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Asked: 2026-05-16T00:13:46+00:00

I’m searching ways to identify scores, when someone is playing i.e. guitar. How can

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I’m searching ways to identify scores, when someone is playing i.e. guitar. How can I manage that?
I’ve heard that midi stores music data as musical scores. I wonder if it’s a good solution.

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  1. Editorial Team

    MIDI does store musical scores, but it doesn’t (normally) extract them from recorded sounds. You can’t take an mp3 file and “convert it to MIDI”, in a standard or entirely reliable way.

    You create a MIDI file using a recorder (or “sequencer”), which might be a desktop application where you “write the score” like a composer does, or it might be a musical device like a keyboard, which records which keys you press, how hard and for how long, and interprets that as a score.

    A MIDI player takes the data/score, and reproduces it using its own voice (or “sound font” if you like). So the advantage of MIDI data is firstly that the voice is already available on the playback device (and so the data is very compact), and second that the same data (“tune”) can be played using different voices (“instruments”)[*].

    I believe there are MIDI guitars, but I don’t know how “good” they are. The tone of an electric guitar comes in part from resonances of the solid body. This could of course be imitated by the voice at playback time, but there are bound to be some things that you can do with an electric guitar but which the MIDI format cannot capture or represent (for example I’d guess feedback is impossible).

    Software exists to extract MIDI data from recorded sound – this is a bit like the way OCR extracts ASCII character data from images of text. It’s not a major means of recording someone’s guitar-playing, but if what you want is to get a first approximation to the score/tabs, you could try it.

    Here’s a randomly-selected example, found by Googling “convert from wav to MIDI”:

    http://www.pluto.dti.ne.jp/~araki/amazingmidi/

    [*] But members of the audience, you find yourselves wondering, “what is this mindless automaton which bangs out the tunes it’s instructed to, without comprehension or any aesthetic sense”. Ladies and gentlemen, Colin Sell at the piano.

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