Udio / Suno Prompt Guide

Recreating the style of the soundtrack of True Detective (Season 2) using Udio and ChatGPT.

Since I can't directly ask the machine for the musician, I'll rely on the chatbot to reverse engineer the data from the music algorithm.

Instead of using vague descriptions, I only prompt these machines with specific sub-genres. Less is more. If you don't already know how to classify music, ChatGPT can explain it to you.

In this instance, I asked it to describe the music style of 'Lately' from Lera Lynn and the other songs she contributed to True Detective.

It gave me keywords like: folk, alternative folk, americana, indie folk, haunting vocals, atmospheric instrumentation

And feeding them back to Udio gave me an approximation of her general style, but the True Detective soundtrack is different, something special. So I continued the conversation and reminded GPT of that fact.

Now it gave me words like: folk-noir, dark ambient, dream pop, moody, eerie atmosphere, dark tones

Combining a few keywords from both of these keyword lists recreated pretty much exactly what I had in mind: Love & Entropy on X

My song doesn't sound exactly like any specific track from the show, but it's akin to a blend of 'Lately,' 'Church in Ruins,' 'My Least Favorite Life,' and the other tracks by Lera Lynn from the soundtrack.

Check this playlist for reference: True Detective Season 2 Soundtrack 

Why Does This Work?

ChatGPT knows about this because music journalists and search engines labeled it as such. Regardless of whether the audio generators have been trained on Lera Lynn or not, this approach will get you close.

And if they have been trained on her, this forces the machine to access and reconstruct the data from the Latent Space, because that's how it was labeled and every musician has a unique combination of labels, like a signature.

Simply typing 'Nu Disco, French House' and you'll never need to buy another Daft Punk album. They are the most prominent example of those styles combined, so the machine has no choice but to recreate their unique style. Use 'manual mode' in Udio to guarantee it only uses your keywords.