Record or design your own keyboard sounds

Updated October 25, 2026

Teclo's Create page makes a keyboard sound pack two ways: record your own keyboard, or any sound, with your Mac's microphone, or start from one of its 16 packs and move five sliders. Either way the pack joins your list, and Export… shares it as one .teclo file.

Open Teclo’s window from the keycap icon in the menu bar and click Create at the bottom. The page has two tabs, Design and Record. Both have been in Teclo since version 1.0.7.

Design: start from a pack

Pick the pack it is “Made from”, then move the sliders. Each one changes Teclo’s synthesizer before it makes the sound, not the finished audio, so a pack stays a pack: every key still has its own press and release.

Preview plays “hi there” typed at a calm pace in your design. Surprise me picks a random pack and random slider positions. Name it and click Save; it appears in your list, and Edit on its row brings the sliders back later.

To hear what the sliders work on, play the three packs above: Butter is the default starting point, Boulder the deep one, and Cushion the muted one.

Record: your own keyboard

Choose My keyboard. Teclo asks for four keys, one at a time: A, Space, Return and Delete.

1. Click Record and wait a moment.
2. Press the key three times. Hold each press about 300 ms, let go, and leave at least a second of quiet before the next one. The bar runs 6 seconds.
3. Teclo checks the take as soon as it ends and moves to the next key, or tells you what went wrong and lets you record that key again.

Of the three presses, Teclo keeps the middle one by loudness, with its release. It trims each to just before the key lands, so there is no gap you would hear as delay, and brings every key to the same loudness. The A stands in for every other ordinary key, so the whole keyboard sounds.

Your pack appears under Recorded. If a key does not come through, Teclo says why in plain words, such as “Something sounded too soon after a release. Leave a second of quiet after each press.” or “The sound was too loud for the microphone. Make it softer, or further away.”

Record: any sound

Choose Any sound and make your sound three times, with about a second of quiet between tries. A pen click, a tap on a glass, a word. Teclo keeps the middle one, up to 600 ms of it, and plays it for every key press.

Microphone tips

• Teclo records from the input picked in System Settings, Sound, Input. If it heard “only silence”, pick the right microphone there.
• Record in a quiet room: Teclo looks for sounds clearly above the room’s noise.
• Get close, but not so close the level bar turns orange; that means the take is near the microphone’s limit.
• If you said no to the microphone once, allow it in System Settings, Privacy & Security, Microphone. Teclo’s Record tab has a button that opens that list.

Share it

Every pack you made has Edit, Rename…, Export… and Delete… on its row. Export… writes one .teclo file: a designed pack is saved as its slider settings, so the file is tiny, and a recorded pack carries its sounds. Double-click a .teclo file, or drop it on Teclo’s window, to add the pack on another Mac.

To bring in WAV files you made in an audio editor instead, see custom keyboard sound packs from files. To pick from the built-in packs first, see choose a keyboard sound pack, and for making a video with your new sound, typing ASMR on a Mac.