How to Start Making Music With No Experience: Your First Week

You can start making music with no experience on the phone you already own: pick one free app and give it 15 minutes a day for a week. Spend days 1 to 3 playing only notes and chords that fit together, days 4 and 5 building a short loop in layers, and days 6 and 7 turning that loop into a finished track about 75 seconds long. There is no gear to buy and no theory to study first, and by day 7 you have an audio file you made yourself.

Where to start making music: pick one tool

Comparing apps is the easiest way to lose a first week. Choose one tonight and make every recording in it for all seven days.

GarageBand and BandLab record what you play and stack it in layers, so either one covers the whole week. Song Maker works differently: you build a song by tapping notes onto a grid, with nothing to install, so on days 4 to 7 you place each part instead of playing it in. In GarageBand, tapping Scale on the Keyboard swaps the piano keys for note bars that only play one scale, which is exactly what days 1 to 3 need.

A few rules for the week:

• Headphones: wired, or the phone speaker. Bluetooth earbuds add a small delay between your tap and the sound, and that delay makes playing in time harder once you start looping on day 4. Our guide to AirPods latency in music apps explains why.
• Set a 15-minute timer and stop when it rings, even in the middle of an idea. Stopping mid-idea means you know exactly what to do when you open the app tomorrow.
• Save everything, with the day in the name (“day2-chords”), bad takes included.
• Stay in one key all week: C major. It uses only the white keys of a piano, C D E F G A B. The page of chords in C major lists all seven of its chords if you want to look ahead.

Days 1 to 3: play in one key where nothing sounds wrong

For three days you play only notes and chords from C major. They all come from the same seven notes, so they sit well together.

Day 1: five notes that never clash

Start with C D E G A, the C major pentatonic scale. A pentatonic scale has five notes, and this one leaves F and B out of C major. Those two notes each sit a half step from a neighbor (E to F, B to C), the closest and harshest gap in the key. With them gone, the closest notes in the set are a whole step apart, so no pair grinds.

If your app has a scale setting, set it to C major pentatonic. If it shows a plain piano, avoid F and B. In Gelato Synth, our synth app, the free Notes mode shows only the notes of the scale you pick: choose C and Major Pentatonic and every pad is one of these five notes, repeated over three octaves.

Play the five notes up and down slowly a few times. Then make short phrases of three or four notes, such as E D C or G A G E. Hum each one back after you play it. Notice what the last note does: ending on C sounds finished, while ending on D leaves it hanging, like a question. On a real piano, the black keys alone form a pentatonic scale too (F# G# A# C# D#), which is why noodling on only the black keys sounds good.

Day 2: four chords that loop

Today you play C, Am, F and G, a whole chord per tap. In GarageBand, tap the Chord Strips button on the Keyboard and each strip plays a chord (Apple’s Keyboard guide shows where). In any other app, open the free online chord player in a browser and choose C major. Count four slow beats out loud on each chord, “1, 2, 3, 4”, and change chords on the next “1”. That order is I vi IV V, and G leads straight back to C, so the loop has no seam.

Now play the same four chords in a new order that starts on Am: Am, F, C, G. The loop leans sadder, because your ear hears the first chord as home. Pick the order you like better and keep it for the rest of the week. The rest of this plan uses C, Am, F, G; if you chose the Am version, end your track on Am instead of C.

Day 3: hum a melody over the chords

Play the chords slowly and hum over them, on “da” or “la”, no words. When a little tune repeats itself, hum it into Voice Memos so you do not lose it. Then find it on the five pentatonic notes.

One rule does most of the work: on the first beat of each chord, land on a note from the right-hand column of the table above. Over C, land on C, E or G; over F, land on A or C. Between those landings, wander anywhere in the five notes.

Days 4 and 5: loop it and add layers

A looper records a short section and repeats it while you play new parts on top. Set these up once, before you record anything:

• Key: C major.
• Tempo: 80 BPM, or beats per minute. That is slow enough to hit each chord in time with one thumb.
• Length: 4 bars of four beats, one chord per bar.
• Count-in: on, so you hear a bar of clicks before recording starts.

At 80 BPM each beat lasts 0.75 seconds, so 16 beats make a loop that repeats every 12 seconds. In GarageBand, tempo, key and count-in sit behind the Settings button in the control bar, under Tempo, Key Signature, and Metronome and Count-in. Length lives in the song section controls instead. A new song starts with an 8-bar section, and that works too: the four chords simply play twice.

Day 4: chords, then bass

Record the chords first. Press each chord on beat 1 of its bar and hold it until the next bar. A soft sound such as an electric piano or a pad leaves room for everything you add later.

Then record the bass: the root of each chord, low on the keyboard. That is C, A, F, G, one long note per bar. Once that feels easy, play each root twice, on beats 1 and 3. On GarageBand’s chord strips, the lower segments of each strip play bass notes, so the bass can come from the same screen as the chords.

Day 5: drums, then melody

For drums, put a kick on beats 1 and 3 and a snare on beats 2 and 4. If tapping both at once is too much, record the kick on one pass and the snare on a second pass, or let a built-in beat such as GarageBand’s Drummer play the part. Then record your day 3 melody on the pentatonic notes.

Give each layer three takes, keep the best one and move on. When all four layers are in, mute each one for a pass while the loop plays. If the loop sounds better without a layer, delete it. A thin loop that works is a better base than a crowded one.

If pressing chords in time is the hard part, Gelato Chord, our chord app, puts the seven chords of your key on seven keys, so C, Am, F and G are four presses. Its loop recorder, part of the $4.99 unlock, stacks up to eight layers over a drum groove.

Days 6 and 7: record and finish something small

A loop turns into a track when parts come and go. On day 6, copy your loop until it runs 24 bars (in GarageBand, the Duplicate button in the song section controls copies a section), then clear parts out of some bars so the track builds up and thins out:

That is 25 bars, or 100 beats, which comes to 75 seconds at 80 BPM. The G in bar 24 pulls straight back to C, so the last chord sounds like arriving home.

On day 7, play the track twice: once on headphones and once on the phone speaker. Fix no more than two things. Good candidates:

• The melody is hard to hear. Turn the chords track down before you turn the melody up. Pushing every track up only makes the whole song louder until it distorts.
• The bass disappears on the speaker. Phone speakers drop most low notes, so copy the bass line an octave higher on a brighter sound.

Then export. In GarageBand, touch and hold the song in the My Songs browser, tap Share, then Song, pick a quality and send it to Files, Messages or AirDrop. Other apps have a similar share or export button near the song list. Name the file with its key and tempo, like week-one-C-80, so you know where to start when you come back to it.

Send it to one person, or keep it to yourself. Either way, jot down one thing you liked and one thing to try next week.

How to start making music for free (and what to skip)

Everything in this plan is free if you own a phone: the app, the browser chord player, Voice Memos and your own voice. The things worth skipping are the ones that add choices before you need them:

For week two, keep the same app and change one thing. Move to G major, where the same I vi IV V pattern is G, Em, C, D, or keep C major and raise the tempo to 100 BPM. When a loop starts asking for a second part, our guide to turning a loop into a full song shows how to add a chorus and a proper ending.