Coo / ClickBeats
How to make your first song in ClickBeats
Seven steps, about five minutes. You do not need to read music and you do not need to know what a chord is. Tap squares until it sounds good.
Open ClickBeats1 Open the Create tab
Create is in the left menu. It opens the studio with an empty grid, ready to go. You start in Simple view, which is just the grid, the instrument button, tempo and Play. That is everything you need for a first song.
2 Tap the grid to place notes
Tap any empty square to drop a note. Tap it again to remove it.
Up the grid is higher pitch. Left to right is time. That is the whole idea. Keep tapping to sketch a tune, and do not worry about it being right yet.
If you are stuck staring at an empty grid: place four notes in a row going up, then four coming back down. Play it. You now have something to change.
3 Move and stretch
Drag the middle of a note to move it somewhere else. Drag its right edge to make it ring out longer or shorter.
Long notes feel calm, short notes feel busy. Mixing the two is most of what makes a melody sound deliberate rather than typed in.
4 Pick your sound
Tap the Instrument button at the top to change what your notes sound like. There are 72 instruments across eight families: keys, plucked, mallets, strings, brass, woodwinds, synth and percussion.
The same notes can sound completely different on piano, marimba or guitar. If a melody feels flat, try switching the instrument before you rewrite it.
5 Set the tempo
The BPM control sets your speed. Around 80 feels calm, around 140 feels fast. Nudge it while the song plays and you will hear the character change straight away.
6 Hear it back
Hit Play in the toolbar. Tap anywhere on the ruler along the top to start playback from that spot instead of the beginning, which saves a lot of time once the song gets longer.
7 Save or Publish
Save keeps the song private to you. Publish shares it to the Feed so everyone can play it.
Published songs can take about a minute to appear on other servers. After that, people listening to your song earns you coins, and coins buy visualizers.
Simple vs Advanced
The switch at the top left flips between the two views. Simple is the grid and nothing else. Advanced unlocks the rest:
- Tracks, up to 15, so melody, bass and drums can play at once. Tracks only exist in Advanced.
- Effects per track: reverb, echo, chorus, detune and distortion. A couple sit under the More button.
- Dynamics and key signatures, set under Song setup.
- 61-Key / 88-Key toggle, for when you need the very lowest or highest notes.
- Per note shaping: Staccato for crisp detached notes, V- and V+ to make one note quieter or louder, plus slides and ties for smoother lines.
You can write a whole song without ever leaving Simple. Advanced is there when one instrument stops being enough.
The limits, so you do not hit one by surprise
Go make one
The first one is always rough. Publish it anyway, then write another.