How to Create Instagram Reels with Text and Music

Creating an Instagram Reel that grabs attention often comes down to two powerful elements: the right soundtrack and perfectly timed text. When used together, they can stop the scroll, tell a story, and make your message stick. This guide breaks down exactly how to create Instagram Reels with text and music, from the basics of picking a popular song to advanced tricks for making your text appear and disappear at just the right moment.

Getting Started: Your First Reel

Before you can add any text or music, you need a video. Instagram's Reel editor is surprisingly powerful, letting you either record clips on the fly or upload prepared footage directly from your phone.

Here’s the basic setup:

1. Open the Reel Editor: On the Instagram home screen, tap the plus (+) icon at the bottom of the screen and select “Reel” from the menu.
2. Choose Your Content: You have two options here. You can either record new video by pressing and holding the record button in the center, or you can upload existing clips by tapping the blue plus (+) icon in the bottom-left corner to access your phone’s camera roll. You can add multiple clips, whether recorded or uploaded.
3. Trim and Arrange: Once your clips are in the editor, tap “Edit video” at the bottom left. Here, you can tap and hold any clip to rearrange its order, or tap a clip and drag its handles to trim the beginning or end. This is ground zero for building the visual flow of your Reel.

When your clips are in place, tap "Next." Now you're in the main editing interface where the creative additions happen.

Finding a Beat: How to Add Music to Your Reel

Music sets the entire mood of your Reel. It can create energy, evoke emotion, or tie your content to a trending sound, immediately boosting its potential reach. Instagram’s built-in music library gives you access to millions of songs and audio clips.

Step-by-Step Guide to Adding Music

1. Tap the Audio Icon: At the top of the editing screen, you’ll see several icons. Tap the music note icon to open the audio library.
2. Browse and Search for Music: Instagram will show you a “For you” page with recommended songs based on your activity and what’s currently trending. You can use the search bar at the top to look for a specific song, artist, or even a genre like “lofi” or “upbeat pop.” You can also tap the “Browse” tab to see curated playlists by genre and mood.
3. Select Your Song: Once you find a song you like, tap on it to preview. If it’s the one, tap “Done” to add it to your Reel.
4. Choose the Perfect Snippet: The full song isn’t simply slapped over your video. Instagram lets you choose the exact part of the song you want to use. After adding the song, a slider will appear at the bottom of the screen. Drag this slider left or right to scrub through the song’s timeline. This is your chance to find the perfect beat drop, chorus, or starting lyric for your video. A Reel's audio can be up to 90 seconds, so choose the part that best fits your video's length and energy.
5. Adjust Audio Levels (Optional but Recommended): Tap the “Edit video” button, then "Audio". You will see two audio tracks: Camera Audio and the Music you just added. If your original video has important sounds you want to keep (like your voice), you can use the sliders to balance the volume. For example, you can lower the music volume to 10-20 to use it as background ambience while your voice remains clear on the camera audio track. If your video is purely visual, you can slide the Camera Audio down to zero.

Making Your Words Pop: Mastering Text in Instagram Reels

Text is where you add context, deliver your core message, or simply add a funny caption. The real power comes from timing your text to appear exactly when you want it, making your Reel feel more dynamic and professional.

How to Add and Customize Text

1. Open the Text Tool: In the Reel editing screen, tap the “Aa” icon at the top right corner. This will bring up your keyboard and the text editor.
2. Type Your Message: Start typing what you want to say. Don't worry about getting a whole paragraph in one go, it's often better to break up sentences into multiple, shorter text boxes for better timing.
3. Customize the Look: You have several options at the top to customize your text’s appearance:
   • Fonts: The icons at the bottom let you cycle through different font styles.
   • Color: Tap the color wheel at the top to change the color of your text. You can choose from presets or use the eyedropper tool to match a color from your video.
   • Background/Highlight: The icon at the top left of the text editor (a letter 'A' with stars) adds a solid, semi-transparent, or highlighted background to your text, which is great for making it readable against a busy video.

The Real Trick: Timing Your Text to Appear and Disappear

This is what separates basic Reels from polished ones. Instead of having text on-screen for the whole video, you can control its precise duration.

1. After you’ve styled your text and tapped “Done,” you’ll see your text box overlaid on your video. At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a small bubble representing that piece of text. Tap it.
2. This opens the video timeline, with a highlighted bar representing your text layer.
3. Drag the handles on either end of this bar to set the timing. Drag the left handle to choose when the text appears, and drag the right handle to choose when it disappears. You can scrub through the video with your finger to find the exact frame where you want it to pop up.
4. Once you get the timing right, tap your video preview to hide the timeline.

To add more text that appears at a different time, simply tap the “Aa” icon again to create a completely new text box. Repeat the process: write, style, and then adjust the timing for this new text layer on the timeline. You can stack as many text layers as you need to create sophisticated sequences.

Advanced Techniques: Creating Seamless Reels

Once you’ve got the hang of adding music and timing individual text boxes, you can start combining techniques to make your content even more engaging.

Synchronize Text Changes to the Music Beat

This is an effective technique for grabbing attention. The goal is to make a new piece of text appear right on a distinct beat or lyric in the song.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Add your music first so you have the audio to work with.
2. Play your Reel a few times and listen carefully for the exact moment you want the text to change - a drum hit, a new lyric, or a change in melody.
3. Add your first piece of text and open the timeline editor. Drag the end of its timeline bar to disappear just as the beat hits.
4. Add your second piece of text. Drag the beginning of its timeline bar to appear exactly on that same beat.

The result is a snappy, satisfying transition that makes your Reel feel perfectly edited to the music. Viewers notice and appreciate this kind of detail.

Use Text-to-Speech to Add a Voiceover

The text-to-speech feature reads your on-screen text aloud in a computer-generated voice. This is extremely popular on Reels and TikTok as it allows for hands-free storytelling and adds another layer of audio interest beyond just music.

1. Add a text box like you normally would.
2. With the text editor open, tap the text bubble at the bottom.
3. You’ll see an option for “Text-to-speech.” Tap it and choose from one of the available voices.

You can even reduce your music volume to let the text-to-speech voiceover take center stage. This is a brilliant way to add commentary or narrative to your existing video footage.

Don’t Forget On-Screen Subtitles

A huge portion of users watch Reels with the sound off. If your video relies on you speaking, your message will be completely lost without on-screen captions. By using the text tool to create simple subtitles, you make your content accessible to everyone - people with hearing impairments, users in quiet environments, and habitual sound-off scrollers. This dramatically increases your potential viewership and watch time.

Just break down what’s being said into short, digestible text phrases and time them to match the spoken words in the camera audio track.

Final Thoughts

By pairing catchy music with dynamic, well-timed text, you can tell powerful stories, share valuable tips, and hook viewers in the first few critical seconds. Mastering Instagram’s built-in tools for timing text and selecting music is a skill that directly translates into more engaging, professional-looking Reels directly from your phone.

Once you get into a nice rhythm with creating content, keeping up the momentum is what truly builds an audience. That’s where we found that planning makes all the difference. Using a social media management tool like Postbase allows us to see all our upcoming Reels in a visual content calendar. It helps organize our strategy and lets us schedule everything in advance, saving time and mental energy so we can focus on being creative instead of just scrambling to get the next post live.