One sentence, five eras
Start with a neutral brief: “a hip hop beat, dark, instrumental, around 90 BPM”. That will make something. Now watch what three or four extra words do to it.
| Era | Add these words | What you hear |
|---|---|---|
| Early 90s boom bap | “dusty jazz piano, hard kick and snappy snare, vinyl crackle, MPC swing” | A simple, looping, slightly dirty groove built to rap over |
| West Coast g-funk | “high whiny synth lead, deep funk bassline, laid-back, 95 BPM” | Sunlit and rolling, with the synth line as the hook |
| 2000s soul-sample | “chopped soul vocal, warm bass, big snare, string stabs” | A voice used as an instrument over a fuller, cleaner kit |
| Modern trap-adjacent | “808 bass, rolling hi-hats, sparse dark melody, 140 BPM half-time” | Space, subs and a melody that repeats rather than develops |
| Jazz-rap / lo-fi leaning | “upright bass, brushed drums, muted trumpet, relaxed, 85 BPM” | Live-sounding, soft, more background than confrontation |
Three words do nearly all of it: the drum description, the era or scene name, and the one instrument that carries the hook. Everything else in a brief is decoration by comparison.
The one thing every era needs from you
Whichever row you pick, name the drums explicitly. “Hard kick and snappy snare” gives you boom bap drums; “808 bass and rolling hi-hats” gives you modern ones; “brushed drums” gives you something you can talk over. A brief that describes mood and melody but leaves the drums unsaid is a brief that hands over the most important decision in the beat.
Second: say the tempo. Across beat requests here, three in five name one — the highest share of any kind of request we measure — and that is not an accident. Beat-makers know that the tempo is what their words have to fit into.
And the one thing people forget
About three in four beat requests here never turned on the Instrumental switch, so the generator did the reasonable thing: it wrote lyrics and performed them over the beat. If your plan is to rap on it yourself, the switch above the Create button is the difference between a backing track and a finished song by somebody else.
Where to go from a beat you like
Extend it if it is too short — extending continues the same beat rather than making a new one, so the drums and the instrument stay put. Cover it in another era's clothes if you want to hear the same idea as g-funk instead of boom bap. Put a vocal on it with Add vocals, or upload your own recording and have the track built around it. On Pro and Ultra, stems give you the drums and the melody as separate files, which is what you want if the beat is going into a session with your own verses.
Sources
Written and fact-checked by the Tunely team · Updated