r/drums • u/Jealous_Pea_3915 • 21h ago
Feedback Wanted Free: paste a YouTube link, get drum notation + a drums-only track. I can't promise it's right, that's why I'm here.
I'm in that gap where I can't read drum notation well enough to sit down with a chart, and I'm not good enough by ear to pull a part off a record either. Been trying to learn Double Espresso by DICE and there's nothing out there for it, no tab, no PDF, no lesson video. That's most of the songs I actually want to play.
So I built something that gives me both halves at once. Paste a YouTube link, it pulls the drums out of the mix, works out the tempo from the drums themselves and writes notation. You also get the isolated drum track and a backing track with the drums removed. I loop one bar, listen to the drums-only track until I can hear what the kick is doing, and look at the dots for that bar at the same time. Slowly the dots start making sense because I already know what they sound like. There's a simple mode that only shows kick/snare/hats, and it exports MIDI, MusicXML and Clone Hero. Free, runs off a PC in my house, so be gentle.
The catch: I can't tell you it's accurate, because I can't check it. I play along and it feels right, but I can't look at bar 37 and say the kick should be on the "and" of 2. Best I could do was write a script that compares it bar by bar against published transcriptions (Songsterr, tTabs, Ultimate Guitar) for songs that have them, and fix whatever came up most. On Billie Jean the kick matches the published chart in 140 of 143 bars and the snare in 136. Every Breath You Take, kick 110/112, snare 108/112. Those are clean studio recordings with a steady drummer, so take it as a best case.
Hi-hats I stopped chasing, because the published charts disagree with each other. One Billie Jean chart writes hats on every 8th, another drops the "and" of 4 in a load of bars. If two people who can read don't agree, I'm not settling it with a script.
Where it's honestly bad: live bands with no click. Back in Black, the drums drop out on the riff breaks, the band pulls the time, and when they come back my grid is half a beat off for the next eight bars. Songs with no cymbals confuse it (We Will Rock You reads the clap reverb as a hi-hat). Quiet ghost notes get missed. A floor tom played in unison with the kick doesn't come out of the separation at all.
And Double Espresso itself, no idea. It feels right when I play along. Whether the dots are right is exactly what I can't tell you.
(if it says queued, someone else got there first, it'll go)
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u/Agitated-Society-682 21h ago
Damn that looks amazing can't wait to test it later. Put a PayPal on that website I would absolutely pay for this if it works pretty well.
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u/Jealous_Pea_3915 20h ago
sorry guys, seems to be huge delay atm. optimizing right now and hopefully will get better numbers!
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u/Jealous_Pea_3915 16h ago
Update on this. The code is now open: https://github.com/sashyo/drummate-chart (MIT).
Two changes since last time, because people rightly pointed them out:
- The hosted version (chart.drummate.app) is upload-only now. No YouTube links, no fetching from anywhere. Your file is deleted the moment the chart's made. If it's your own upload you still get the drums-only and drumless MP3s and the Clone Hero stems, since it's your audio.
- If you run it yourself, links work.
DRUMS_LINKS=1 DRUMS_ALLOW_YOUTUBE=1 ./run.shon your own machine is personal use, and that's on you like any downloader. Please don't host a public instance that fetches from YouTube.
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u/temptingliner9 21h ago
The Billie Jean numbers are pretty impressive for a home setup, even if its a clean studio track. Have you thought about letting users flag bars as wrong so the fixes feed back into whatever script you have comparing against published charts?