Red Pen puts a review board inside Ableton Live. Leave notes on clips, tracks, and moments in the arrangement ("kick too hot at the drop", "retake this vocal") and work through them without leaving the Set. No more mix notes scattered across your phone, a notebook, and three text files.
It never touches your audio. Red Pen is a notepad for the Set, not a device in the chain.
You never export anything or reach for a second screen. Open the board, leave the note, get back to the music.
Red Pen runs on Ableton Live 12's new Extensions system (currently in beta). Install it like any extension.
Each Set gets its own board. Your notes stay with the project they belong to, automatically.
Notes attach to clips, tracks, and arrangement positions, and time anchors drop a native Live locator so the spot is marked on your timeline.
Open, In Progress, Resolved, with a high-priority flag, search, and filters for when the project gets album-sized.
Red Pen for Ableton is being dogfooded on a real multi-EP project. Every feature in it exists because a mix session demanded it.
Every Set gets its own board, named after the project. Open a different Set, see that Set's notes. Nothing bleeds between projects.
Click a note and Red Pen blinks the clip it is about. Live 12's Extensions API exposes no way to select a clip or scroll the view, so the button is called Flash rather than Locate: a colour blink, not a jump. For time anchors, the native RP: locator on your timeline is the marker. Honest about the limit until Ableton ships the API.
Search, filters, and sorts that hold up when one project has a hundred notes across twenty tracks.
Open, In Progress, Resolved, plus a high-priority toggle. Live's SDK gives no room for a three-way control, so it is a flag rather than low/normal/high. "Fix the hats" stops being a vibe and becomes a queue.
Red Pen is not a device and never enters your signal chain. The only things it writes into the Set are locators and clip colours. Neither touches audio, and both are listed in Settings.
Notes can surface as locators and session tints inside Live itself, so the to-do list is visible where you actually work.
The album, the club set, that remix you owe someone: each Set sends its notes to the Red Pen Hub, one local board that sees all of them.
The Hub runs on your own computer, with nothing hosted anywhere else. Resolve a note on the Hub board and it syncs back into Live. Nothing in it counts projects, so the number of Sets you connect is up to your disk.
The extension will be free, like every Red Pen surface. None of it is paywalled. It is feature-complete and in daily use on a real album; it ships the moment Live's Extensions SDK goes public. Watch the GitHub repo for the release.
This page runs the web version of Red Pen. The red button in the corner is the same idea on a different instrument.
The extension is feature-complete at v0.9.5 and used daily on a real album project. It is built on Ableton Live 12's Extensions system, which is itself still in beta. The public release lands when the SDK does. GitHub is the place to watch.
No. Red Pen is not an audio device and never enters your signal chain. It reads your Set to know what clips and tracks exist, and the only things it writes back are locators and clip colours, neither of which touches audio.
The note text does not. Notes are stored alongside the project, keyed to the Set. But Red Pen does write two things into your Set, and you should know about both. Time-anchored notes create a native Live locator named RP: ... on your timeline, which is what makes the spot visible in Live at all, and Red Pen stamps one RP# marker so it can tell your Sets apart. Session clip tints are optional and restore their original colour when a note resolves. Locators are on by default and can be switched off in settings. Red Pen only ever touches locators carrying its own prefix.
No. If you can install a Max for Live device, this is easier: install the extension, open the board, type. Nothing about it involves writing code or running a server.
The Hub is an optional board on your computer that gathers notes from all your Sets, and from any other Red Pen surface you use. You do not need it; the extension is complete on its own. It shines when you juggle several projects.