1.4.0 is out! Cleaner vocals (even slightly off-pitch AI vocals), bass slides that stay as two notes, strummed chords kept separate, no more phantom kicks on hi-hat stems, and Suno stems are now recognised with matching instrument sounds. It also opens more reliably, with a “Starting Stemquill…” window on the first launch. Full details in the devlog. Got a stem that converts badly? Drop a comment, that’s how this update happened.
A few tips: • Vocal and bass previews can take a minute on a full-length song, so give them a moment. Clicking Convert afterwards is almost instant. • Leave Snap to grid off for AI-generated stems (Suno, Udio); their timing drifts a little. • If your drums land on the wrong sounds, pick the drum map that matches your plugin in the stem’s settings.
Found a stem it gets wrong, or have an idea? Leave a comment here. I read them all, and bug reports are what shape the next update.
I am a composer... And I have several pieces that have only survived as a Youtube playlist after the the computer that had the original sheet music and tabs, as well as external storage with backup copies, were all lost after a lightning strike hit my devices.
That was 17 years ago and for 17 years I have searched for some kind of tool to help me recover/transcribe those pieces of music.
I do not have a good enough ear to do so on my own - I compose the music for all instruments in a typical 'rock' instrumentation, without an instrument in hand, directly from the idea I hear in my head to tabs and notation.... BUT I CANNOT EVEN READ SHEET MUSIC!
...Much less play most of the stuff I write... sometimes it takes me months or even close to a year of practicing something I wrote just to be able to play it on guitar or bass.
After literally 17 years of hoping I could one day see the music in its original format again - and actually take it from that point and produce/develop it and mix it all properly... anything more than the 'Super Nintendo' style versions they currently are on YouTube. An d it seems technology is finally getting to a level that this may be possible.
The irony, I suppose, is that the songs are just the audio recording of the RAW MIDI instruments being played back inside Guitar Pro.
And because all this AI tech, stem splitters, etc etc train on audio data from REAL INSTRUMENTS, these purely musical composition versions using MIDI sounds have proven to be difficult for all these tools and platforms to recognize and pick out the different instruments since they all expect ACTUAL instruments in an audio recording...
Anyway, I'm rambling.
If you are interested, here is the playlist of those songs... (as you can see, from literally 17 years ago! ...haven't been right since then...)
If you need some kind of direction to go in with your development work on this project, have a listen to that playlist. That's what I've been aiming to recover as notation/tabs.
And as you might notice, the rhythms and time signatures happen as the music itself originally sounded to me in my head - not 4/4 - because music exists outside of time.
You're hitting on something special. But I will point out where I'm at on the first couple of runs.
For the bass guitar part for the song 'Sea Thou Art' (see YT playlist link in last comment), here are a couple of the very first measures in tab format that StemQuill gave me - regardless of how high I set the sensitivity:
Here is what I was finally able to transcribe from remembering exactly how I composed it once I was finally able to see some of the bass part in tab format:
Even though I set it to keep original tempo after trying out the 'detect tempo' option the first time, StemQuill possibly overlooked adding the tempo to the MIDI file (I set the tempo in the second screenshot.
The small red boxes also point out some of the notes that I have filed in from memory after having an initial base that helped spark my memory.
As mentioned above, the sensitivity setting for the bass part seemed to produce the same tab from the MIDI output.
Also, if you haven't taken a few seconds and heard any of the music in that playlist, it might be noteworthy to reiterate something I mentioned in the last comment as well: I am not sure how much of the issues I am facing (on any platform attempting to go from the extracted YT audio to MIDI - not just your app) is possibly due to the fact that the audio files are a direct recording of the Windows MIDI synth through internal audio capture in Guitar Pro - it is not actually real instruments...
I am not complaining by any means - your app is a much better starting place than many of the other platforms online I have tried attempting the same thing to arrive at a specific outcome (RE-transcribing my old compositions).
I just wanted to provide some feedback since I could not afford to donate when downloading. But this is as far as I have gotten with StemQuill currently. Hopefully it passes along some insight.
Keep working on this one and you will have something great for sure.
Wow, thanks for taking the time to write all this up, and for the screenshots. They made it really easy to see what was going on.
You actually found two real bugs. Stemquill was missing the low notes on the bass, like that open E and the low G you had to fill in from memory. The way it was listening just wasn't picking up notes that low. The sensitivity slider was also basically doing nothing on clean bass tracks, which is why you kept getting the same tab no matter where you set it. I've fixed both, and the update should be up in the next day or two.
The tempo one is on me too. "Keep original timing" is the snap-to-grid setting, not the tempo, so your file ended up at the default 120 BPM instead of 100. That's why everything looked shifted in Guitar Pro. If you set the tempo to 100 (or hit Detect) before converting, it should line up a lot better. The next version will also warn you if you leave it at the default.
One heads-up: Stemquill writes everything in 4/4 right now, so you'll still need to set those 5/16 and 7/8 bars in Guitar Pro yourself. In this new update I will include a single Time signature setting for the whole song. It would be a dropdown in the Song card next to Tempo, with 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, 12/8, 5/4 and 7/8.
And don't worry about the Guitar Pro synth recordings. Clean synth bass is actually some of the easiest stuff to transcribe, so that wasn't the problem.
No need to donate at all. This kind of feedback honestly helps more. I'd love to hear how it does on "Sea Thou Art" once the update's out!
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1.4.0 is out! Cleaner vocals (even slightly off-pitch AI vocals), bass slides that stay as two notes, strummed chords kept separate, no more phantom kicks on hi-hat stems, and Suno stems are now recognised with matching instrument sounds. It also opens more reliably, with a “Starting Stemquill…” window on the first launch. Full details in the devlog. Got a stem that converts badly? Drop a comment, that’s how this update happened.
Thanks for trying Stemquill!
A few tips:
• Vocal and bass previews can take a minute on a full-length song, so give them a moment. Clicking Convert afterwards is almost instant.
• Leave Snap to grid off for AI-generated stems (Suno, Udio); their timing drifts a little.
• If your drums land on the wrong sounds, pick the drum map that matches your plugin in the stem’s settings.
Found a stem it gets wrong, or have an idea? Leave a comment here. I read them all, and bug reports are what shape the next update.
Thanks for this - I am about to give it a try.
I am a composer... And I have several pieces that have only survived as a Youtube playlist after the the computer that had the original sheet music and tabs, as well as external storage with backup copies, were all lost after a lightning strike hit my devices.
That was 17 years ago and for 17 years I have searched for some kind of tool to help me recover/transcribe those pieces of music.
I do not have a good enough ear to do so on my own - I compose the music for all instruments in a typical 'rock' instrumentation, without an instrument in hand, directly from the idea I hear in my head to tabs and notation.... BUT I CANNOT EVEN READ SHEET MUSIC!
...Much less play most of the stuff I write... sometimes it takes me months or even close to a year of practicing something I wrote just to be able to play it on guitar or bass.
After literally 17 years of hoping I could one day see the music in its original format again - and actually take it from that point and produce/develop it and mix it all properly... anything more than the 'Super Nintendo' style versions they currently are on YouTube. An d it seems technology is finally getting to a level that this may be possible.
The irony, I suppose, is that the songs are just the audio recording of the RAW MIDI instruments being played back inside Guitar Pro.
And because all this AI tech, stem splitters, etc etc train on audio data from REAL INSTRUMENTS, these purely musical composition versions using MIDI sounds have proven to be difficult for all these tools and platforms to recognize and pick out the different instruments since they all expect ACTUAL instruments in an audio recording...
Anyway, I'm rambling.
If you are interested, here is the playlist of those songs... (as you can see, from literally 17 years ago! ...haven't been right since then...)
Slipping into Sanity
So I am excited to see if your tools work for me!
If you need some kind of direction to go in with your development work on this project, have a listen to that playlist. That's what I've been aiming to recover as notation/tabs.
And as you might notice, the rhythms and time signatures happen as the music itself originally sounded to me in my head - not 4/4 - because music exists outside of time.
You're hitting on something special. But I will point out where I'm at on the first couple of runs.
For the bass guitar part for the song 'Sea Thou Art' (see YT playlist link in last comment), here are a couple of the very first measures in tab format that StemQuill gave me - regardless of how high I set the sensitivity:
Here is what I was finally able to transcribe from remembering exactly how I composed it once I was finally able to see some of the bass part in tab format:
Even though I set it to keep original tempo after trying out the 'detect tempo' option the first time, StemQuill possibly overlooked adding the tempo to the MIDI file (I set the tempo in the second screenshot.
The small red boxes also point out some of the notes that I have filed in from memory after having an initial base that helped spark my memory.
As mentioned above, the sensitivity setting for the bass part seemed to produce the same tab from the MIDI output.
Also, if you haven't taken a few seconds and heard any of the music in that playlist, it might be noteworthy to reiterate something
I mentioned in the last comment as well: I am not sure how much of the issues I am facing (on any platform attempting to go from the extracted YT audio to MIDI - not just your app) is possibly due to the fact that the audio files are a direct recording of the Windows MIDI synth through internal audio capture in Guitar Pro - it is not actually real instruments...
I am not complaining by any means - your app is a much better starting place than many of the other platforms online I have tried attempting the same thing to arrive at a specific outcome (RE-transcribing my old compositions).
I just wanted to provide some feedback since I could not afford to donate when downloading. But this is as far as I have gotten with StemQuill currently. Hopefully it passes along some insight.
Keep working on this one and you will have something great for sure.
Thanks for building this!
Wow, thanks for taking the time to write all this up, and for the screenshots. They made it really easy to see what was going on.
You actually found two real bugs. Stemquill was missing the low notes on the bass, like that open E and the low G you had to fill in from memory. The way it was listening just wasn't picking up notes that low. The sensitivity slider was also basically doing nothing on clean bass tracks, which is why you kept getting the same tab no matter where you set it. I've fixed both, and the update should be up in the next day or two.
The tempo one is on me too. "Keep original timing" is the snap-to-grid setting, not the tempo, so your file ended up at the default 120 BPM instead of 100. That's why everything looked shifted in Guitar Pro. If you set the tempo to 100 (or hit Detect) before converting, it should line up a lot better. The next version will also warn you if you leave it at the default.
One heads-up: Stemquill writes everything in 4/4 right now, so you'll still need to set those 5/16 and 7/8 bars in Guitar Pro yourself. In this new update I will include a single Time signature setting for the whole song. It would be a dropdown in the Song card next to Tempo, with 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, 12/8, 5/4 and 7/8.
And don't worry about the Guitar Pro synth recordings. Clean synth bass is actually some of the easiest stuff to transcribe, so that wasn't the problem.
No need to donate at all. This kind of feedback honestly helps more. I'd love to hear how it does on "Sea Thou Art" once the update's out!