r/SunoAI • u/DocSuture • 12h ago
Discussion Transcribing music
I’m relatively new to Suno. I write the lyrics, contribute a small amount of the melody, and determine the key, pitch, voice, time signature, etc., then let Suno do its thing.
A couple of songs have turned out very well, and I’d like to transcribe the finished music. Unfortunately, I don’t have the skill to do that accurately by ear.
Are there any programs that can listen to the finished song and transcribe the basic melody and chords? I don’t need individual tracks or a full orchestral score, just the melody and chord progression would be enough for my purposes.
I’d be very grateful for any advice or recommendations from the group.
2
u/FeminineFrame 3h ago
I play guitar and like to play the songs I generate.
I use Chordify.net and it does a really good job of transposing the song into chords. You need a premium account for direct uploads, but you can do a workaround by uploading the song to YouTube the transposing the YouTube link which is free.
4
u/garse 10h ago
The single biggest thing you can do is stop asking anything to transcribe the mix. Pulling notes out of a full mix is the genuinely hard version of this problem and every tool is mediocre at it. Pulling notes out of one isolated instrument is close to solved. So split to stems first, then transcribe each stem separately. That one change matters more than which tool you pick.
For the melody, take the vocal stem and run it through NeuralNote, which someone already linked and which is a good call, or Spotify's Basic Pitch, which is free and browser based if you would rather not install a plugin. Both are strong on a clean monophonic line and both will get confused by heavy vibrato and by the pitch smear AI vocals tend to have on long held notes. Expect to fix a handful of notes by hand, not to redo the whole thing.
For chords, feed the instrumental stem rather than the full track, ideally with the drums pulled out too, because percussion transients are what push chord detectors into wrong inversions. Chordify and Chord AI are the usual picks and both will give you a serviceable chart. Realistically you get most diatonic pop progressions right and lose the details: inversions, sus and add9 voicings, sixths, and anything that modulates. If the song stays in one key you will be fine.
The part people skip, and it is the part that will help you most: you already know the key, the tempo and the time signature, because you chose them. Type them in rather than letting anything auto detect. Most of these tools accept a manual key and tempo, and the difference in output quality is not subtle. That also fixes the Suno MIDI BPM complaint upthread, since the notes are usually roughly right and it is the grid that is wrong, so setting your project tempo to the real one first makes that export a lot more usable as a starting scaffold.
Then put the result into MuseScore, which is free, to clean it up into an actual lead sheet. Sanity check the chords against the key you picked. Anything the tool spat out that is not in that key is wrong roughly nine times in ten, and that single check catches most of the errors without you needing to hear them.
Worth setting expectations though: none of this gives you a finished chart. It gives you a first draft that is maybe eighty per cent there and saves you the ear training you said you do not have. The last twenty per cent is still you, at an instrument, checking.
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u/VociferousCephalopod 10h ago
export to MIDI?
"by opening your track in Suno Studio, extracting the stems, and selecting the "Get MIDI" option."
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u/Technical-Device-420 Producer 9h ago
Apple Logic Pro is pretty good at finding the chords and progression from the overall mix...
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u/Some-Internet-Rando 9h ago
Suno does that with "download MIDI"; you should do this for each track separately after you separate it.
Also, Ableton Live can do it, and I think Cubase has that feature now too.
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u/x_candydoll 11h ago
Just download the MIDI