Turn a riff into tab with SUS4 Transcribe

For SUS4 Transcribe and SUS4 Ear Daily5 min readUpdated 29 September 2026

Working a part out by ear is one of the best things you can do for your playing, and one of the slowest. SUS4 Transcribe does the first pass for you: give it a recording of a single line (a riff, a solo, a bassline or a melody) and it gives you back the key, tempo, notes, chords and a tab.

The first pass is a draft, not the answer. This guide shows how to get a clean result, and how to use your ears to check and correct it before you export.

The short version

Pick the instrument. Choose Guitar, Bass, Piano or Drums at the top so the tab is laid out for your instrument.
Import a short, clean clip. Tap Import audio and choose a WAV, AIFF, MP3 or M4A file with one line playing on its own.
Check the key and tempo. Read the detected Key and BPM, and play along with the original to check them.
Correct it by ear. Open Edit / correct, play each phrase against the recording, and fix any wrong notes with −1, +1 and the octave buttons.
Export. Export as MusicXML, GuitarPro Text, ASCII Tab, MIDI or PDF.

Give it something it can hear

SUS4 Transcribe works on one line at a time: a solo, a melody or a bassline, not a full band playing chords. It works entirely on your device. The cleaner the source, the better the draft. Your own DI’d guitar, a single-instrument practice recording or an isolated part will transcribe far better than a dense mix.

Keep clips short and focused. The free version transcribes up to 30 seconds of a file, and Pro up to three minutes. Thirty seconds is plenty for a riff or a phrase, and shorter clips are quicker to check.

SUS4 Transcribe on iPhone: the Guitar, Bass, Piano and Drums picker, an Import audio button, and a result for "Riff idea 3" showing A minor, 96 BPM, 16 notes, 8 chords, a chord progression and a guitar tab preview. — A transcription result (App Store screenshot): key, tempo, notes, the chord progression and a tab preview.

Check it with your ears

Start with the big things. Play along with the original at the detected BPM. If it feels half or double speed, the tempo detection has locked onto the wrong level, and you should read the tab with that in mind. Then check the key: play the tonic chord over the recording and listen for whether it feels like home.

Then go phrase by phrase. The commonest error in any pitch detector is the octave: the right note in the wrong register. The editor has buttons for exactly that. −1 and +1 move a note by a semitone, −8va and +8va by an octave, and "Fix octave (snap to neighbours)" and "Drop obvious octave errors" clean up the obvious jumps in one go. For guitar you can also set the tuning (Standard, Drop D or ½-step down), so the tab lands on the right strings. Save corrections when you are done.

Export to where you work

Export offers MusicXML (for notation software such as SUS4 Score), GuitarPro Text, ASCII Tab, MIDI (for your DAW) and PDF. Exporting isn’t limited, so a corrected transcription can go wherever you need it.

Train the ear that checks the machine

The better your ear, the faster you catch the draft’s mistakes, and eventually you won’t need the draft for simple parts. SUS4 Ear Daily drills exactly that, in a few minutes a day: pick Intervals, Triads, 7th chords or Scale degrees, listen, answer, and find out straight away whether you were right. Scale degrees is the drill that helps most with transcription: it teaches you to hear where a note sits in the key, which is exactly the question you are answering when you fix a wrong note.