Improve a prompt in four passes

Pass 1 — delete the unmusical words

Strike anything that describes your ambition rather than the audio: best, amazing, viral, professional, high quality, masterpiece, chart-topping. These words cost prompt space and steer nothing. Also strike audience words (for studying, for my friend) unless they double as a real style cue.

A quick test: read the prompt aloud to someone who has never used the tool and ask them which words tell them what the song sounds like. Everything they cannot answer for is a candidate for deletion.

Pass 2 — resolve contradictions

• minimal next to a list of nine instruments — pick one.
• aggressive next to gentle lullaby — pick one, or place them in different sections of the arc.
• lo-fi next to pristine modern mix — pick one.
• Two tempos, or a BPM that fights the named groove (140 BPM slow ballad).

Contradictions do not average out into something interesting; they get resolved arbitrarily, which is why conflicted prompts feel random between runs.

Pass 3 — fill the loudest empty slot

Run the eight pillars. Usually one is missing and it is the one causing your drift — most often the vocal or the tempo. Add a single phrase, not a sentence.

Pass 4 — change one thing per test

Now iterate properly. Generate, listen, and write down the single phrase you will change next and what you expect it to do. If you change three phrases at once and the result improves, you have learned nothing you can reuse.

Example

Practice

Take your worst-performing prompt and run all four passes on it in writing, keeping each intermediate version. Count the words you removed in pass 1 and the conflicts you found in pass 2 — most people are surprised by both numbers. Then generate once from the pass-4 version and compare against the original to confirm the edit actually paid for itself, rather than assuming it did.

FAQ

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