Recipe: turn an AI-generated song into a chart your band can play

The short answer: split the song into stems, run each stem through Spotify's free Basic Pitch to get MIDI, then clean that MIDI up and print parts in free MuseScore Studio. For most bands, the real deliverable is a one-page chord chart you finish by ear; the MIDI just gets you there faster.

What it costs: nothing, if you use the free tools below. Suno's Free plan has no stem separation and no commercial rights, so if you want Suno's own stems or plan to play the song for money, you need Pro or Premier (Suno). The free route is an open-source separator such as Demucs, which is MIT-licensed and splits drums, bass, vocals and "other" (Demucs).

Time: two to four hours for a typical three-minute song, most of it in step 5.

The steps

1. Get the cleanest audio you can (10 minutes, free or paid). On Pro or Premier, download Suno's stems; all stems from a song count as that song's single download, not one each (Suno). On Free, download the full mix within your trial downloads and split it yourself in the next step.

2. Split the mix if you have to (15 minutes, free). Demucs separates drums, bass, vocals and the rest; its experimental six-source model adds guitar and piano, though its author reports the piano stem has considerable bleed and artefacts (Demucs). For a desktop app, our look at UVR5 as a free stem separator covers the same models with buttons. Expect artefacts on generated audio; our separation workflow guide explains which ones matter.

3. Convert each pitched stem to MIDI (20 minutes, free). Drop the bass, vocal and "other" stems into Basic Pitch one at a time. It outputs a MIDI file with pitch bends, supports polyphonic instruments, and, in Spotify's words, "works best on one instrument at a time" (Spotify). That last line is why step 2 matters: a full mix gives you mush. Skip the drums; write the groove by hand.

4. Open the MIDI in MuseScore (10 minutes, free). MuseScore Studio is free, GPL-3.0 notation software (MuseScore), and it opens MIDI and MusicXML files directly (MuseScore handbook). Set the tempo and key from the song first; import settings live under Preferences → Import.

5. Clean up, bar by bar (1 to 2 hours, free). This is the real work. Delete ghost notes, merge stuttered repeats, simplify vocal runs into the melody a singer would actually sing, and spell the bass line in the key. Our guide to chord progressions for producers helps you name what the "other" stem is doing.

6. Write the chord chart (30 minutes, free). Most rhythm sections play from chords, not dots. Add chord symbols over the melody, mark the sections (intro, verse, chorus, bridge), repeats and any stops or hits. One page is the target.

7. Print the parts (10 minutes, free). MuseScore makes a separate part for every instrument; click Parts, then Open all (MuseScore), and print or export each part from there.

8. Run it with the band against the original (one rehearsal). Play along to the generated track once, mark every bar that is wrong, fix the chart, and stop referring to the recording after that.

Before you play it in public

If the song came from Suno's Free plan, it has no commercial rights (Suno), so a paid gig is out. Who owns the composition is a separate question; read who owns an AI-assisted song in India before you register or release a cover of your own generated track.

What we think

Transcription tools are good enough now that the notes are not the hard part; deciding what to leave out is. A generated song is full of tiny fills and doubled lines no four-piece can play at once, and a faithful transcription of all of it is a worse chart, not a better one. Treat the MIDI as a first draft, write the chart a drummer can read at a glance, and let the band's version replace the recording.

If you would rather start from notes than audio, text-to-MIDI tools and MIDI generators in your DAW skip the transcription step entirely.