A free note finder for solos and melodies: guitar, sax, trumpet and voice

Sometimes you don’t need the whole arrangement, just the line: the guitar solo you can’t quite catch, the sax hook, the melody of a song you want to sing in a different key. For that, a free online note finder that follows one melody is often more useful than a full transcription of everything in the mix.

Single melody mode

Noteform’s Single melody mode uses pYIN, a well-established pitch tracker designed for one sound at a time, like a voice, flute, trumpet, violin or a guitar playing single notes. It covers roughly C2 to C7 and reports one note at a time, so it’s never used to work out chords. If the solo is played over a band, the tracker follows the strongest pitch it can find, which works best when the solo is clearly louder than the accompaniment.

For chordal solos, double stops, piano or anything where notes overlap, switch to Polyphonic mode. It uses Spotify’s Basic Pitch model, which detects several notes at once across the full piano range, A0 to C8.

Transcribing your own playing

A transcriber isn’t only for other people’s records. Use Record input to capture yourself through a microphone or audio interface, then transcribe it. It’s a quick way to:

• write down a riff or melody idea before you forget it,
• check whether you’re playing the notes you think you’re playing,
• see where your intonation drifts on a sustained note, and
• turn an improvised solo into a list of notes you can learn and develop.

Reading the results

Each note is shown with its name in scientific pitch notation (middle C is C4) and its start and end time in the recording. A ? marks notes where the detector’s evidence was weak, so you know which ones to listen to first. Times are performance times in seconds. Noteform doesn’t guess tempo, bar lines or rhythm values, so you decide how the line is counted.

Getting a cleaner solo transcription

• Select only the solo with the range tool rather than transcribing the whole song.
• Use the cleanest recording you have: live recordings with lots of room echo blur the ends of notes.
• Expect fast runs and heavy vibrato to need the most correction; slides and bends are shown as the nearest notes.
• Edit pitch, octave, start and end directly in the list. Undo and “reset to the original detection” are always there if an edit goes wrong.

When you’re done, export the notes as a plain-text file, or as JSON if you want to use the data in another program.