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Reference

Browse the style reference

An index of every style list in this reference, grouped so you can find the right vocabulary in one or two clicks.

What this reference is

Every list here is a table of style terms next to a prompt-ready cue line. The term is the name you would look up; the cue is a comma-separated line you can paste straight into a Style field and edit.

The cues follow the same grammar throughout: what the music is, what plays it, roughly how fast, and how it feels. That order is deliberate — the first tokens have the strongest pull on the result, so genre and instrumentation sit at the front and mood sits at the end.

How the lists are grouped

Thirty-one lists, grouped seven ways. Nothing stops you mixing across groups; most interesting prompts do.

  • Popular song forms — Chart-facing styles where production era and vocal treatment carry most of the identity. Lists: pop-list, rnb-list, hip-hop-list, retro-music-list, viral-music-list.
  • Guitar-led music — Scenes separated by guitar tone, drum room and how polished the recording is meant to sound. Lists: rock-list, punk-list, metal-list, underground-indie-list, country-list.
  • Electronic and club — Machine-made music, split between listening styles and tempo-locked floor styles. Lists: electronic-list, dance-club-list, experimental-list.
  • Roots and tradition — Living traditions where the rhythm pattern and the lead instrument define the style. Lists: folk-list, jazz-list, reggae-list, latin-list, religious-gospel-list.
  • Regional families — Region-specific lists that name traditions directly instead of collapsing a continent into one word. Lists: african-list, east-asian-list, indian-south-asian-list, middle-eastern-list, southeast-asian-list.
  • Function-first music — Cues chosen by the job they do — a scene, a workout, a bedtime, a focus session. Lists: soundtrack-list, game-music-list, study-focus-list, fitness-music-list, children-music-list, ambient-list.
  • Building blocks — Orchestration vocabulary you can drop into any other prompt to fix the arrangement. Lists: instruments-list, classical-list.

Picking a list

Start from what you already know about the track. If you know the scene, go to the genre list. If you know the region, go to the regional list. If you only know what the music has to do — underscore a scene, carry a workout, keep a toddler entertained — go to the function-first group.

If you know none of those but you know the sound, open the instruments list and build upward from the timbre. A prompt assembled from three good instrument cues and one mood word beats a guessed genre name almost every time.

Using the raw data

Each list page links its underlying JSON file, so you can pull the terms into your own scripts, build pick-lists, or feed them to the prompt builder. The files are plain arrays of objects with a term and a use field — no nesting, no surprises.

FAQ

How many lists are there?
Thirty-one style lists plus this index and the genre families overview. Each list holds between twenty-four and forty entries.
Can I combine entries from different lists?
Yes, and you should. A common pattern is one genre cue, two instrument cues and one mood word, with a single BPM shared across them.
Are the cue lines fixed?
No. Treat them as starting points — swap the tempo, change one instrument, drop the mood word. They are written to survive editing.
Why does every cue include a tempo?
Most do, because tempo resolves more ambiguity than any other single token. Ambient and free-rhythm entries deliberately leave it out.

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