Wake tones
Custom alarm sounds on iPhone
Your own audio beats a stock tone for one unglamorous reason: you have not heard it four hundred times already, so your brain has not filed it under ignore.
In short
Tock comes with 18 wake tones, and if none of them suit you it takes your own audio as the alarm instead. Whatever you choose still gets scheduled through Apple's AlarmKit, so the silent switch, an active Focus and a fully closed app have no bearing on whether it rings.
- Bundled wake tones
- 18Bundled wake tonesPlus any audio of your own
- Wake-up missions
- 9Wake-up missionsIt rings until one is solved
- Mission families
- 3Mission familiesMind, body and place
Nothing to play on this page
This page is about a kind of wake tone rather than one specific sound, so there is no single clip to put here. Beacon, Kalimba, Marimba and Musicbox all have one.
How it rings
A custom tone behaves however your file behaves, which is the appeal and the risk: a track with a slow intro can burn twenty seconds of quiet before it reaches anything capable of waking you.
Pick the clip, not the song
The mistake everyone makes is choosing a track they love and letting it start from the top. Most songs spend their first fifteen seconds building, and at 6am those are fifteen seconds of nothing while you sleep straight through.
Trim to the part that already has energy, so the first second of the file is the loudest thing in it. A clip of twenty or thirty seconds that immediately means business does the job better than any full track.
Nothing to preview here, since we cannot play your file. The four bundled tones you can hear are Beacon, Kalimba, Marimba and Music box.
Novelty is the asset, so protect it
The reason a custom sound works is that it has no history with you. Every morning you hear it and dismiss it, that history builds, and eventually the new sound goes as transparent as the old one did.
So rotate it. Change the clip every month or two, keep a shortlist, and stop trying to find the one perfect alarm sound that lasts forever. It does not exist.
What makes a bad custom alarm
Some choices fail predictably, and it is cheaper to read the list than to oversleep learning it.
- Long intros and slow fades, which give you a window to sleep through
- A song you genuinely love, because you will not love it in a month
- Anything that sounds like a notification you already ignore all day
- Podcast or speech audio at conversational level, which is quieter than it seems under a duvet
The clip is still only the opening move
A custom tone gets you the first few weeks. What holds after that is the ending: Tock keeps ringing until you finish a wake-up mission, and there are nine of them across mind, body and place.
Change the sound when it goes stale, keep the mission constant, and the alarm stays honest even when the novelty runs out.
Who should set this one
Worth setting if
- Anyone who has gone transparent to every stock tone they own
- People who need a sound with a personal association attached to it
- Language learners and anyone using the first ten seconds of the day for something
- A voice memo from someone whose voice you will not sleep through
Pair it with a mission
Scan a barcodeWake-up mission
A custom tone is the one you are least likely to sleep through in week one, and scanning a barcode makes sure week five still works. The alarm ends at the cereal box in the kitchen rather than on your pillow.
All nine missionsQuestions people ask
Can I use my own music as an alarm in Tock?
Yes. Tock takes your own audio as a wake tone alongside its 18 built-in ones, and it rings through AlarmKit the same way any other tone does.
How long should a custom alarm clip be?
Twenty to thirty seconds is plenty, as long as the first second is already at full energy. Length matters far less than what happens at the start.
Will a custom sound stop working after a while?
It fades like anything else you hear every morning. Swap the clip every month or two, and lean on a wake-up mission for the part that has to keep working.
Does Tock have a free plan for this?
No free tier. There is a 3-day trial after onboarding, then a subscription from $39.99 a year.
Other wake tones
Eighteen ship with the app. These are the ones worth reading about first.
- MarimbaMarimba is the rounded wooden-bar tone everybody recognises from stock phone alarms, and Tock ships its own version of it. Familiarity cuts both ways: your brain identifies it instantly, and it has also had years of practice sleeping through it. The alarm itself still rings on Apple's AlarmKit, so silent mode and a Focus change nothing.
- Annoying alarm soundsAn unbearable alarm tone works for roughly a week. After that you learn to silence it before you are properly conscious, and you are back where you started with a worse mood attached. The durable fix is not a harsher sound, it is making the alarm end somewhere your half-asleep self cannot reach.
- Loud alarm soundsTock's alarms ring through silent mode and through a Focus because they are built on Apple's AlarmKit, not on an app keeping audio alive in the background. What no app can do is raise your iPhone's hardware volume for you. Loudness gets your eyes open; the wake-up mission is what stops you dismissing it and going straight back to sleep.
- BeaconBeacon is a wake tone in Tock: an evenly spaced two-note pulse that your ear identifies as an alarm almost immediately. Tock's alarms are built on Apple's AlarmKit, so Beacon rings on the native full-screen alert even when the phone is on silent, sitting in a Focus, or the app hasn't been opened since last night.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- NapsThe 10 minute napA 10 minute nap lifts alertness without taking you into slow wave sleep, so you wake up clear rather than groggy. It is the safest nap to take close to work or driving, and it does nothing for memory consolidation, which needs considerably longer.
- Head to headAlarmy vs Sleep CyclePick Alarmy if you sleep through alarms and need one you can't beat. Pick Sleep Cycle if you wake up on time but feel wrecked when you do, and you want a gentler window plus a record of the night.
- FeaturesSleep scoreThe sleep score is a single number for a night, sitting at the top of that night detail view. Underneath it are the parts that produced it, and across nights the insights cover 21 metrics in 7 groups plus long-run measures like sleep regularity and sleep debt.
- Sleep soundsNight forestA night forest bed is a soft, broad rustle of leaves with occasional distant events layered into it, and the design rule that makes it work is that none of those events should ever be identifiable. A sound you can name is a sound you then lie there waiting to hear again, which is the exact opposite of falling asleep.
- Tock for youSnorersSomeone has told you that you snore, or you have woken yourself up doing it, and you have no idea how loud it really is or whether it is the kind of thing that matters.
- AlternativesTock vs RiseChoose Rise if planning your day around energy peaks and a running sleep debt is what actually changes your behaviour. Choose Tock if you want the alarm itself to be smarter, the night recorded from the phone, and a coach that can talk about what it heard.
An alarm that rings on silent, and then asks for something
Tock is built on Apple AlarmKit, so it rings through silent mode and a Focus with the app closed. Then it keeps ringing until you solve one of nine missions.