Podcast music has one job the rest of the time it's not being paid attention to: get out of the way of the voice. That constraint shapes every prompt you write for it differently than a standalone song would be prompted.
Treat intro, outro and bed as three separate generations
Resist the urge to generate one long track and chop it into pieces — an intro needs a hook and momentum, an outro needs a sense of resolution, and a bed needs to actively avoid drawing attention. Prompting each separately with its actual job in mind gets better results than editing one piece into three roles.
- Intro (5-15 seconds): a clear melodic hook, energetic but short, prompted as 'punchy intro sting' with your genre and a defined length.
- Outro (10-20 seconds): similar instrumentation to the intro for brand consistency, but resolving downward or fading, described as 'closing, settling, gentle fade.'
- Bed (60-plus seconds, loopable): instrumental only, sparse, described as 'minimal low-mid content, no prominent melody, ambient texture.'
Why beds specifically need low-mid space carved out
The human voice lives mostly in the low-mid to mid frequency range, and a bed with busy content in that same range will constantly mask or compete with speech, forcing listeners to work harder even if they cannot say why. Prompting for 'minimal low-mid content' and a sparse arrangement is a useful shortcut, and if a generated bed still feels busy under narration, Studio's 6-stem separation lets you pull the offending stem (often piano or a mid-range synth) down or out entirely rather than regenerating from scratch.
Practical settings that help
Zori5 Turbo is a sensible default for short branded elements like stings, since they are quick, low-cost to iterate on, and do not need the extra fidelity of Zori5 XL to do their job. Generate two or three variations of your intro so you can A/B test which hook is more memorable, then use the cut tool to trim exactly to your show's template length rather than fading awkwardly mid-phrase.