🖋️Write Your Lyrics

This is another box where a lot of the magic can potentially happen depending on your preferences!

Underneath the Core Prompt Box is the Write Your Lyrics section:

There are three options here: Auto-Generate, Custom and Instrumental. Let's look at them in order of increasing complexity.

Instrumental

If you click this button, it means the model will generate an instrumental clip for you by itself, following your Core Box Prompt and Advanced Controls settings. The rest of the decision you leave up to it to decide. If you want a quick instrumental section and aren't terribly fussy about what it's like or how it develops, this option is useful.

Note: You can create instrumental sections using the Custom option, and this allows you greater control over the instrumental you generate.

Auto-Generate

If you click this option, the AI will generate a set of lyrics for you by itself, saving you the task of having to think of any. The lyrics it generates will be based upon your Core Box Prompt and the contents.

This is useful if you want quick lyrics and aren't too bothered by what they are and perhaps don't feel confident enough to edit them on your own. Just be mindful AI lyrics tend to play into certain song writing tropes and stereotypes, which can make them feel "samey", although the models that write them are improving every day!

Note: If you use this option you will not have the option to know what the lyrics are in advance, and will only learn this after the model generates the clip. If you want the potential option to use AI-generated lyrics but amend them, use the Custom option.

Custom

Use this section if you want to do one of the following:

• Use AI-generated lyrics with the option to see/edit them in advance if desired.

• Write your own lyrics, including the possibility of instrumental breaks

• Have an instrumental section which you can more precisely control

Fundamentally this is a huge blank box:

Knowing how to use this box well is as important as the Core Prompt Box!

AI-Generated Lyrics

If you want to use AI-Generated lyrics the first thing you would do is describe your planned song in the "What is your song about?" box shown above. When done typing, click "Write for Me" and below in the blank space, lyrics which match this will appear:

Notice how the lyrics rhyme. The AI will try to incorporate musical structuring like this by itself.

You can then edit these lyrics as you like by simply clicking in the box and deleting/amending whatever you desire!

Writing Your Own Lyrics or Instrumental

This is where things get interesting! Creative control!

Fundamentally, you just type into the box and what is typed "normally" the AI interprets as lyrical content. Pretty simple! The AI will do it's best to sing whatever you type, but you need to be mindful of how many lyrics you're including in regards to the clip size. You also need to think of structuring and cadence. These are more advanced concerns and you can read more about mastering them in the Knowledgebase!

Very important are metatags. These are essentially "instructions" to the AI, typed into the lyrical box which it will (in most cases) not sing, but it will "read" and try to act on. See below:

Note the word count in the bottom right. Keep an eye on this, as it gives you an idea of how fast the delivery may be (lower numbers = slower, higher = faster)

You will notice in the above image some text is plain, some is within [ ] and some is within ( ) .

[ ] contained text is a metatag. For the lyrics above this is telling Udio what to do, but not what to sing. As you can see it's used here to distinguish between what is a verse and what is a chorus. It is also used to instruct the AI to perform an instrumental break between the verse and the chorus; specifically with guitars being dominant.

You can type all sorts of things into metatags, check the Knowledgebase for the full list, but for now, let's keep it to the idea we should use them to structure the song by specifying things like:

[Intro]

[Verse]

[Chorus]

[Pre-Chorus]

[Post-Chorus]

[Outro]

[Instrumental]

[Instrumental Break]

The ( ) around terms tells the AI to treat these lyrics differently to those outside them. This can range from being performed by backing singers, a different vocalist, whispered, reverb etc. You can control this somewhat with the Core Prompt Box.

Now if we're using this box to generate a pure Instrumental, we're gonna need to consider more than the above because we have no lyrics!

(tele, write this bit please)

Creation

Technically, once the above is done, you can hit the "Create" button at the bottom and the clips will start to generate! Give it a spin for your first time.

If you want to then build upon the clip you have just generated, check out the next page: Extending Songs

If however you're not ready to create and you fancy looking at more tools to control your generation first; take a look at Advanced Controls

The large button "Create" or "Extend" is always what you press when you're ready to generate, whether you have used advanced options or not.