Why I Built a Music Practice App Instead of Using Voice Memos

I'm a guitarist and vocalist who has been recording practice takes for years. I built RunThrough, a music practice recording app, because I got tired of scrolling through hundreds of unnamed voice memos trying to figure out if I was getting any better. This is the story of why Voice Memos wasn't enough and what I did about it.

A year ago, my Voice Memos app had almost 200 recordings in it. Names like "New Recording 114" and "guitar thing tuesday maybe" and “blues rock thing in Em.” A few had dates in the title. Most didn't. I had no idea which ones were any good.

I'd been recording myself for years. Guitar, vocals, a little bit of piano. The advice is everywhere, "record yourself, it's the best way to improve," and the advice is right. The problem is what happens after you hit stop.

I'd listen back. Think "that was okay" or "that was rough." Save it. Never listen to it again.

Two months later I'd record the same thing. I'd think I sounded better. But did I? I couldn't find the old recording. Or I'd find three recordings with similar names and couldn't tell which one was the good take and which was the rough one. So I'd listen to the new one, shrug, and move on.

Practice, record, forget, repeat. That was the cycle. Voice Memos did what Voice Memos does. It recorded audio. But recording was never the hard part.

The hard part was comparing

One night I was going back and forth between two recordings of the same bridge section, about three weeks apart. I'd been practicing the timing and it felt like nothing was changing. But when I actually played them back to back, switching between the older take and the newer one, the difference was obvious. The timing was noticeably tighter. Not perfect, but clearly better. I was better.

I just sat there thinking: why was that so hard to do? Why did it take me 20 minutes of scrolling to find two recordings of the same passage? Why isn't there a button that just says "compare these"?

There was no grand vision. Just frustration. I wanted to tap a button, hear take A, tap again, hear take B, and know whether I was actually improving.

Voice Memos records. That's it

Recording is step one of a three-step process. Record, compare, improve. The recording is raw material. The value comes from putting two takes of the same thing next to each other and noticing what changed. Did my timing tighten? Did my phrasing shift? Did I finally nail that transition I'd been struggling with for weeks?

The recordings had those answers in them. I just couldn't get to them. Not without digging through a chronological list of untitled files.

I tried a bunch of DAWs. Logic, Ableton, Studio One (I mean Fender Studio Pro), Luna…they’re great tools if you're producing music, but wildly overbuilt for what I needed. And they’re distracting! Instead of practicing, I’d start playing with drum kits or synths, or looking for loops on Splice…that’s not a good use of practice time! I didn't want multi-track recording or virtual instruments or effects chains. I wanted to hit record, play a passage, stop, and compare it to last week's take. Opening the DAW for a quick practice recording felt like opening Photoshop to crop a photo. The friction killed the flow.

So I built the thing

I'm a developer, so I did what developers do when a tool doesn't exist. I built it. The app is called RunThrough, and the whole thing is organized around that loop: record, compare, improve.

One tap to start recording. No setup, no menus, no project files. When I'm done, the recording goes where it belongs, organized by what I was practicing, when I practiced it, and which song or passage it's connected to. No more "New Recording 214."

And then the part I actually built this for: I pick any two takes and compare them side by side. Two waveforms on screen. Tap to toggle between them. I can hear exactly what changed. No scrubbing through a timeline, no opening multiple files, no guessing which recording was which.

The first time I used the comparison feature on my own playing, on a passage I'd been working on for a month, I heard improvement I genuinely didn't know was there. My memory had been telling me I was stuck. The recordings told a different story.

My memory had been lying to me

This is the part that surprised me. My memory of how I sounded yesterday was unreliable. Not a little unreliable. Wildly unreliable.

I hear myself play every day. The changes between Monday and Tuesday are so small that I can't perceive them in real time. But I'd go back and compare a recording from six weeks ago to one from today and the difference would jump out at me. The improvement had been happening the whole time. I just couldn't hear it day to day.

That's what I kept getting wrong with Voice Memos. I was making the recordings but never going back and putting them next to each other. The comparison is where the insight lives, and I was skipping it every time because the tool made it too hard.

What I didn't build

RunThrough isn't a lesson app. I'm not teaching scales or telling anyone what to practice. If you want lessons, there are great options out there. Yousician, Fender Play, JustinGuitar. They're good at what they do. Better yet, find a local teacher who can give you personal attention and create a lesson plan just for you.

It's not a practice timer or habit tracker. I don't care how many hours I logged. Hours don't mean anything if I'm not improving. I've spent plenty of 60-minute sessions accomplishing nothing, and I've had 15-minute sessions where everything clicked. The clock doesn't tell you much.

It's not a DAW. If I'm recording a song, I'll use Fender Studio Pro.

RunThrough does one thing: it shows whether practice is working. Record, compare, hear the difference.

The tape doesn't lie

I built this because I was wasting practice time and didn't know it. I was practicing, but I couldn't tell if I was improving, and that uncertainty was draining my motivation. When I finally had a tool that let me hear the difference, actually hear it, not just hope for it, something shifted. Not my playing, exactly. My relationship to practice. I stopped dreading the plateaus because I could hear they weren't as flat as I thought.

The tape doesn't lie. And once I heard the truth, I didn't want to go back to guessing.