12 Best Songwriting Apps for iPhone, From Idea to Demo

The best songwriting apps for iPhone each handle one step of a song: catching the idea, finding chords, writing lyrics or recording a demo. Start with three free Apple apps: Voice Memos and Notes come on every iPhone, and GarageBand is a free download. Between them they cover ideas, words and demos, and the other nine apps below help when one of those steps needs more.

We make one app on this list, Gelato Chord, and it is marked “ours” at number 5. The other eleven come from other developers, and we checked each one’s developer, price model and platforms against its App Store listing in September 2026. AI song generators are left out on purpose, since this list is for writing your own song.

Songwriting apps for capturing ideas

A melody you hum in the car is usually gone by dinner, so a capture app has one job: open fast and save.

1. Voice Memos (Apple). Free, built into iPhone, with iPad and Mac versions.

   On an iPhone with an Action button, set it to Voice Memo in Settings > Action Button, and pressing and holding it starts a recording. Replace lets you record over one section, so fixing the chorus doesn’t cost you the whole take, and on supported iPhones you can add a second layer: sing over a guitar or piano memo without headphones, then balance the two with the Layer Mix slider. Rename every memo with its key and tempo (“verse, G, 84 BPM”) so you can find it, and play along, months later.

2. Notes (Apple). Free, built into iPhone, iPad and Mac.

   Plenty of lyrics already live in Notes, and it can record audio inside a note, so the sung melody sits right above the words it belongs to. On iPhone 12 and later it also transcribes spoken words in English and several other languages, which is handy when you talk an idea through (“chorus lifts here, bridge drops to the IV chord”). Keep one note per song with the sections in order, and pin the song you’re working on to the top.

3. Demo: Songwriting Studio (Demo Music). Free with in-app purchases (a Demo+ subscription or a lifetime purchase). iPhone, iPad and Mac.

   Demo keeps a whole song in one project. Build a chord progression or tap a prebuilt one, loop it, write lyrics beside it with a rhyme tool, and record vocals on a multitrack recorder. It exports a mix, separate stems, MIDI or a chord sheet, and CoWrite lets a bandmate work on the same song. More than 100 features sit behind Demo+, listed at $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year in the US (the yearly plan starts with a three-day trial). Write one song on the free version first, and you will know which locked feature you keep reaching for.

Songwriting apps with chords

Chord apps either tell you which chords fit or play them so you can sing on top. Both start from the same fact: every major key has seven chords that belong together, and in C major they are C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am and Bdim (I ii iii IV V vi vii°). A chord progression is an order for some of them, such as C, G, Am, F. For more, our list of chord progression apps for iPhone covers ten.

4. Suggester 2 (Mathieu Routhier). Free with in-app purchases (a monthly subscription or a one-time key). iPhone, iPad and Mac, plus Android.

   Pick a key and Suggester lists the chords that fit, labeled with Roman numerals, then suggests what could come next after the ones you’ve placed. A library of classic progressions gives you somewhere to start, and piano, guitar and ukulele views show how to play each chord. It exports audio, MIDI or text and also runs as a plug-in inside a DAW. The numerals are what teach you: C, G, Am, F in C major reads I V vi IV, and that same pattern gives G, D, Em, C in G major.

5. Gelato Chord (ours) (Gelato Audio). Free with one $4.99 in-app purchase. iPhone.

   Every key you choose puts its seven chords (I ii iii IV V vi vii° in a major key) on seven labeled keys, so you can sing over a progression from the first minute. The melody plate lays the key’s scale out as twelve strings and lights up the ones in the chord you’re holding, and those lit strings are the safest notes for a melody over that chord. Without paying you get the whole instrument in Play mode, three sounds (Grand Piano, Rhodes and Saw) and a quick recorder; the purchase adds Strum, Lead, Arp and Repeat modes, the loop recorder and all 59 sounds. It works in one key at a time, so a chord from outside the key means switching the key or scale.

6. Chordbot (Contrasonic AB). $4.99 in the US, with a free Chordbot Lite that cannot save or export. iPhone and iPad.

   Type in chords and Chordbot plays them with a backing band, built from more than 70 comping styles and 400 instrument tracks. It knows over 60 chord types plus inversions and slash chords. Split the song into sections so the verse and chorus get different arrangements, then export MIDI or WAV and sing over it in GarageBand. It is a quick way to hear a chorus with drums and bass before you can play it yourself. The last update came in May 2022, so run the free Lite version on your iPhone before you pay.

Apps to help write lyrics

A lyric app is a notepad with a rhyming dictionary attached. Look for one that offers near rhymes (heart and dark, home and alone), because a verse built only on perfect rhymes starts to sound like a greeting card.

7. Rhymer’s Block (Watt Apps). Free with in-app purchases (a Pro subscription). iPhone and iPad, plus Android.

   Rhymes appear as you type, slant rhymes included, and the rhyming words in your lyric are color-coded so the rhyme scheme shows at a glance. It rhymes slang and made-up words by how they sound, works offline, and syncs to the cloud if you create an account. The Block, its built-in community, is where people post verses for feedback; skip it if your lyrics are private. It suits rappers and anyone who packs rhymes inside a line.

8. Fast Rhymes Songwriting Studio (Davoti Solutions). Free with in-app purchases. iPhone, plus Android.

   Search rhymes, synonyms, word associations and definitions in English, Spanish, French or Norwegian, then swipe to the lyric editor, which has a syllable counter and a recorder. Another swipe brings up beats you can loop while you write, which suits writers who start from a groove. An AI Ghostwriter offers lines when you ask for them.

9. The Lyrics App (Michael Handkins). Free, no in-app purchases. iPhone and iPad.

   Each song holds its lyrics and its melody recordings together, which ends the back-and-forth between Notes and Voice Memos. Double-tap a word, tap Rhymes or Thesaurus above the keyboard, and a scrolling bar offers up to 1,000 options. Songs back up to iCloud Drive as one folder each, with a text file of the lyrics and every recording inside. It was last updated in 2024 and costs nothing.

Whichever you pick, count syllables. If the first line of verse 1 has eight syllables, give the first line of verse 2 somewhere between seven and nine, and the same tune will carry both. For fitting words to a tune, see how to write a melody for lyrics.

Apps for recording a quick demo

A demo only has to prove the song works: one instrument, one voice, a steady tempo. Record the chords to a click first, then sing over them in wired headphones, because Bluetooth earbuds add enough delay to pull a vocal off the beat (here is why AirPods lag in music apps).

10. GarageBand (Apple). Free, no in-app purchases. iPhone and iPad.

    Up to 32 tracks, chord strips that sound a whole chord per tap, and a Drummer that plays realistic grooves you steer with an XY pad. Edit Chords turns any strip into a custom chord with an added note or a different bass note, so a slash chord like G/B is a few swipes away, and each song has a Note Pad where its lyrics can live. A starting recipe: tempo at 90 BPM, a Drummer track, eight bars of chord strips, then the Audio Recorder for the vocal.

11. BandLab (BandLab). Free with an optional Membership subscription. iPhone, iPad, Android and web.

    A free multitrack studio with a drum machine, a looper, a sampler with over 250,000 royalty-free sounds, and AutoPitch pitch correction with six free effects. Its Splitter tool separates a recording into vocals, drums, bass and the rest, and the social side makes it easy to send a rough mix to a co-writer. The free studio is plenty for a demo. BandLab’s terms set the minimum age at 13, with a parent’s permission under 18.

12. Moises (Moises Systems). Free with in-app purchases (Premium and Pro subscriptions). iPhone, iPad, Android, desktop and web.

    Moises works on recordings you already have. Drop in an old voice memo and it detects the chords, key and tempo, then splits your voice from the rest of the recording, so you can keep the guitar as a backing track and sing a fresh take over it. Pitch shift moves a song into your range, and the speed control slows a passage down while you learn it back. The free tier allows a limited number of uploads each month. For the full process, see how to turn a voice memo into a song.

Free songwriting apps for beginners

Eleven of the twelve are free downloads; Chordbot is the paid one, with a Lite version to try. These six give you the most without paying, and four of them have no paid tier at all:

A beginner can write a first song with the four free ones. Start with C, Am, F and G, the I vi IV V chords of C major. Play them on the free online chord player until you can hum a line over them, then sing that line into Voice Memos before it slips away. Write words for that line in Notes or The Lyrics App, then rebuild the chords in GarageBand with chord strips and a Drummer and sing the line over the top. For a chorus, reorder the same four chords to Am, F, C, G (vi IV I V) so it starts somewhere new.