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Choose useful cues and drop the rest
A cue is useful only if a musician could act on it — everything else is padding that dilutes the words that work.
The actionability test
For every phrase in your prompt ask: *if I handed this to a session musician or a mix engineer, would they know what to do?* "Fingerpicked nylon guitar" passes. "Beautiful guitar" does not. "Half-time bridge" passes. "Epic moment" does not.
This one test resolves most prompt-writing questions. It is more useful than any word list, because it works on vocabulary you have never seen before.
Cue categories, ranked
| Tier | Kind of cue | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Strong | Nameable technique or instrument | brushed snare, palm-muted guitar, half-time |
| Strong | Measurable value | 92 BPM, four-bar intro, minor key |
| Useful | Established style shorthand | boom bap, shoegaze, Motown backbeat |
| Weak | Mood adjective with no cause | dreamy, intense, vibey |
| Dead | Quality or reaction claim | amazing, professional, viral, best |
Why padding actively hurts
- Attention is finite: every dead word takes weight away from a live one.
- Quality claims bias toward a generic commercial sheen, flattening character.
- Long prompts increase the chance of internal contradiction.
- Vague adjectives invite the model to fall back on genre defaults you did not choose.
- Shorter prompts are easier to A/B test, which is how you actually improve.
Keep the weak ones that earn their place
Weak-tier mood words are not banned — they are just cheap only when paired with a cause. "Dreamy" alone is padding; "dreamy, long reverb tails, slow chord rate, no percussive attack" is a specification with a mood label on the front. The label helps the model integrate the details, so the pair is stronger than either half.
Example
Practice
Take your longest prompt and mark every phrase as strong, useful, weak or dead using the table above. Delete everything dead, pair or delete everything weak, and regenerate. Track how many characters you removed — most people cut thirty to fifty percent and report the results get more distinctive, not less.