Your ideas are dying in your voice memos.

You didn't play to a click. It doesn't ask you to.

Paint a beat under a part you've already recorded, with a click or without one. It listens to that take, finds the beats and the downbeats, and lays the pattern onto your timing — so a bar you rushed stays rushed and the drums stay with you. Nothing gets quantized out from under the performance.

Four voices on a step grid, up to four bars, with swing and a half-time or double-time feel. Or skip the grid: pick a beat from the shelf, rock, funk, shuffle, jazz, and paint that instead. Those beats are played, not stamped: the ghost notes breathe, the backbeat holds, an open hat gets choked by the next closed one, and nothing machine-guns.

A click when you want one. Never in the take.

Tap record and it counts you in at the demo's tempo. On headphones or an interface the click runs right through the take. On the speaker a click would print straight into the mic, so it counts you in and stops, and the drums still follow what you actually played.

Type an exact tempo and length, or let it read the tempo off your first take and put it in the header. Every new demo starts clean.

A step grid that only offers notes in your key.

Once the key is set, the melody grid stops being a chromatic sheet and becomes the seven notes that work. Draw single notes or whole chords, up to four bars, in whichever voice you're on — piano, guitar, xylophone, synth, organ. Preview it looping while you edit; add a note mid-loop and the groove keeps its place instead of snapping back to the top.

When it's right, paint it to a track. It renders in place, in time with the take underneath it.

The pads are already the right chords.

Seven pads, the diatonic chords of whatever key you're in, voiced as real fingered shapes rather than spelled-out note names. Need one that isn't in the key — a borrowed IV minor, a passing diminished — tap Assign, play the notes or enter a guitar shape, and it names itself and takes a pad.

They sound while you're recording a vocal or a guitar too, so you can hold a chord for reference while you sing over it without it landing in the take.

A filter under your thumb. The synth becomes a synth.

Synth Lab sits after the synth voice: drive, a filter you play on an X/Y pad with cutoff and resonance under one finger, attack and release, and an LFO that moves the filter in note values, locked to the song's grid so the wobble lands on the beat. Presets to start from, and a Dice that lands somewhere usable.

One engine runs the live monitor and the print, so the take is exactly what you heard while you played it. Per track, off until you turn it on.

On iPad, the whole session at once.

The iPad layout puts the four tracks, the instrument, and the track controls side by side — volume, pan, EQ, effect, and a nudge wheel for the track you're on, without a sheet covering the song. The key it heard sits in the header. The iPhone layout stays what it always was: one thumb, on the couch, in portrait.

It locks before you've finished the pluck.

Detection is the McLeod method — a normalized square-difference function, the algorithm built for instrument pitch — running on Apple's Accelerate framework on the audio thread. The autocorrelation is hardware dot products, not a loop. It re-reads about every 23 milliseconds and locks a note in two confirming frames, on the order of fifty.

An onset detector watches for a fresh attack and drops its search lock the instant you pluck again, so a jump from low E to A, or a hammer-on, follows the new note instead of hanging on the old one. The readout is native SwiftUI — no web view spins up to draw it.

The reason most phone tuners choke, fixed.

iOS runs the mic through processing tuned for phone calls, and it scrubs everything around 80 to 110 Hz — exactly where a low E, A, and B live. That's why most tuners make you pluck a low string three times before it catches anything.

We open the mic in measurement mode, which bypasses that filter, then set the detection threshold against real device logs so a valid low pluck is never thrown out. A low E locks first try, same as the high ones.

Steady when you hold it, instant when you bend.

The detected pitch is interpolated between samples for sub-cent resolution, smoothed through a median and a 1€ filter — the adaptive filter from motion tracking — then eased onto the display at 60 frames a second. It sits still on a held note and moves the moment the pitch does. Three cents reads in tune.

Guitar, bass, ukulele, and violin by string, a full chromatic mode for anything else, and a reference A from 432 to 444.

Built for music, not for phone calls.

We turned off the phone's built-in echo cancellation. It's made for speech, so it hears a held chord as noise and scrubs it, and your take comes back underwater.

Instead the monitor runs quiet and the app already knows the backing, because it played it. In the count-in it reads your room and your speaker, then pulls what it can measure of the bleed back out and leaves what you played alone. When it can't measure the leak confidently, it leaves your take exactly as recorded rather than guessing — a quiet bit of bleed beats a damaged part.

That's the hard case, nothing in your ears. Plug in headphones or AirPods and there's no bleed to cancel at all. Plug into a USB interface and you're off the phone's mic entirely: a guitar straight in, a mic on a real preamp, and you hear yourself while you track.

Class-compliant in. Monitored out.

Any class-compliant USB audio interface. Pick the input in the route sheet, arm the track, and you hear yourself through that track's own effect while you record, so a synth or a guitar you're tracking through an amp sim is what you play to, not a dry signal you'll fix later. A mono input sits in the middle of the picture, not hard left.

If the interface goes away mid-session, the app says so instead of counting you in over nothing.

Your keyboard, its voices.

Plug in a MIDI keyboard and play the app's voices from real keys: piano, guitar, xylophone, organ, or the synth with the Lab on it. Choose which devices it listens to, and it remembers.

Bluetooth lies about timing. We correct for it.

A speaker adds a little delay. Bluetooth adds a lot, and most recorders land your part late. This one measures the real delay every take and slides it back into place.

When Bluetooth still drifts, a per-track nudge wheel slides a part a few milliseconds by ear until it sits — and the waveform moves with it, so you can line it up by eye as well.

This is the step before the DAW.

No mixing desk, no plugins, no automation. It's where an idea becomes a named sketch — and now, if you want, an arrangement — while you still care about it. If it earns a full production, export it and open your DAW. Most never get that far. That's the gap.

Every mode knows its own chords.

Not the usual seven. Major and all three minors, every major mode, all six modes of harmonic minor and all six of melodic minor, and an exotic shelf — Double Harmonic, Hungarian Minor, both Neapolitans. Each scale carries the triad and the seventh for all seven degrees, so the chords it hands you are right for the mode: the augmented tonic in Ionian ♯5, the ø7 in Locrian, the major-♭5 in Double Harmonic.

Spelled correctly — flat keys get flats — with proper Roman numerals (°, ø, +) and Nashville numbers. Every scale comes with what it's for: the mood, the songs that used it, the degree spelling. You get the why, not just the notes.

Play it the chord, it names it.

Identify is a true reverse lookup: hand it a set of notes and it tries each one as the root against thirty chord types — triads, sus2 and sus4, the sixths and the four common sevenths, m7♭5, dim7, m(maj7), the altered dominants — then ranks exact matches first, simplest next. Tell it the chords you've got and it finds the key they fit.

Organized like a song, not a dictionary.

Per scale, sorted into verse, chorus, and bridge — each one a scale-degree pattern with a functional note and the records that used it, from I-V-vi-IV to the Andalusian descent. They're stored as degrees, so they land in whatever key you're working in. A starting point, not a lookup table.

The fretboard, not just a scale on it.

The five pentatonic positions with their root anchors, the blues scale with the ♭5, chord-tones-only, the modal colors (Dorian's 6, Mixolydian's ♭7, Lydian's ♯4), and the advanced moves — superimposed pentatonic up a fifth, the diagonal 3:2 run. Plus the signature shapes by their real geometry: the BB King box on the top three strings, the SRV zone fusing boxes one and two, the Hendrix major/minor-third blur. Each with a technique note, mapped to your key, in any of ten tunings from Drop D to DADGAD.