Writing a style description

The style description is the whole instrument. Every control in the settings panel adjusts a track the description has already decided the shape of — so a sharper sentence is worth more than any knob on the page.

Name four things

A description that names genre, instrumentation, production and feel gives the studio everything it needs and nothing to argue with. A description built from adjectives — beautiful, professional, high quality — gives it nothing at all, because those words do not describe a sound.

Recipes you can paste in

Melancholy indie folk, fingerpicked nylon-string guitar, brushed drums and upright bass, close-mic’d male vocal with a slight rasp, warm tape saturation, mid-tempo and unhurried.

Anthemic alt-pop, driving eighth-note bass, bright electric guitars, four-on-the-floor drums, big reverb on the snare, female vocal doubled in the chorus, energetic.

[intro]

[verse]
We packed the car at four a.m.
and left the porch light on

[pre-chorus]
and nobody said the word goodbye

[chorus - anthemic]
Drive until the radio gives out
Drive until the morning finds us out

[bridge]
Every mile is one more mile from home

[outro]

Structure tags

Lyrics without structure tags leave the studio guessing where the song turns. Tags are plain tokens you drop on their own line above the lines they govern.

A tag can also carry one delivery note — [chorus - anthemic], [verse - whispered], [bridge - sparse piano] and [chorus - layered harmonies]. One note per tag, not three: stacking modifiers muddies the section rather than compounding the effect.

Change one thing at a time

When a take is nearly right, the temptation is to rewrite the description. Don’t. Fix the Seed first — the starting point for the randomness. fix it when you want to change one thing and hear only that change; let it move when you want fresh ideas. — then change a single phrase, and you will hear exactly what that phrase was doing.