’t find any resource on internet that actually explains how grooves actually work. After an hour of trying to understand, it’s still unclear what the algorithm looks like.

[gigamonkey]

I'm new to this—came here looking for more info about grooves myself—but I think I can answer this one. My mental model of grooves is that you can think of them as a midi clip (and you can indeed create them that way by writing a midi clip and then using "Extract groove" to turn it into a groove. When the groove is then applied to another clip, each note in the clip you are affecting will be adjusted according to the position of the nearest note in the groove. In the simplest case, the note in the affected clip is exactly on a beat and the nearest groove note is a bit ahead or behind the beat; in that case the clip note will be moved to the position of the groove note, i.e. a bit ahead or behind the beat.

In the bit you quoted, they were just pointing out that a note in the groove that's exactly on the beat represents zero change so it has no effect on a clip note at that beat.

At least that's my understanding.