Play fifteen seconds of electric guitar. Get it back as standard notation and tab, ready to export.
Aminor
Eight notes across two bars, written out below.
Plug in, or hold the guitar near the mic. Play single notes.
Ready.
Treble clef, sounding an octave lower — the way guitar music is always written.
Riff listens to a short recording of a single guitar line — a riff, a lick, a solo phrase — finds the pitch of every note, works out where the beat is, and writes it out as standard notation with guitar tab underneath. It is built for single notes. Play a chord and it will pick one of the strings and ignore the rest.
Everything happens in your browser. The recording is never uploaded, because there is no server to upload it to: the analysis, the engraving and the exports all run on your own machine.
It will get things wrong. Transcription by ear is hard for people too. The controls above let you fix the tempo, the time signature and the key, and you can click any note on the stave to nudge it into place before you export.
A single-note line, played reasonably cleanly, with a neck or middle pickup and not too much gain. Heavy distortion, palm mutes and chords all make the pitch harder to find. Fifteen seconds is the sweet spot — long enough to catch the phrase, short enough to stay accurate.
Press “Record 15 seconds” and play, or drop an MP3, WAV or M4A file on the page. Riff writes the notes out as standard notation with tab underneath. Check the tempo and key, click any note that came out wrong to fix it, then export MusicXML for MuseScore or Guitar Pro, or copy the text tab.
Single notes on an acoustic guitar use the same pitch tracking, though Riff is built for electric guitar. Bass is out of range for now: the tracking stops at about 70 Hz, just below a guitar in drop D, and a bass’s low E sits at 41 Hz.
No. Picking several simultaneous pitches out of one recording is a much harder problem than following one, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it. If you play a chord, expect one note per strum.
Fifteen seconds is not much to work with, and a free-time phrase has no tempo at all. Type the real one into the tempo box, or use the halve and double buttons — the notation re-flows immediately.
MusicXML opens in MuseScore, Dorico, Sibelius and Guitar Pro with the notes, the key, the tempo and the fret positions intact. MIDI drops straight into a DAW. Text tab is for pasting into a forum post, and SVG is the printed page.
No. The page is static files and the audio stays in the tab: your playing is never sent, stored or logged. The only thing the site keeps in your browser is a copy of its own files, so it still opens offline.
That is the convention for guitar. The little 8 under the treble clef says so: what you read as middle C sounds an octave lower. Every export carries the same instruction, so nothing shifts when you open it elsewhere.