Tutorial•10 min read
How to Make a Piano Cover of Any Song
A good piano cover starts with knowing what the song is actually doing. Here is how to find the chords and melody, arrange them for two hands, and make the song your own.
Explore Songscription's guides to music transcription, sheet music, MIDI, piano roll, and AI-powered music learning, plus product updates and company announcements from the Songscription team.
A good piano cover starts with knowing what the song is actually doing. Here is how to find the chords and melody, arrange them for two hands, and make the song your own.
Classical piano is one of the hardest things to transcribe well: dense voicing, pedal blur, and rubato all fight you. Here is how to get a clean score by ear or with AI, and what to expect.
Gospel piano is built on rich chords, fast passing notes, and a feel that is hard to pin down. Here is how to transcribe it without losing what makes it gospel, by ear or with AI.
Music transcription is the act of writing down music you can hear but do not have on paper. Here is what it means, the forms it takes, and how AI changed who can do it.
AI music transcription listens to a recording and writes out the notes. Here is what actually happens between the audio going in and the sheet music coming out, in plain language, plus where the technology is strong and where it still struggles.
Stem separation splits a finished mix back into its parts: vocals here, drums there, bass on its own. It can be a useful step before transcribing a dense recording, though it is not something Songscription requires. Here is how it works and when it helps.
The file you upload sets the ceiling on how good a transcription can be. A clean WAV or a high-bitrate MP3 beats a quiet phone clip every time. Here is what formats work, what actually matters about the recording, and how to give the AI its best shot.
It is two questions in one. Reading many notes at once from a single instrument is something AI does well, especially on piano. Pulling several different instruments apart from one mix is the hard frontier. Here is what is really going on, and how to get readable notation today.
A piano plays many notes at once, and pulling that apart into separate written notes is the core hard problem of music transcription. Here is a plain-language explainer of why simultaneous notes are so difficult, how a modern model reads a chord, and why piano is the benchmark.
A full band on one recording is the hardest thing to transcribe, but you are often closer than you think, because the song frequently exists as separate tracks. With stems, a full-band score becomes several doable problems. Here is how to transcribe each part and assemble a real score.
You can sing a melody long before you can write it down. Here is how to turn a vocal recording, sung or hummed, into readable notation with AI: what the voice model gets right, where lyrics and runs trip it up, and how to clean up the result into a lead sheet you can keep.
A clean trumpet line is one of the friendlier things to transcribe automatically. The catch is that the trumpet is a transposing instrument, and that changes the key the part should be written in. Here is how to turn a trumpet recording into sheet music and get the key right.
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