How to Make Music on iPhone (No Experience Needed)

To make music on your iPhone, install one free app such as Apple’s GarageBand, set it to C major at 90 BPM, and loop four chords (C, G, Am and F) while you add drums, bass and a tune on top, one layer at a time. Then stretch the loop into a short song and export it as an audio file you can text to a friend. You need no experience and no extra gear, and a one-minute first song fits in a single evening.

What you need to make music on an iPhone

An iPhone can do the whole job, from the first note to a finished song file. GarageBand is free on the App Store, made by Apple, and holds up to 32 tracks. It has touch keyboards, guitars and drums, a virtual Drummer that plays along with you, and a Live Loops grid where you tap cells to start and stop loops. The built-in microphone is good enough for demo vocals, and Voice Memos is already on your phone for catching a tune before you forget it.

On top of the phone, you need two things:

• One music app. GarageBand is the free default, and this guide uses its button names.
• Headphones, wired if you have them. Bluetooth earbuds add a short delay between your tap and the sound, which makes playing in time harder; the AirPods latency guide explains why and what helps. The phone speaker works too, but it hides most of the bass.

You do not need to read music. The steps below make the big decisions for you (the key, the tempo and the chords), so all that is left is playing.

Step 1: pick an app and a key

Either of these apps will take you from nothing to an exported song. Choose one and ignore the other for a week. Knowing where one app keeps its buttons matters more than which app you picked.

In GarageBand, the Keyboard’s Scale button turns the piano keys into bars that only play the notes of one scale, so every note you touch belongs to the key. Gelato Synth, our synth app, works the same way in its free Notes mode: the pads are only the notes of the scale you choose, laid out in three rows for three octaves.

Now the key. Pick C major. It uses only the white keys, C D E F G A B, and these are its seven chords:

These chords all come from the same seven notes, so they sit well next to each other in almost any order. For the first song, use four of them: C, G, Am and F (I, V, vi, IV), one bar each. To hear them before you record, choose C major on the free online chord player and play the progression called The pop four. The page of chords in C major has the 7th chords and more progressions for later.

Set the song up before you record anything. In GarageBand, tap the Settings button in the control bar, tap Key Signature and choose C major, then set the tempo to 90 BPM (beats per minute). At 90, a beginner can play in time, and the loop still has a pulse you can nod to.

Step 2: build a loop in layers

A loop is a short section that repeats while you add parts on top of it. The tool that does this is called a looper, and each part you record over the repeating loop is an overdub. Make your loop 4 bars long with one chord per bar. At 90 BPM in 4/4 time, 4 bars is 16 beats, about 10.7 seconds, which holds all four chords and comes around often enough to give you plenty of practice passes.

A new GarageBand song starts with one 8-bar section. Shorten it to 4 bars: tap the Song Section button at the right end of the ruler, tap the Inspector button next to the section name, turn off Automatic, then tap the down arrow next to Manual until it reads 4. Turn on the count-in too (Settings, under Metronome and Count-in) so you hear a bar of clicks before each take.

Then record the layers in this order:

1. Drums. Kick on beats 1 and 3, snare on beats 2 and 4, hi-hat on every eighth note (count “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”). If that is too much at once, let GarageBand’s Drummer play the part, or record the kick and snare first and the hi-hat as a second pass.
2. Chords. Play C, G, Am, F, pressing each chord on beat 1 of its bar and holding it for the whole bar. If finding three notes at once is fiddly, tap GarageBand’s Chord Strips button: each strip plays a whole chord with one tap. A soft sound such as an electric piano or a pad leaves room for everything else.
3. Bass. Play the root of each chord, low on the keyboard: C, G, A, F. One long note per bar is plenty. Once that feels easy, play the root twice per bar, on beats 1 and 3, so it lands with the kick drum.
4. Melody. Use only C, D, E, G and A. That is the C major pentatonic scale, and leaving out F and B removes the two notes most likely to rub against the chords. End each short phrase on a note from the chord underneath: E or G over C, G or D over G, A or C over Am, A or C over F.

Takes are cheap. If one is off, undo and play it again; three or four tries per layer is normal. GarageBand can also snap your notes to the grid after you play them, which is called quantizing: tap the Track Controls button, then Track Settings, then Quantization, and pick an eighth note under Straight.

If a tune comes to you away from the app, hum it into Voice Memos and find the notes on the keyboard later. And if chords are the part that scares you, Gelato Chord, our chord app, has seven keys that always play the seven chords of your key, so the loop above is four presses. Its loop recorder (part of the $4.99 unlock) stacks up to eight layers over a drum groove.

Step 3: arrange, export and share the song

A loop repeating forever is a sketch. To turn it into a song, keep the same 4 bars and change which layers play in each section:

That is 25 bars, a little over a minute at 90 BPM. In GarageBand, open the song section controls, select your section and tap Duplicate five times, which gives you six 4-bar sections. In each copy, delete the regions that section leaves out, so the intro copy keeps only the chords. Then tap Add for one last section and play a single C chord at its start. The outro now ends F then C, the soft “amen” ending you hear at the close of hymns, and it sounds finished because C is home in this key.

Before you export, play the song once on headphones and once on the phone speaker. If the bass disappears on the speaker, replay the bass line an octave higher on a brighter sound so it still comes through. If the melody is hard to hear, pull the chord track’s volume down a little before you push the melody up; turning the loud parts down leaves headroom, so the mix does not distort.

To export from GarageBand, go to the My Songs browser, touch and hold your song, tap Share, then tap Song. Pick an audio quality, type a title, tap Share, and choose AirDrop, Messages, Mail or Save to Files. The song arrives as an M4A file, the same kind of compressed audio file Voice Memos makes, small enough to text and playable on nearly any phone or laptop.

Put the key and tempo in the title, like First Song C 90. When you come back to the idea in a month, you will know exactly where to start.

Where to go next: producing music on iPhone

The second song comes faster than the first. Pick one change for it:

• Reorder the same chords to Am, F, C, G (vi, IV, I, V). Nothing else changes, but starting on the minor chord makes the whole loop sound darker.
• Change the tempo. Around 120 BPM feels like pop or dance music; around 70 feels like a ballad. GarageBand stretches Touch Instrument recordings to a new tempo, so you can try both on the song you just made.
• Give the song a second part. Many songs switch to new chords for the chorus, and the guide to turning a loop into a full song covers adding a chorus, a bridge and a proper ending.
• Record a real voice or instrument with GarageBand’s Audio Recorder. For a cleaner sound than the built-in mic, a USB microphone or audio interface plugs straight into a USB-C iPhone; iPhones with a Lightning port need a Lightning to USB camera adapter.
• Move to a computer only if you want to. GarageBand for Mac and Logic Pro can open songs started on the iPhone, so nothing you begin on the phone is stuck there.