Guitar Recording to MIDI — Transcribe Guitar Online
Upload a guitar recording and get an editable MIDI transcription — preview every note, fix the wrong ones, and export sheet music.
- Guitar / bass
- Fingerstyle & riffs
- Tabs via notation
Click a note to hear it
What is guitar to MIDI?
Guitar to MIDI turns a guitar or bass recording into MIDI notes — the pitches and timing of what you played, ready to edit, re-voice, or notate. Record a riff, a fingerstyle passage, or a bassline and get back notes you can drop into a DAW instead of re-playing them by hand.
Single-note lines — riffs, solos, and basslines — transcribe most accurately, since the model reads one pitch at a time cleanly. Preview on the piano roll, fix any misread frets, then export MIDI or turn it into a score you can read.
How it works
Upload your guitar recording
Drop an MP3 or WAV of your playing. Clean, close-mic'd recordings of single-note lines or fingerstyle work best.
Check the transcription
Play the result against your original recording in the compare view. Adjust sensitivity or minimum note length and re-transcribe to dial it in.
Edit and export
Join fragmented notes, delete noise, transpose — then download the MIDI or sign in to export notation as MusicXML/PDF.
Formats & limits
- Input formats
- Guitar
- Output
- MIDI
- File limits
- 50 MB · 10 min
- Price
- Free · no sign-up
Highlights
Riffs & basslines
Monophonic guitar and bass lines transcribe cleanly, note for note.
Re-voice freely
Play the part back with any instrument once it is MIDI, not a fixed guitar tone.
Notation export
Export MusicXML/PDF to read the part as a score for practice or sharing.
Recording guitar for transcription
- Single-note lines, riffs, and fingerstyle melodies transcribe well; dense strummed chords are hard for any AI transcription.
- A dry signal (no reverb/delay) gives dramatically cleaner results — effects smear note onsets.
- Let notes ring and avoid heavy palm muting; clear attacks help onset detection.
- Slides and bends are captured when you enable the pitch-bend option.
Frequently asked questions
Can it transcribe chords?
The underlying model, Basic Pitch, is optimized for melodic, largely monophonic lines rather than dense polyphony, so how well it handles guitar chords depends a lot on how they're played. Sparse double-stops, two-note harmonies, and arpeggiated chords — where notes are picked one at a time even if they ring together — usually come through reasonably well, since the model can still identify each pitch as it attacks. Full strummed chords, where five or six strings sound at once, are harder: the model may miss some notes in the stack, mistake string noise or harmonics for extra notes, or blur the attack timing across the whole chord. In practice, a chord-heavy recording needs noticeably more manual cleanup in the piano-roll editor afterward than a single-note riff or solo would, so budget time for that rather than expecting a ready-to-use chord chart.
What guitar recordings work best?
Clean, dry, single-note or fingerstyle recordings with clear, well-separated attacks transcribe most accurately, for the same reason true of any instrument: the model reads one pitch at a time, so keeping pitches distinct gives it the clearest signal. Close-mic'd or direct-input recordings without heavy room ambience help too, since reverb and delay smear the start of each note across time, making it harder to pinpoint exactly when a new pitch begins. Removing distortion and modulation effects before recording — or capturing a clean DI signal and reamping later if you need that tone — also improves results noticeably, since those effects add harmonic content the model can misread as extra notes. Letting notes ring naturally instead of heavily palm-muting them helps as well, because clear sustain gives the detection algorithm more signal to confirm what it heard.
How do I turn the result into guitar sheet music?
After the transcription finishes and you've checked it on the piano roll against your recording, sign in to unlock sheet-music export, since notation output — unlike the plain MIDI download — requires an account. From there, open the sheet-music view to render standard notation from the corrected MIDI, then export it as MusicXML, which opens directly in MuseScore, Guitar Pro, Sibelius, and most other notation or tab software for further editing, or export straight to PDF if you just need something to print or read. Fix any wrong or extra notes on the piano roll before this step rather than after: correcting a mistake in an already-engraved score inside notation software is considerably more tedious than deleting or nudging a note on the roll while it's still just a transcription, not a finished page.
Is this guitar to MIDI converter free?
Yes — converting a guitar recording and previewing the transcription on the piano roll is completely free and needs no account at all; you can upload a file, listen to the result against your original recording, and judge whether it's usable without ever signing up. What sits behind an account is everything past that first preview: the full note-editing tools for cleaning up misread chords or stray string noise, saved conversion history so you can return to a transcription later, and exporting the result as sheet music — MusicXML or PDF — rather than just a plain MIDI file. If all you need is a quick MIDI download of a riff or solo with no editing, the free anonymous flow covers that on its own, with the same underlying transcription quality either way.