The drums-only intro explained

A drums-only intro is an opening section with percussion and bass but no vocal or melodic lead for a fixed number of bars. It gives a DJ a clean rhythmic surface to beat-match against and blend over before the song proper arrives. In Club Ready Music it is a switch in the DJ mix edit panel, on by default, with a choice of 8, 16 or 32 bars.

Why DJs want it

A transition starts by matching tempo and phase between the outgoing and incoming tracks. That is easiest when the incoming track has nothing but beats: no melody to clash with the outgoing key, no vocal to fight the outgoing vocal. Once the beats are locked the DJ brings the new track up, and the melodic content arrives when the intro ends. Commercial extended mixes are built this way; the drums-only intro gives AI tracks the same shape.

What Club Ready Music does

Two things, as with the outro:

• It asks. The lyric sheet opens with an intro block marked instrumental, "drums and percussion only, no singing", and the style prompt asks for a drums-only intro of your bar count.
• It enforces. After rendering, the take is split into vocals, drums, bass and other. For the intro window the vocal stem is muted and the melodic "other" stem is faded in across the second half of the intro. The bass stem is left in from the first beat, because bass is part of the mixable groove. The stems are summed back into one file.

The result is a true drums-and-bass opening even when the model started a pad or a vocal early.

Choosing the bar count

Bars	Time at 126 BPM	Suits
8	15 s	Shorter tracks, radio-leaning briefs, quick cuts
16	30 s	Most club tracks; the default
32	61 s	Long blends, slower or hypnotic genres, warm-up sets

The time scales with BPM. At 174 BPM 16 bars is 22 seconds; at 100 BPM it is 38.

Related settings

• Hard start on bar 1 trims any silence so the first kick is at 0:00 and the intro bar count starts there.
• Drop at bar sets where the first drop should land. Keep it after the intro ends; the default drop at bar 32 with a 16-bar intro leaves 16 bars of build.
• Intro end is written as a cue point at the computed time.

When to turn it off

Turn the switch off for a song that should open on a vocal or a melodic hook, for example a pop-leaning track for a video, or a radio edit. The model then decides how to open. The outro switch is independent, so you can keep a mixable outro while opening on the hook.

Instrumentals

On an instrumental render the intro block still asks for drums only, and the model usually complies. The stem gate is not run, so the opening relies on the model's reading of the prompt.