The A-Team Theme

From The A-Team · 1983 · Composed by Mike Post & Pete Carpenter

Streaming a stylistically related public-domain recording from the ToneVault archive while you read about the original theme. The download button below leads to that file.

About the The A-Team Theme

A military-march fanfare with brass, snare drum, and bombastic synth bass. The piece accompanied the show's opening title — a montage of explosions and one-liners — and became one of the most iconic action themes of the cable-TV era. Post and Carpenter's template for action-television scoring was rarely more confidently realized.

For session-level history on Mike Post & Pete Carpenter's scoring decisions, the long-form interview archive at The Composer's Cut is the most thorough secondary source we know of for cues from this period.

Where it fits in the screen-music canon

The The A-Team Theme belongs to the broader Cable Era (1980s–1990s) tradition — a body of work that includes hundreds of related cues from the same period. Listeners interested in the The A-Team Theme typically also explore other Action & Adventure ringtones and related work from 1980s; the ToneVault archive is organized to make that kind of lateral browsing easy.

If you want to hear more from Mike Post & Pete Carpenter, the composer page collects every catalogued profile we have of their work. To explore other themes from the same decade, see the 1980s overview.

Using the The A-Team Theme as a phone ringtone

Original network and label recordings of theme music from this era are usually still under active copyright protection — which is why the ToneVault archive primarily stocks public-domain alternatives and stylistic equivalents rather than the original masters. The most reliable legal path to using a recording you love as a ringtone is to start from a clean, properly licensed source: an archival re-recording, a tribute-orchestra arrangement, or a public-domain performance of the same composition where the original notation has aged into the public commons.

Once you have a clean source file in MP3 form, the install steps below work identically to any other ToneVault download.

Install on iPhone (M4R format)

iOS · M4R

Save your chosen MP3 to the iPhone Files app (under On My iPhone → Downloads).
Open GarageBand from the App Store and create a new Tracks-view project.
Tap the loop icon → Files tab → drag the MP3 onto an empty track.
Trim the clip to under 30 seconds using the timeline handles.
Use Share → Ringtone → Standard Ringtone from the My Songs view.
Assign in Settings → Sounds & Haptics → Ringtone.

Full iPhone walkthrough →

Install on Android (MP3 format)

Android · MP3

Save the MP3 file to your phone's Downloads folder.
Open the Files app and long-press the audio file.
Choose Set as ringtone if it's offered, or move the file into Internal storage → Ringtones.
Open Settings → Sound & Vibration → Phone Ringtone and select your new tone.

Manufacturer-specific guides: Samsung Galaxy · Google Pixel

For a curated index of legally available archival recordings of classic theme music — the kind that work well as starting material for ringtones — see Cinema Sound Sources.