Stave: Song to Tab

Stave listens to a recording and writes down what was played. Bring a video or a voice memo, or play into the phone, and a minute or two later you have the tab, the notes and the chords, lined up with the recording so you can slow it down, loop it and play along. It's built for two kinds of people: anyone learning a piece they've just heard, and teachers who want that piece written out for a student without spending an evening transcribing it. For learning - Go from hearing it to playing it. A riff from a clip, a fingerpicked intro, the bass line under a chorus: bring the recording and Stave writes it out. - Slow it down without the pitch dropping, and loop the bar you keep getting wrong. - Break it down: Stave loops a single bar, starts it slow, and listens through the mic as you play it back, so you know when you've got it. That listening happens on the phone. - Play along with a count-in, a click that follows the recording, and the next chord shown before it arrives. - Choose how it's written: exactly as played, or simplified for a beginner with the awkward stretches and extra notes taken out. - Tap any chord to see its shape in your tuning and capo. For teachers - Play a passage once and hand your student the written version. Record yourself in the lesson and they leave with the tab or the notation. - Turn the recordings students bring you into material you can teach from, without transcribing by ear. - Fix anything Stave got wrong: notes, bars, chord names. Your corrections carry through to everything you export. - Print clean pages or export a PDF of the tab, the notation, a lead sheet or just the chords. - Take it further in notation software with MusicXML, or use MIDI, plain text tab, ABC or JSON. - Share a song with a link that opens in any browser, so a student can play along at home. What it writes - Tab for guitar and bass, in standard or your own tuning, with the capo on if it sounds like one was used. - Standard notation for piano, violin and voice. Piano gets both hands; a sung melody gets the words under it where Stave can make them out. - A grid for drums: kick, snare and hi-hat, bar by bar. - Chord names over the top of everything. How well it works It's best with one instrument played clearly: fingerpicking, single-note lines, riffs and melodies. That's also what most lessons sound like. Strumming comes out rougher, and a busy full-band mix roughest of all. A quiet room and the phone close to the instrument make a real difference. Notes Stave isn't sure about are drawn faint, so you know where to check. It gets things wrong sometimes, so trust your ears over the tab. Stave is new and gets better with every update. If something comes out wrong, tap "Doesn't sound right?" on the song or email support@playstave.app, and it helps fix it for everyone. How long it takes The listening runs on Stave's server, so you need a connection. A 30 second clip of one guitar takes about a minute. A full song with a band behind it takes a few minutes, because Stave has to pull your instrument out of the mix first. Tell it the recording is just you and it skips that step. What it doesn't do It doesn't fetch songs from streaming services or video sites: you bring the file. It doesn't work offline. Most audio and video files are fine, up to 10 minutes long. Accounts Your first song needs no account. A free account holds 50 songs at a time and keeps them on any phone you sign in on; delete one and the space comes back. There are no ads and nothing to buy. Privacy Your recordings are yours. No advertising, no tracking and no third-party analytics. Stave keeps simple counts of how the app is used, like how many songs are made and how long they take, to make it work better. Nobody listens to your recordings unless you ask for help with one and say yes. Delete a song and its recording goes with it. Close your account from inside the app and everything on it goes.