All this week, we’ll be publishing posts from the 2025 NAMM Show in Anaheim, California. It’s a huge exhibition, so we’ll focus on what we do best: covering the field of music notation software and related technology. Follow all of our NAMM 2025 coverage at Scoring Notes, and on our social media accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
The process of transcribing music by ear, to those that aren’t skilled at the task, can seem like pure wizardry. Transcribing the spoken word is difficult enough, but music has many more layers of complexity.
And yet, technology has made the mysterious seem almost mundane. We expect Siri, Alexa, or whichever digital assistant may be listening to not only take an accurate record of what we tell it, but to analyze, infer context, and improve upon what we say.
As has happened since the days of the invention of the printing press (and probably earlier), technological advancements that improve how we work with text and language are followed on rather quickly with the same advancements in music.
Standing at the crossroads of human skill, experience, and new technology is Oriol López Calle. In 2011 he founded My Sheet Music Transcriptions (MSMT) to do, well, exactly what the name says — make sheet music from transcriptions. In the past decade-and-a-half since then, Oriol has grown his company from a solo act to one that has more than 50 professional musicians on staff, and, and according to their records, has served up more than 40,000 transcriptions for nearly 20,000 customers.
MSMT’s purview now encompasses digital music notation services including transcription, arranging, engraving, and music editing, serving both individual customers and large companies. Oriol discussed how MSMT seeks to be the top digital music notation provider in the industry, emphasizing their focus on quality output.
“We tried to put together a team that specializes in as many genres and instruments setups as possible,” Oriol told me during our interview at the 2025 NAMM Show. “So, no job is too big or small. We take on really small orders by individual customers who need help with their little music notation needs for next Sunday; but also we take on like big orders from music learning apps who need hundreds of songs fed to their platform for next month. So we try to be the production branch for all those companies who need to have great quality content for their music learners, and provide them with whatever music notation they need, whether if it’s a PDF ready to be published and printed, or a MusicXML file that syncs up beautifully when you’re playing it along, or a MIDI file that powers a beautiful, colorful piano tutorial for a music app.”
MSMT uses all of the major notation software applications, and seeks to provide a consistent product regardless of the software used, whether it’s Sibelius, Finale, MuseScore, Dorico — or even Guitar Pro. “Yes,” Oriol said, there is “ quite a lot of Guitar Pro because we do work a lot for the guitar community. They love Guitar Pro and their playback engine is fantastic for guitar.”
Recently, MSMT’s shift to business-to-business (B2B) services has driven its growth, although, as Oriol said, they still value their individual consumer base. I wanted to get Oriol’s take on whole nature of transcribing and the technological revolution that is upon us. He said that technological advancements, such as AI-based tools for lyrics recognition, stem separation, and MIDI mapping, are complementing MSMT’s manual processes, but emphasized that human expertise remains crucial for high-quality transcription.
For instance, Oriol said, “ whenever we don’t have the lyrics of a song, it’s easier to get AI to transcribe them for us rather than just trying to pick them up. At the same time, if an instrument that we want to transcribe cannot be heard in a mix — like with your own musician ears — the audio stem separation is not really going to help you achieve that. And that’s where the arranging is going to come in. You’re going to have to guess what the piano part is doing there. That’s where musicality and critical decision-making comes in. So it’s very important.”
The importance of being at NAMM is huge for Oriol. “ NAMM is the best show,” he said. In addition to taking meetings and developing business relationships, it is a lot of fun. “ NAMM also like reminds us all why we are doing this — you see those shiny guitars, people enjoying hitting the floor and trying out clarinets, saxophones, playing their pianos. This reminds us music notation nerds what we are here for!”
Fellow music notation nerds, I am sure you will enjoy my complete interview with Oriol López Calle on the NYC Music Services YouTube channel.
Keep coming back to Scoring Notes for more coverage from the 2025 NAMM Show, and follow us on our social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
