UMEAN: Session Sound Decoder

A client sends you a text: "make it thump like those old Motown records, round and warm, not too busy." You know roughly what they mean. UMEAN tells you exactly, in the language of your chair.

Pick what you play, paste what they sent, and UMEAN reads it back the way players and engineers talk to each other.

SEVEN CHAIRS • Drums: sizes, heads, tuning, muffling, cymbals, sticks, where the notes sit • Percussion: which instruments, hand sounds, patterns, how it sits with the kit • Bass: the instrument, strings, muting, right hand, amp or DI, note length • Keys: the keyboard, the patch, drawbars, effects, voicings, register • Guitar: guitar, pickup, amp, pedals, the kind of part, doubling • Horns: the section, voicing, articulations, mutes, how tight • Strings: the forces, bowing, vibrato, voicing, close or hall

FOR EVERY PHRASE THEY WROTE • What it means, in one line • Setup: the gear and the capture that get there • Feel: how to play it • Hear it: a record that carries the sound, who is playing, and the time to start listening • How sure the read is: solid, likely, or best guess

THEIR WORDS, MARKED UP The client's note comes back with a highlighter stroke over every phrase that was decoded. Tap a stroke to jump straight to what it means.

WHEN THE NOTE IS VAGUE UMEAN writes the questions to send back, in plain words the client can answer.

ALSO • The brief: the whole session in two or three sentences • Every record is checked against a music catalogue before you see it • Past reads stay on your phone • Share a read with the band • A free example read for every chair, before you buy anything

READS • UMEAN is free to download, and every chair has a free example read. • Decoding your own notes uses reads. A pack of 25 reads is $1.99, bought in the app. • A pack doesn't expire. It only goes down as you use it, and a read that fails isn't counted.

GOOD TO KNOW • UMEAN needs an internet connection. What you paste is sent to UMEAN's server and a third-party AI service to write the read; it is used for that one read and is not kept by UMEAN. The app asks before the first one. • Times are where to start listening on the original studio recording and can be off by a few seconds. • No account, no ads, no tracking.

Made by a working session drummer.

Discovery signals