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.
Making a transcription or arrangement is the easy part. Selling it is where the law gets specific, because a song you transcribed is still someone else's copyrighted work. Here is what you can sell, what needs a license, and how charging for the work differs from selling copies.
Transcribing a song can take ten minutes or a whole evening, depending on the music, your ear, and whether you do it by hand or with AI. Here is an honest breakdown of the time involved by method, song complexity, and skill level.
Transcribing sounds like it should require fluent music theory, but most of it comes down to a few practical ideas, and AI now does the hardest listening for you. Here is the minimum theory that actually helps, and how transcribing can teach you the rest.
A Guitar Pro file holds tab, standard notation, and playback together in one editable document, which is why so many guitarists prefer it to a flat PDF. Here is what is inside a .gp or .gpx file, how to open one, and how to get a Guitar Pro file from a recording.
Some tools promise to split a whole band into separate parts in a single pass. It sounds convenient, but the result is often a rough approximation of every part at once. Here is why transcribing one instrument at a time produces cleaner, more editable scores, and how to assemble a full arrangement from them.
A transposing instrument reads its music in a different key than it sounds, which is why a trumpet and a piano playing the same written note do not match. This guide explains what makes an instrument transposing, why it happens, and gives a full chart of the B-flat, E-flat, F, and concert-pitch instruments.
Hand a trumpet player a concert-pitch part and it comes out a whole step too low. The trumpet is a B-flat instrument, so it reads in a different key than the piano. Here is the interval the trumpet needs, why concert pitch is wrong, and how to get a part in the right key without doing the math.
The B-flat clarinet reads a major second above concert pitch, so a piano part handed straight to a clarinetist sounds in the wrong key. Here is the interval the clarinet needs, how its registers affect the result, and how to get a part in the right key without transposing by hand.
The French horn in F reads a perfect fifth above concert pitch, a different interval from the B-flat and E-flat band instruments. Here is exactly how far to move a part for horn, why concert pitch comes out wrong, and how to get a readable part without working out the interval yourself.
People are asking Gemini and Claude to turn recordings into sheet music, the way they once asked ChatGPT. Here is what these AI assistants can and cannot do with audio, and what actually produces accurate notation.
The Nashville Number System lets a band read a song in any key, but every charting app makes you type the numbers in by ear first. Here is how to get the chords automatically and turn them into a number chart.
There is no button on YouTube that hands you a MIDI file, but you can get there. Here is how to turn a YouTube video into MIDI you can drop into your DAW, and how to skip the audio-download step entirely.
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