For beta testers · September 2026
Sample Notes takes a commercially released record and tells you what a producer needs to know to work with it: what it runs at, what key it sits in, how the harmony moves, and what was probably used to make it. Search a record, and four cards come back.
1 · Blueprint. Tempo, key, time signature, scale and genre. This is the only card measured directly from audio rather than reconstructed — we decode the record's preview clip and analyse the waveform, then cross-check it against an independent tempo and key database. When those sources disagree, the card says so instead of picking one and sounding confident.
A value printed in green was measured from the recording; one in plain ink is the model's recollection. The colour is the provenance, so you can tell at a glance which numbers can be checked. Beside a key we stand behind you'll find its Camelot code — 8A, 4B — for anyone mixing harmonically.
Some records have no single answer, and the card says which kind of uncertainty it is. No clear key or multiple keys is a fact about the record: percussion-led tracks often have no tonic to read. Modulates means it changes key partway through, so we give you both. And we're not sure means the sources disagreed and we would rather say so than pick one. Blueprint is free on anything already in the shared library, forever, including on the free plan.
2 · Harmonic Map. How the harmony moves through the record — where it sits, where it goes, and what the relationship is between sections. Chord symbols lead and Roman numerals sit underneath them, with the key stated so the numerals mean something.
3 · Chord Chart. The progression written out bar by bar. You can play it back in the browser at the record's own tempo and metre, watch the bar highlight as it goes, and play any single section on its own rather than always from the top. Bars run four to a line with their numbers in the corner, and a chord held across more than one bar is dimmed rather than reprinted.
4 · Production Suite. What the record appears to have been made with — drums, bass, keys, the vocal chain in order, and what it samples where we can tell.
MIDI export gives you the chord chart as a standard MIDI file carrying the record's actual tempo and time signature, with section names as markers your DAW will show. Drop it on a track and it lines up.
Card export gives you any single card, or the whole record, as a print-ready PDF or a PNG.
The library is shared. When anyone analyses a record it joins a common catalogue, so the next person to look it up gets it instantly and for free. Most searches never cost anything. Your own library — what you've opened — is private to you.
A record you open stays yours. Permanently, even if your plan lapses later. Nothing you have unlocked is ever taken away.
Card 1 is measured; cards 2 to 4 are reconstruction. We're explicit about this because it matters: the tempo and key come from the audio, and the harmony, chart and production notes are a model's best reading of the record. They're good, and they are not the same kind of claim. Where a record came out too recently for the model to know it, the card says that too.
The clip in the player is the clip we measured. Not a different pressing, not a live take — whatever we analysed is what you can hear, so you can check our working. When a search turns up several versions of the same title, the one you pick is the one fetched and measured: covers, live cuts and radio edits are different recordings with different tempos, and choosing between them is yours rather than ours.
Search and Library are the two places to be. Tabs along the bottom on a phone, links in the header on a desktop. Your library holds every record you have opened, and you can group them into collections — "flips to try", whatever suits — with the + at the end of any row. Deleting a collection never deletes the records in it.
Light and dark. Sample Notes ships in both, and the switch is in the header beside your account. Until you choose, it follows whatever your computer is set to; once you choose, it stays chosen. If you work next to a DAW at night, dark mode is the one to try.
Two things, and the second matters more than the first.
Tell us when it's wrong. If a key or tempo doesn't match what you hear, or the player has the wrong recording entirely, say which record and what it should have been. Every one of those becomes a permanent test case, and they're worth more to us than compliments.
Tell us if you didn't use it. If you opened it twice and forgot about it, that's the most useful thing you can report, and it's the thing people are most reluctant to say. We'd rather know now.