← Guide / Genres / Electronic & EDM
Electronic & EDM
Machine-made music where sound design, tempo and arrangement mechanics matter more than instrumentation lists.
Sound and palette
Electronic music is organised by subgenre more strictly than almost any other family, and each subgenre implies a whole palette. Say house and you get four-on-the-floor kick, off-beat open hats, chunky piano or organ chords. Say drum and bass and you get a chopped breakbeat and a sub-heavy Reese. Say synthwave and you get gated drums, analogue brass stabs and arpeggiated bass. Naming the subgenre is therefore the highest-leverage word in your prompt — much more useful than listing individual synths.
After the subgenre, spend words on sound design, not instruments. Useful descriptors are about shape and processing: plucky saw lead, supersaw stack, detuned square bass, filtered pad, sidechained chords, acid 303 line, FM bell. These tell the model what the sound does, which is what electronic listeners actually perceive.
- Kick character: punchy and tight (techno), soft and round (deep house), distorted (hardstyle).
- Bass: sub sine, Reese, acid 303, plucked pluck, wobble — pick one, they rarely coexist.
- Leads: supersaw, plucky saw, FM bell, square arp, vocal chop.
- Textures: white-noise riser, reverse cymbal, impact hit, granular pad, vinyl noise.
- Movement: filter sweep, sidechain pumping, tape stop, gated rhythm.
Rhythm and tempo range
In electronic music BPM is not a detail — it is a genre signal. A 128 BPM prompt reads as house or progressive; 140 reads as trance or dubstep (halftime); 174 reads as drum and bass. Get the number wrong and the model will fight your subgenre label. Always include a BPM in dance prompts, and make sure it agrees with the style word you chose.
Groove language matters almost as much. Four-on-the-floor, off-beat open hats, syncopated shuffled hats, broken beat, halftime drop and swung 16ths all produce different rhythmic results at the same tempo.
| Subgenre | Typical BPM | Groove marker |
|---|---|---|
| Deep / lo-fi house | 118–124 | Soft kick, swung hats, warm chords |
| House / tech house | 124–128 | Four-on-the-floor, off-beat open hat |
| Techno | 130–140 | Driving kick, minimal top end, long builds |
| Trance | 136–142 | Rolling bass, supersaw lead, big breakdown |
| Dubstep | 140 (halftime) | Snare on 3, wobble bass, heavy drop |
| Drum and bass | 172–176 | Chopped breakbeat, sub bass, two-step feel |
Arrangement and vocals
Dance arrangement is a mechanical language the model understands well when you use it: intro, build, drop, breakdown, second drop, outro. Adding eight-bar build with riser and snare roll into the drop gets you a recognisable transition rather than a flat loop. If you want the energy to release rather than explode, say filtered drop, energy pulls back.
Vocals in this family are usually either a full topline or a texture. A topline wants short, repeated, vowel-heavy phrases — long narrative verses fight the arrangement. As texture, ask for chopped vocal sample, pitched-up vocal stab, vocoder pad or wordless female hook. For club tracks, instrumental is a perfectly good answer and keeps the sound design in front.
Production character and pitfalls
Production words carry a lot of weight here: sidechain pumping, wide stereo synths with mono bass, club-loud mastering, analogue warmth, crunchy bitcrushed drums. Because everything is synthesised, the processing is the timbre, so these are not garnish.
The most common failure is subgenre soup — asking for "EDM house techno trance dubstep" and receiving an incoherent average. The second is a BPM that contradicts the style word. The third is describing energy with adjectives only ("banger", "massive") rather than with structure; the model cannot act on hype, but it can act on "snare roll into a halftime drop".
- One subgenre per prompt. Blends work only as an explicit pair, e.g. melodic techno with trance leads.
- Match BPM to subgenre or drop the number entirely.
- Don't list five bass types; the model will pick badly.
- Say what happens at the drop, not how great it is.
- Add instrumental for club tracks unless you actually want a topline.