r/transcribe

Song: Paw Prints by Alec Benjamin

trying to learn it on my keyboard but I don’t know the chords. If anyone can help it’s much appreciated.

I've been experimenting with several tools for converting sung vocals into MIDI and sheet music, and I kept running into the same problem: the pitch transcription can be surprisingly good, while the resulting rhythm is almost unusable.

You get strange rests, unnecessary sixteenth notes, very short notes caused by vocal artifacts, overlapping notes, and all kinds of rhythmic clutter.

At first I assumed the problem was simply poor pitch detection. But after testing different approaches, I started to think the problem happens after the pitch information has already been extracted.

A singer doesn't perform a melody as a perfectly quantized MIDI sequence. There are tiny fluctuations in pitch, consonants, breaths, vibrato, slides, and other details that are musically irrelevant when you're trying to create a readable melodic line.

So I tried a different approach.

Instead of asking the transcription system to produce the final notation directly, I used a workflow with several stages:

1. Vocal isolation

The original recording is processed to isolate the main vocal and remove as much background material, reverb, speech, screams, etc. as possible.

2. Pitch extraction

A pitch-transcription engine is then used to generate the MIDI. In my tests, engines based on YourMT3 produced much better raw material than some of the simpler audio-to-MIDI solutions I had previously tried.

3. Rhythmic/musical cleanup

This was the interesting part.

Rather than simply quantizing the MIDI or deleting notes below a certain duration, I tested an HTML-based processing system that evaluates the extracted notes in context and tries to reconstruct what a human copyist would consider the intended melodic line.

The objective isn't to preserve every tiny fluctuation in the original performance.

It's to produce something that makes musical sense on paper.

The result was much more useful to me.

Instead of getting a technically detailed MIDI full of tiny rhythmic events, I could open the result in MuseScore and work on a relatively clean melodic draft. There can still be small things to correct manually — an occasional unwanted tie, a note that needs adjusting, etc. — but the basic rhythmic structure is already much closer to something a musician would actually write down.

The tool I used for this is called ScoreDraft. I originally came across the project while looking for a way to automate the tedious MIDI-cleaning stage of my own transcription workflow.

I'm not presenting this as a magical one-click transcription solution. It isn't. The final score still needs a human review.

What I found interesting is that better transcription may not necessarily mean capturing more information.

Sometimes the opposite is true: you need to deliberately throw away information that is musically irrelevant.

That made me wonder whether the future of practical audio-to-score transcription is less about making the AI hear every microscopic detail, and more about having a good musical logic layer decide which details should actually survive into the notation.

Has anyone else noticed that the rhythmic cleanup is often a bigger problem than the actual pitch detection when working with vocal transcriptions?

Hey, I’m getting back into ukulele and there’s a bass part from Aiden Kroll’s song “Tether” that I really want to learn.
Could anyone help me turn about 10 seconds of the bass part into a simple ukulele tab? I’m using a concert ukulele in standard GCEA tuning.
I know a ukulele can’t match the low range of a bass, so it doesn’t need to sound exactly the same. I’m mainly trying to get a close version of the melody that I can actually play and practice.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/hdT\_EumLkwI
I’m still a beginner, so a simple tab with the string/fret numbers would be perfect. Thanks!

I just finished arranging an instrumental version of Sarah McLachlan's "Do What You Have to Do" from her 1997 album "Surfacing". My background is that I studied classical piano performance and theory for about 12 years and have continued my own studies since then, and now write my own music as well as figuring out other people's. Hope you enjoy! https://www.sheetmusicdirect.com/se/ID_No/2097305/Product.aspx

Hello all, I'm a student trying to get a decent side hustle going. I've studied upto Trinity grade 5, am a pianist myself and I'm great at learning by ear. I have multiple compositions under my name, and work in a choir as well. If anyone wants help transcribing any song that might not be available online (such as original compositions/unknown Youtube rabbit hole songs), dm me and I can help you out for a small fee :)
Thanks

I need a human musician with good ears to listen to it and extract just the main melody line into a clean, simple Piano MIDI file (just single notes/basic chords, nothing overly complex). AI software keeps creating a jumping mess so I need a human touch. I don't read music, I just need the raw MIDI file to drop into a falling-notes player. https://vocaroo.com/1icD955dnfrT Budget is £10–£15 via PayPal. Please send me a DM if you're interested!

I was thinking about the song this morning (such a banger) and thought “wow, it would sound really good on a kalimba”. I am trying to translate it from piano to a 17 key one but I have barely any experience with writing or translating music lol; so far I’ve only gotten the intro’s basic notes (and they’re still a bit off 🚶‍♀️). Wondering if anyone here who is maybe more experienced is interested in trying it out?

I am reposting to state that I am willing to pay for this help!

I am working on transcribing DPR Cream's 'Our last dream', but I am having a hard time figuring out some of the chords.

I think I have found the first chords (please tell me if they are wrong, I don't have perfect pitch and my relative pitch is questionable at times). After that I am beyond lost lol

the song link:

https://open.spotify.com/track/0kM48A5Wx5RnYDGlqcCjKy?si=fc76c4a5167f420c

Measures 1-7

Measures 8-14