How to Write Prompts for AI Sound Effects (With Examples)

AI sound effect models are good at following descriptions, but they only know what you tell them. “Explosion” gets you an explosion. “Large explosion with a deep boom and falling debris, distant echo, no music” gets you the one you actually needed. This guide shows how to write prompts that land on the first or second try, so you spend credits on sounds you keep.

The five-part prompt formula

Most good sound effect prompts answer five questions, roughly in this order:

1. What is it? The source and the action: “sword being drawn”, “wooden door creaking open”.
2. What is it made of? Materials change the sound more than anything else: steel, rusty iron, leather, glass, gravel, wet stone.
3. How does it unfold? The shape over time: “building up then a burst”, “short and crisp”, “slowly fading out”.
4. Where does it happen? Distance and space: “close-up”, “in a stone dungeon”, “distant, outdoors”.
5. What should be left out? “No music, no background noise, no reverb”. Models sometimes add a bed of music or ambience; say so if you don’t want it.

Put together:

Sword being drawn from a metal sheath, sharp metallic slide and a clean ringing tone at the end, close-up, no music

You can hear that exact prompt on our weapon sound effects page, generated once with no editing.

Words that make the biggest difference

• Size: tiny, small, large, huge, massive. A “small explosion” and a “massive explosion” are different sounds, not just different volumes.
• Distance: close-up, nearby, distant, far away. Close-up sounds are drier and more detailed.
• Texture: crisp, punchy, soft, gritty, crunchy, wet, metallic, hollow, airy.
• Genre context: “retro arcade”, “fantasy RPG”, “sci-fi shooter”, “cartoon”. These pull the whole sound toward a style.
• Exclusions: “no music”, “no voice”, “no reverb”, “no background noise”.

Before and after

Here are vague prompts and the versions that work better:

• “click” → “Soft UI button click, short and crisp, modern mobile game menu, no reverb, no music”
• “monster” → “Monster growl, deep guttural snarl of a large creature in a cave, close-up, no music”
• “rain” → “Steady rain on a window with soft distant thunder, calm ambience, no music”
• “magic” → “Magic fireball spell cast, whoosh building up then fiery burst, fantasy game, no music”

Notice the pattern: every improved prompt names a specific source, a texture or shape, a context and an exclusion.

One sound per prompt

It’s tempting to describe a whole scene: “a knight draws his sword, swings it and hits a shield”. You’ll usually get a muddy result, and even when it works you can’t trigger the parts separately in your game. Generate the draw, the swing and the impact as three sounds. They’re easier to time to animation and easier to reuse.

The exception is ambience, where you want several things happening at once. Even there, keep foreground events out of the bed and add them as one-shots. Our ambience guide covers this in more detail.

Use the settings, not just the prompt

• Duration: match it to the sound. UI clicks want 0.5–1 seconds; explosions with debris tails want 4–6. A long duration on a short sound often adds unwanted extras at the end.
• Prompt influence (ElevenLabs SFX v2): higher values follow your words more literally, lower values give the model more creative freedom. Raise it for precise UI and impact sounds, lower it when you’re exploring.
• Loop: turn it on for ambiences, engine hums and auras so the end flows back into the start.
• Variations: generate two to four takes. Picking the best of four is faster than rewriting a prompt four times, and the extra takes are useful for randomizing repeated sounds like footsteps.

Iterate in small steps

If a result is close but not right, change one thing at a time. Too boomy? Add “tight” or “short tail”. Too clean? Add “gritty” or “distorted”. Too far away? Add “close-up”. Changing everything at once makes it hard to learn what worked.

When you find a prompt that works, keep it. Reusing the same style words across a set (for example, every UI sound starting with “soft wooden”) is the easiest way to make a game’s audio feel consistent.

What to avoid

• Names of real people or requests to imitate someone’s voice. These aren’t allowed, and they’re blocked.
• Song titles or music requests. Sound effect models aren’t music generators; describe the sound instead.
• Very long prompts. A clear sentence or two beats a paragraph. ElevenLabs SFX v2 accepts up to 450 characters.

Try it

Every sound effects category page has eight prompts you can copy, plus the settings we recommend for that kind of sound. Create a free account to try them.