Drums · iPhone and iPad · Coming soon

The chart for the song
you are learning tonight.

Drum notation for the track you actually want to play is either nowhere to be found or transcribed for someone with better hands than yours. DrumScribe writes it out at a level you can play today, then mutes the record's drummer so you can take the seat.

No account neededDrumless mix includedCharts stay yours
One slider, four charts
A simple chart that is right
beats a full chart that is wrong.
Every other transcriber hands you the complete part and lets you discover at rehearsal which bars it invented. Here the simple levels are the product, and the raw transcription is labelled for what it is.
Level 1

Backbone

Kick and snare only, one pattern per section. The shape of the song, playable the first time you look at it.

Level 2

Groove

The hi-hat or ride comes in on eighths and the easy fills appear. This is where it starts to sound like the record rather than an outline of it.

Level 3

Detailed

The real fills, written out. Ghost notes are still left off, because a ghost note you cannot hear on the recording is a guess printed as a fact.

Level 4

Full

Everything the transcriber heard, nothing tidied. It is labelled a draft and carries its own confidence number, so you know what you are looking at before you trust a bar of it.

Marked draft
What it does
From a recording
to the drum seat.
Getting the hits on the page is half of it. The other half is the hour you spend playing along to it with the original drummer taken out of the way.

The drummer, muted

Every conversion separates the recording, so the mix without its drummer comes back at the same time and costs nothing extra. Pull the drum fader down and the seat is yours. Pull it up when you want to hear how the part was actually played.

Play along, not just read

Turn the phone sideways and the chart runs against the original recording with the cursor following the audio itself, not a timer counting alongside it. Slow it down, loop the four bars you keep dropping, and the chart stays in step.

Four levels, one song

The same song written four ways, from kick and snare to the full draft. One slider moves between them and the reduction happens on your phone in a frame, so changing your mind costs nothing.

Setlists for the weekend

Group the songs you are actually playing on Saturday into a set, in the order you play them. Built for the night before the gig rather than for a practice diary.

Fix what it got wrong

A wrong hit is a tap to move, remove or add. Corrections live with the chart, so the fix you made in the kitchen is still there at rehearsal.

Yours after you cancel

Charts you have made stay readable and playable whether or not a subscription is running. That is not a promise in a footer: nothing in the app's chart storage asks about your subscription before opening a file.

Honest by design
What a machine cannot do.
Automatic transcription is genuinely useful and genuinely imperfect. Knowing which is which before you pay is worth more than a confident sentence in a store listing. These numbers are from the project's own test runs.

Read this before you rely on it

  • The transcriber is a signal processing baseline, not a trained model. It finds beats and onsets and decides what the hi-hat is dividing the beat into. On synthetic loops with known ground truth it scores a mean F1 of 0.963, and over a drum part mixed into three real commercial recordings it reaches 0.99 to 1.00 with the tempo exact in all six runs. Read that as the pipeline finding drums that are present in real music, not as the pipeline transcribing drummers.
  • Hi-hats go missing on a dense record. On the test fixtures the detector reports two or four hats per beat. On real songs it finds roughly half of them, because cymbals, crashes and a loud mix bury the hat. Level 1 and level 2 are largely unaffected, since neither is carried by the hat.
  • The time signature is sometimes wrong. On a run of real songs, two of the eight that passed came back in 7/4 and 3/4 where 4/4 is far more likely. It is the first thing to check on a new chart, and it is exactly why the level 4 draft is labelled a draft.
  • It refuses songs it cannot hear drums in. Rather than returning a confident chart made of noise, a recording that does not have a drum part in it is declined. A conversion that comes back empty is the app telling you something true.
  • Converting needs the internet and a server. Separating a mix is far beyond what a phone can do, so the audio is uploaded and processed on Google Cloud. What happens to it there is set out in the privacy policy. The practice shelf and any chart you already have work with the phone in flight mode.
  • You are responsible for what you bring in. The app does not host, index, search or recommend any catalogue of music. It works on the file or the link you give it, on the understanding that you have the right to use that material.
  • There is no grading. It does not listen to you play and score you, and that is on purpose. Being told you missed a hit on a chart that might itself be wrong is worse than being told nothing.
Pricing
Buy conversions,
or stop counting them.
Pay for the songs you convert, or subscribe if there is always another one. Either way the charts you make stay yours, and the practice shelf costs nothing.
3 credits
$4.99
One-time, no subscription
  • Three songs, all four levels
  • Drum stem and drumless mix
  • Charts are yours to keep
10 credits
$9.99
One-time · cheaper per song
  • Ten songs, all four levels
  • No expiry date on a credit
Pro monthly
$6.99
per month
  • Conversions without counting them
  • Setlists and export
Pro yearly
$49.99
per year · 7 days free
  • Everything in Pro
  • Works out cheaper from month eight
FAQ
Straight answers.
What can I turn into a drum chart? +

An audio file you own such as an MP3, WAV or M4A, a recording you made yourself, or a link to audio you have the right to use. The app does not host, index, search or recommend any catalogue of music; it works on the material you bring to it.

What are the four levels? +

Backbone is kick and snare with one pattern per section. Groove adds the hi-hat or ride on eighths and the easy fills. Detailed writes out the real fills. Full is everything the transcriber heard, labelled a draft with a confidence number. They are the same song at four sizes and one slider moves between them.

Which level should I actually use? +

Backbone or Groove, more often than people expect. A simple chart that is right is more use at a rehearsal than a full chart that is wrong in three bars. Level 4 is there for when you want to see everything and are willing to fix it.

How accurate is it? +

Good enough to play from, not good enough to publish. Kick and snare are reliable. Hi-hats go missing on dense mixes, and the time signature is occasionally wrong, so check it on a new chart. The full level is explicitly a draft and says so on screen.

What is the drum fader? +

Separating the recording produces the drum part on its own and the same song without it. The fader moves between the two, so you can practise against the record with its drummer removed, or bring the original part back to hear what it is meant to sound like. It comes with every conversion at no extra cost.

Do I need a real kit? +

No. Charts read and play back on their own, and the practice shelf works with nothing but the phone. If you have an electronic kit you can connect it over USB or Bluetooth MIDI and see your hits on the chart while you play.

Do I need an account? +

No. There is no sign-in screen, no name and no email address to give. Nothing you send to the conversion service identifies you.

What does it cost? +

Conversions are bought as credits: 3 for $4.99 or 10 for $9.99. DrumScribe Pro is $6.99 a month or $49.99 a year with a 7-day free trial. The practice shelf needs no credits at all, and charts you have already made stay yours whether or not a subscription is running.

Can I sell or publish the charts it makes? +

Not unless you hold the rights to the underlying music. A transcription is a derivative of the composition, so a machine-made chart of a song someone else wrote is for your own private practice.

Does it grade my playing? +

No, and it is not planned for the first version. Grading is the single most complained about feature of the app that does it, and a wrong verdict on a chart that may itself be wrong is two mistakes rather than one.

Is DrumScribe available now? +

Not yet. It is being prepared for the App Store. Leave your email and we will tell you the day it is out.

Learn the song you actually wanted.
DrumScribe is not on the App Store yet. Leave your email and we will tell you the day it is.

DrumScribe produces machine transcriptions for private study and practice. You are responsible for holding the rights to any audio you bring into the app, and a transcription of music you do not own is not yours to share, perform or sell. The app does not host, index, search or recommend any catalogue of recordings.