The page is already steering, and you can steer it back
Most generators treat every brief the same way. This one does not. When a brief carries the wording of loss, Tunely adds a tone to the request before it is sent — gentle and tender, slow and solemn, hymn-like, soft piano and warm strings — because the default for an unspecified song is bright, and bright is the wrong answer at a funeral. This exists because someone told us the song they got for a service came back upbeat.
You do not have to ask for that tone. You have to know how to turn it off, because a celebration of life is a different event from a burial and often wants a different song.
| What you write | What happens |
|---|---|
| “in memory of”, “in loving memory”, “passed away”, “rest in peace”, “eulogy”, “funeral”, “we lost”, “my late father” | The gentle, hymn-like tone is added to the arrangement |
| Any of those, plus “upbeat”, “joyful”, “celebratory”, “festive”, “danceable” | The steering stands down and your words decide the mood |
| “Memorial Day” | Treated as the American holiday, not a bereavement — no tone is added |
| A style of your own — “New Orleans brass”, “gospel choir”, “her favourite: 70s soul” | Used as written; an explicit style always outranks the default |
So the practical instruction is short. For a funeral or a wake, write plainly and let the steering do its work. For a celebration of life, name the mood you want in the same breath as the loss: “a celebration of my mother's life — joyful, gospel choir, hands in the air” produces a completely different song from “a song in memory of my mother”, and both are correct.
You already have the words
Across the site, about half of what people make starts from a description. Here, bring what you have instead — and it is worth stating plainly for anyone arriving at four in the morning wondering what to type: you are not supposed to describe them to a machine. You are supposed to bring what you have.
What you have is usually more than you think. The eulogy, if it is written. The words from the order of service. The three sentences you keep repeating to people who ask. A list of the things they always said. Any of those is a lyric already; it needs cutting, not writing.
- Cut to between sixteen and twenty-four lines. A eulogy is prose and runs long; a lyric is a short poem with room around it.
- One image per line. “She kept the back door open all summer” survives being sung. “She was always welcoming” does not.
- Find the line you have repeated most since they died, and make it the chorus. It is already the chorus; you have been rehearsing it for weeks.
- Keep their own turns of phrase word for word, including the ones that are not grammatical. Those are the lines the room will recognise.
- Spell their name the way it is said aloud, and decide whether you want it sung at all. Some families want the name everywhere; some cannot hear it yet. Both are ordinary.
- Leave the dates out of the lyric. Written down they are facts; sung, they scan badly and they fix the song to a document rather than a person.
If you truly have nothing written, three sentences is enough to start: who they were to you, one thing they did that nobody else did, and how you want the room to feel at the end. Use Custom mode when you have text of your own, and the description box when you do not.
If it is for a service
Services run on a timetable that somebody else controls, so a few practical things matter more than the song does.
- Tell whoever is running it early, and give them a file rather than a phone. Funeral directors, celebrants and crematoria usually want audio in advance, and some have a cut-off a day or two before.
- Plan on about three minutes or a little more — the middle of what songs made here run. That is a long, quiet time in a full room; it is also about the length of a slideshow or a walk to the front.
- Download the MP3 rather than relying on a page loading on the day. A venue's wifi is not something to discover at the wrong moment.
- Listen to it once on the actual speakers if you can. A song that is right on headphones can be thin in a chapel or boomy in a function room.
- Decide who hears it first. A memorial song lands harder than people expect, and the first listen should not be a surprise you spring on a grieving room.
A service is not the only reason people make these, and often not the first. Some are made weeks or months afterwards — for an anniversary, for a birthday that still arrives every year, for a child who is too young now and will want to hear their grandmother's voice described to them later, or for nobody at all. There is no correct time, and nothing here expires.
What happens to the song afterwards
Songs made here are private by default. Nothing is published, nothing appears on a public page, and sharing happens only if you turn it on and send the link yourself. That matters more on this page than on any other, because what goes into these songs is a family's own material — a name, an illness, the things that were said at the end.
It is also why this page has no example song to listen to. Every memorial song made here is about one named person, and none of them is ours to play for strangers. A borrowed example from some other page would tell you nothing useful about yours anyway.
Keep your own copy. Download the MP3 rather than leaving the only version in an account you may not open for a year.
Before you press Create
- The words you already have — eulogy, order of service, or the three sentences you keep saying
- Cut to sixteen to twenty-four lines, one image per line
- The line you have repeated most, set aside to be the chorus
- Their own phrases, kept word for word
- Their name spelled the way it is said — or deliberately left out
- For a celebration of life: the word “joyful” or “celebratory”, or the gentle tone will be added for you
- Who is going to hear it first
Sources
Written and fact-checked by the Tunely team · Updated