Help Center/Recording/How recording works
🎙️Recording

How recording works

Everything about the recording screen — what gets captured and how.

The Record screen is your sketchpad. It captures audio in high quality and runs a full musical analysis the moment you stop recording.

What Larka analyzes

Key detection — Larka listens to the pitch content of your playing and identifies the most likely musical key. It accounts for harmonic relationships between notes, not just which notes appear most often.

Scale — alongside the key, Larka identifies whether you're playing in a Major or Minor context.

Chord detection — every chord change is logged with its timestamp. Larka uses a chromagram — a map of pitch energy — to identify chords, with extra weighting on lower-octave notes so guitar and bass roots aren't confused with overtones.

BPM — Larka detects rhythmic pulses and estimates your tempo. If you were using the metronome, that value is used directly.

The chord timeline

After recording, tap the Chord Timeline to see a visual map of your chord progression. Each segment shows the chord name and how long it lasted. Tap a chord to hear it played through the built-in chord player.

Saving and organizing

Give your recording a title, add tags, and it's saved to your library. All recordings are grouped by date (Today / This Week / Older) and can be searched by title, key, or tag.

You can swipe left on any recording to delete it.

Using with the metronome

If you turn on the metronome before recording, the detected BPM will always match the metronome's tempo — no guesswork. The metronome keeps running while you record so you can play in time.

Related articles

Reading the chord timeline
How to interpret the chord progression detected after recording.
Voice memo to songwriter note
How to record your ideas out loud and have Larka transcribe them into a new songwriter note.
Managing and organizing your recordings
How to search, tag, and organize your recording library.
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