Stride and ragtime
Transcribe stride and ragtime piano to MIDI
Upload a stride or ragtime recording and get a MIDI file with the striding left hand and the right-hand figures on separate tracks.
One free transcription a week of the first 2 minutes of a recording, no card required. See plans
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Free transcriptions cover the first 2 minutes of a recording; anything after that is left out. Paid plans go up to 15 minutes.
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The left hand is the hard part
In stride, the left hand plays a bass note or a 10th low on the keyboard, then leaps up to a chord in the middle, twice a bar. A hand-separation method that splits the keyboard at middle C gets this wrong on every other beat, giving the top of each left-hand chord to the right hand.
The Jazz setting here was tuned against real stride recordings and corrected note by note. It treats the bass note and the chord as one hand moving, not as two hands.
Rolled 10ths and octave melodies
Two stride habits get specific handling. A broken 10th in the left hand (root, then fifth, then the 10th above) stays in the left hand, even though its top note sits where the right hand often plays.
When the right hand plays the melody in octaves, the lower note of the octave is the right thumb. It stays with the right hand, and so do the grace notes leading into it.
Early recordings
Much of this music survives on piano rolls and 78s. Surface noise is less of a problem than you might expect. The usual artefact is a handful of quiet notes at the extremes of the keyboard that were never played, and the Jazz setting removes the isolated ones.
Questions
Which setting should I choose for ragtime?
Tick "Separate hands" and leave the style on Jazz, which is the default. It covers jazz, stride and ragtime. The Classical setting assumes each hand stays within a narrow reach and will split a striding left hand.
Can I turn the result into sheet music?
Yes. Import the MIDI into notation software such as MuseScore. With the hands on separate tracks, each one lands on its own staff. Expect to tidy the rhythms, because a real performance is never perfectly on the grid.
Will it handle very fast tempos?
Tempo itself is not a problem. Accuracy drops where the texture is thick and the pedal is down, at any speed.