There is exactly one melody guaranteed to make an entire train carriage pat their own pockets in unison, and Apple wrote it. The iPhone "Marimba" ringtone — officially named "Opening" — is 18 notes of Pavlovian dread that your nervous system recognizes faster than your own name. So naturally, I decided to play it on guitar, because if I'm going to be haunted by a sound, I'd like to at least own the copyright to my suffering.
This little clip arranges the iPhone Marimba ringtone for solo guitar in under 90 seconds. No band, no marimba, no phone — just one guitar reproducing the most recognizable arpeggio on Earth, so you can finally answer the eternal question: "how do you play the iPhone ringtone on guitar?" (Answer: with mild embarrassment and a lot of pinky.)
How the iPhone ringtone works on guitar
Strip away the marimba timbre and the "Opening" ringtone is just a fast arpeggio outlining chords in bright, friendly G major — mostly notes plucked one at a time rather than strummed together. That's why it translates so well to guitar: you're not fighting big barre shapes, you're picking a repeating pattern of single notes (G–D–B is the backbone) that dances up and down while your fretting hand barely moves. The trick is to keep every note even in volume, because a marimba is mechanically consistent and your fingers, sadly, are not.
The useful takeaway: treat this as a fingerstyle etude. Anchor your thumb on the low string, assign one finger per higher string, and let the pattern loop until it's muscle memory. Do that and you've secretly practiced clean alternation and string separation — the exact skills that make real fingerpicking pieces feel easy later.
Fair warning: once you can play it, you will play it constantly, and eventually someone in the room will genuinely reach for their phone. That's not a bug, that's a standing ovation. If you want the tab and Guitar Pro file — plus the growing pile of other things I've decided to inflict on my own fingers — they live on my Patreon.