Why I Built Good Take
Voice Memos is fine for interviews, but it kinda sucks for music.
I’ve got hundreds of voice memos. Half of them are named “New Recording 347.” Sometimes I type out a title for it and the app just deletes the title so then I type it again or give up. I have no idea which one had the chord progression I loved last March, or what key any of them are in. I hummed something I thought was cool at 2am and by the morning, it’s gone (that one might be on me).
That’s the problem Good Take is trying to fix.
GarageBand is the other side of the same problem. It’s a real DAW — great for production. But when you have a 15-second idea on the couch, you don’t want to launch a project, pick an input, arm a track, find the right monitoring setup. By the time you’re set up, the idea is gone.
I wanted something between Voice Memos and GarageBand. A scrappy little tool that:
- Records in one tap
- Tells you the key and tempo automatically (chord detection’s on the roadmap — not in v1 yet)
- Transcribes whatever you sang (sometimes this is pretty funny if you’re not singing “real lyrics” yet)
- Lets you actually find the recording later — by key, by lyric, by tag
- Doesn’t pretend to be a full DAW
That’s Good Take!
A few things I care about
No subscription. As a musician, hobbyist, artist, I truly hate application subscriptions. Good Take is in beta on TestFlight on Apple’s iOS/iPadOS stuff right now, but when it ships on the App Store it’ll be a one-time purchase — somewhere around five or ten bucks. Pay once, own it. No monthly fee to use a tuner; that’s ridiculous.
Almost nothing leaves your phone. No account, no analytics, no tracking. Key and BPM detection both run on-device. Transcription uses Apple’s Speech framework — for most major languages it runs on-device, but for some of the long-tail languages Apple does the recognition on their servers (that’s an Apple thing, not a Good Take thing). Either way, I can’t see your data — that’s not a marketing line, it’s the architecture. I want to make something that works for you, to help you solidify ideas you have quickly.
AI is like an assistant, not a replacement. If you bring your own Claude or ChatGPT key, you can ask the AI for chord ideas, melody suggestions and drum patterns with full context of your recording. Every feature in the app works without AI. There’s no AI paywall, it’s just a way to integrate if you’re interested in the tech.
Why the name
A “good take” is the one that captures it. Whatever “it” was — the riff, the moment, the thing you’re trying to remember. Good Take is the app you grab when you want to make sure you got it. Feels good to tell your bandmate, “good take, dude!” Feels great to hear it too. Go get some good ones.
Where this is going
The roadmap: multitracking, idea cards, retroactive multitracking, importing entire folders of voice memos and analyzing them in bulk. A scrappy little DAW for quickly demoing stuff. Not a Logic Pro replacement — a sketchpad that does more than just record.
If you’ve got 400 untitled recordings and can’t find any of them, Good Take is the app I built for me. I hope that it’s helpful for you too!