How to Make Beats on iPhone for Free: Your First Beat

To make a beat on your iPhone for free, open GarageBand or BandLab, set a tempo, program a one-bar drum pattern on a 16-step grid, then record a bassline and a short hook over the looping drums. A kick on beats 1 and 3, a snare on beats 2 and 4 and a hi-hat on every eighth note at 90 BPM is already the skeleton of a hip hop beat.

What you need to make beats on your phone

A beat is a short loop, usually 4 or 8 bars, of drums, a bassline and a hook (a short tune or riff that repeats), made for someone to rap or sing over. Besides the phone, you need one app and a pair of headphones.

This guide uses GarageBand, Apple’s free DAW (digital audio workstation), with its Beat Sequencer for drums and Touch Instruments for the notes. BandLab, also free, is the pick if you want to finish the project later in a laptop browser, since it saves projects to the cloud.

Wired headphones work best. Bluetooth earbuds add a short delay between your tap and the sound, which makes a bassline hard to play in time (our guide to AirPods latency in music apps explains why). Headphones also carry the bass. A phone speaker plays almost nothing between roughly 40 and 80 Hz, where kicks and 808s sit, so check the low end on headphones before you call a beat finished.

Pick a tempo (BPM) that fits your genre

Tempo is counted in BPM (beats per minute), and each style lives in its own range. Set it first, because a drum pattern that grooves at 90 can sound rushed at 120.

Trap looks fast on paper. At 140 BPM with the snare only on beat 3, the body feels like 70 while the hi-hats run in sixteenths on top. That split is most of the trap sound, so leave the tempo at 140.

In GarageBand, tap the Settings button in the control bar, then tap Tempo. Tap the tempo bar repeatedly in rhythm to set a speed, or use the up and down arrows. On the same screen, tap Key Signature and choose A, then minor. The examples below stay in the key of A minor because its notes are only the white keys (A B C D E F G).

Lay down a simple drum beat

Drum machines split one bar of 4/4 into 16 steps, each a sixteenth note. Steps 1, 5, 9 and 13 are the four beats, and steps 3, 7, 11 and 15 are the “ands” between them. Count it out loud as “1 e and a, 2 e and a” and the grid stops looking like math.

In GarageBand, tap the Browser button, swipe to Drums, then tap Beat Sequencer. Each row is one drum sound, and you tap a step to light it. Start with one of these four patterns:

A pattern where every hit is equally loud sounds stiff. Four fixes make it feel played:

1. Accent the hats. Tap the Step Settings button, choose Velocity, then drag down on every other hi-hat step so the hats go loud, soft, loud, soft. In the boom bap pattern, that means the even steps go soft.
2. Swing the boom bap. Tap the Inspector button, tap Swing and choose a value from the list. Swing plays the offbeat notes a little late, which turns straight hats into a bounce and gives boom bap its lean. Start with the lightest value; heavy swing turns into a shuffle.
3. Roll the trap hats. In Step Settings, choose Note Repeat and drag up on the last hi-hat step, so it fires a quick burst into beat 1.
4. Ghost a snare. Light step 12, one sixteenth before the backbeat on step 13, and drag its velocity almost to the bottom. You feel it more than you hear it.

Set Chance (also in Step Settings) on one or two hi-hat steps so they play only some of the time. When the pattern works, tap Record in the control bar to lay it into your song as a region.

To skip programming, add a Drummer track, pick an electronic drummer and drag the yellow puck on the XY pad: up or down for louder or softer, left or right for simpler or busier. BandLab’s Drum Machine is a step grid too, so the patterns in the table work there as well.

Add a bassline and a hook

Now give the beat some notes. Under this example sit four chords, one bar each: Am, F, C, G (i, VI, III, VII in A minor). You don’t have to play them: a bassline and a hook that follow them let a listener hear the changes.

The bassline

Open the Keyboard Touch Instrument and pick a bass sound. Play one root note per bar: A, F, C, G. Keep it low, between F1 and C2 (about 44 to 65 Hz). Then lock it to the kick. In the boom bap pattern, play the root on step 1 and again on step 11, exactly where the kick lands, so the two hit as one punch, and keep the bass off the snare steps.

Record it as an overdub, a new part played on top while the drums keep looping. Turn on the count-in first (Settings, then Metronome and Count-in) so you get clicks before the take. If a few notes land early or late, open Track Settings, tap Quantization, choose Straight and pick a sixteenth note to snap them to the grid.

For a trap beat, make the bass an 808: a sine wave that starts an octave or two high and drops to the played note in 20 to 60 ms, then rings out with a long decay. If your synth has glide, turn it on so the pitch slides when you move from A down to F. If the bass vanishes on the phone speaker, add some drive, which gives the sine upper harmonics a small speaker can reproduce. Our guide on how to make a synth bass has step-by-step 808 settings.

The hook

The hook is the part people hum after the beat stops. Keep it short and leave space around it. Build it from the A minor pentatonic scale, A C D E G. Dropping B and F removes both half steps in the key (B to C, E to F) and the two notes most likely to clash: B rubs against the C and F chords, and F against the E in Am and C. More on that in why the pentatonic scale sounds good.

A hook to start from: play E5, D5, C5 and A4 on steps 1, 4, 7 and 10 of bar 1. Leave bar 2 empty, repeat the same four notes in bar 3, and leave bar 4 empty again. Spacing the notes three steps apart pushes them across the beat, which gives the line bounce, and the empty bars leave room for a rapper or singer. Play it on a pluck, a bell or an electric piano, about three octaves above the bass so the two never crowd each other. On GarageBand’s Keyboard, the Scale button turns the keys into note bars that only play the notes of one scale, which makes a wrong note hard to hit.

Once the 4 bars loop cleanly, you have a beat. A new GarageBand song starts with one 8-bar section, so your 4 bars play twice before the loop comes around. To grow it into a track, copy it out to 16 or 32 bars and take parts away: drums out for the first 4 bars, hook out under the verses, everything back in for the chorus. Our guide to turning a loop into a full song covers the rest of the arrangement.

Beat making apps for iPhone, free and paid

Three apps cover every step above.

GarageBand is the place to start on an iPhone. The extra instruments and loops in its Sound Library are free downloads, and every step in this guide works in it. Its project files open only in Apple’s own apps, so if your laptop runs Windows, BandLab fits better.

BandLab has a Drum Machine, a Sampler that records your own sounds or browses more than 250,000 royalty-free BandLab Sounds, and a Looper that triggers pre-made loop packs. It needs an account, and account holders must be at least 13. The optional Membership adds members-only features, including AI tools.

Koala Sampler is the pick for beats built from found sounds. Record up to 64 samples with the mic (a knuckle on a table for a kick, a hand clap for a snare), play them from pads, and sequence them with swing and quantize. It exports WAV files and Ableton Live Sets, so a sketch can move to a computer later.

Our own apps handle the playing side of a beat. Gelato Synth has a loop recorder: choose a tempo and a beat (Click, Rock, Hip Hop or Dance), then record up to eight layers of bass and hook, with Snap pulling notes to the nearest sixteenth. Drop your own drum hits into the Files app and the beats use them. Gelato Chord records loops over eight drum grooves, on machines that include an 808 and a 909, while its seven keys play the chords of your key. Both are free to download, with the loop recorder in a one-time $4.99 unlock. Neither has a step grid, so program your drums in GarageBand, BandLab or Koala.

Some beat-pad apps are free to download but sell weekly subscriptions or show ads. Check the In-App Purchases list on an app’s App Store page before you build beats in it.