How to make a song with AI in five steps.

The fastest way to a good song is knowing who will hear it. A birthday song for your sister, a hook for a TikTok, a lofi track to study to, a demo of a melody stuck in your head: each of these wants a different length, tempo and voice. Write the purpose down in one line before you open anything. It becomes the first half of your prompt.

Purpose first. The prompt writes itself once you know who it is for.

A good brief names four things: the genre, the mood, the subject and one concrete detail. Compare “a sad song” with “a slow acoustic ballad about the last night before moving out, boxes in the hallway, female voice”. The second one gives the engine a scene to write from, so the lyrics stop sounding like a greeting card.

• upbeat pop about finally quitting a job I hated, bright synths, big chorus, female vocal
• dark trap about driving home at 3 a.m., sliding 808s, sparse piano, male vocal
• warm country song for my dad’s 60th, his old truck and Sunday fishing, deep male vocal

If you want more examples by genre, the prompt guide has 36 that work. Avoid stacking ten adjectives; three that agree beat ten that fight.

Pick female, male or instrumental. If you are on Android, you can also let the song be sung by your own cloned voice. Voice choice changes how a lyric lands: the same words read as a confession in a low male voice and as a celebration in a bright female one. Most generated songs run two to three minutes; say “short” in the prompt if you want a hook-first structure for a video.

For a first song, let the engine write the words from your brief. When you have something specific to say, paste your own lyrics with [Verse] and [Chorus] tags and they will be sung exactly as written. Two rules make lyrics sing: keep lines between six and ten syllables, and let the chorus repeat one line that says the whole idea. The lyrics guide goes deeper, including how to mark spoken parts and ad-libs.

The first result is a draft, not a verdict. Listen all the way through and decide what is wrong in one word: too fast, too busy, wrong voice, weak chorus. Change only that in the prompt and run it again. Beginners rewrite the whole brief and lose what was working. If the melody is right but the words are not, keep the melody: use the cover tool to re-sing the same track with new words or a new style, or the section editor to regenerate just the part that bothers you.

Three runs is a normal number to get a song you keep. Each run costs one credit, and a failed render is refunded automatically.

Every song in Octa gets a share link with cover art, a downloadable MP3, and a one-tap video for Reels, TikTok or Instagram. If it is a gift, send the link privately first. If it is for a video, cut the best fifteen seconds. If it is for you, put it in a playlist and make two more in the same style; that is how a sound becomes yours.