I write songs and have mostly used Apple’s built-in Voice Memos. If I had to guess, this is probably the most common approach since it’s so easy. What I wanted was something that gets out of the way and lets me focus on finishing songs.
When I hear songwriters talk about their process on podcasts or whatever, they usually say something like “let me pull up the first voice memos I have for this song”. So it’s clear that capturing ideas is not the problem, and Apple makes this really easy. What I have struggled with, however, is how to organize my ideas and build momentum towards a finished song.
There was a brief glimmer of hope when Apple released Music Memos, a similar tool, but built for musicians. This seemed to be all that I needed… but it didn’t last long. Apple stopped supporting it after a few years and us songwriters were back to Voice Memos.
In the meantime there have been other apps released for musicians and songwriters, but for me personally, I never found one that clicked. I still felt like I had a hard time organizing ideas around a song and/or it felt too bulky to use consistently. That’s why I decided to build my own app. The features are not groundbreaking, but I put them together in a way that helps my workflow and more importantly, helps me write more songs.
What Music Memos actually did
If you never used it, it’s worth a short explanation, because people are still looking for it. I dug up this old video for old times’ sake:
You opened it and played. It figured out on its own when you’d started and when you’d stopped, so you didn’t have to hit a button with a guitar in your hands. It would also guess the chords and put a bass player and a drummer behind you, which was the part that got demoed, though it was never why I used it.
What I used it for was that it treated takes like songs instead of files. You could name them, rate them, and keep the good ones separate. I didn’t really appreciate how much I used that until it was gone.
Apple discontinued it in 2021 and pointed everyone back at Voice Memos.
The part I actually missed
For me it was never the drums. It was that Voice Memos has no idea what a song is.
To be fair, Voice Memos isn’t as bare as it used to be. There are folders, favorites, and it’ll clean up a recording you made in a noisy room. But every take still lands in one long list named after the date and the place, sitting next to the reminder you left yourself about where you parked.
So if I record a verse idea one week, and then a few weeks later I get a chorus for the same song, there’s nothing tying those two together. The lyrics I typed out are sitting in Notes somewhere. After a couple of years of this I had a few hundred recordings and no real sense of which ones were worth going back to. I felt like I was always replaying old ideas to find what I needed.
What to look for, whatever you pick
There are more options now than there were in 2021, and I’d rather you found one that works than assume it’s mine. Here’s what I’d judge them on:
- How long from locked phone to recording? This is the whole thing. If it needs a project chosen or a track armed, the idea is already gone.
- What happens after you stop? If everything lands in one big list you won’t find it later. I’d look at whether the app understands that a few different recordings can belong to the same song.
- Where do the recordings live? On your phone, or on someone’s server. You can’t re-record an idea from memory, and apps do get shut down, which is more or less what this whole article is about.
- What does it cost, and when? A lot of them are subscriptions. That’s a fair way to fund an app, but it’s worth knowing before you’ve got two years of ideas inside one.
What I built, and what it isn’t
Write More Songs is what came out of the above. It doesn’t do the backing band thing, but it does cut a lot of the friction out of my songwriting workflow. It’s super fast to record, tag and group ideas into a song. You can even enable auto tagging to identify guitar parts vs. vocals vs. whole band. Then you can add lyrics directly or take pictures of ones you may have scribbled on a napkin.
It’s free, it works offline, there’s no account, and nothing you record leaves your phone.
Honestly, the app matters less than the habit… listen to Tenacious D:
More people should write songs, and I hope this helps you.
If you want to try mine, Write More Songs is free on the App Store. And if you have suggestions or feedback, just reach out. I love hearing it.