How to Make a DJ Drop With Your Name

To make a DJ drop with your name, open Club Ready Music's Drops page, type your line into the What should the voice say? box on the DJ drop tab, choose a voice, an FX chain and a music bed, set the length and press Render 3 variations. Club Ready Music reads the line with a text-to-speech voice, runs it through the FX you ticked, lays it over the bed and normalises each result to −8 LUFS. You get three variations, each with an MP3, a Dry voice-only file and a Copy link button.

Steps

1. Open the DJ drop tab

Go to the Drops page. It has three tabs: DJ drop, Jingle and Commercial spot. Stay on DJ drop for a spoken tag with your name; the Jingle tab is sung by the music model and the Commercial spot tab is for longer scripts with a call to action.

2. Type the line

Click into What should the voice say? and write what you want read, up to 200 characters. A classic name drop is short: 'DJ Marlowe in the mix' or 'You are locked in with DJ Marlowe'. The hint under the box says to write it phonetically if the name is unusual, so 'Siobhan' becomes 'Shiv-awn' and 'Nguyen' becomes 'Win'. Say it out loud once before you render.

3. Pick a voice

Choose one of four voices. Hype is big club MC energy, delivered fast and loud. Smooth is late-night radio, slower and steadier. Imaging is the processed station-ID read. Robotic is vocoded and pitched. For a first drop with your name, Hype or Smooth are the usual choices; Hype adds an exclamation mark to the end of your line if you did not type one.

4. Build the FX chain

The FX chain is multi-select, and Reverb tail and Stutter are on by default. Reverb tail adds about 1.2 seconds of room after the last word. Stutter repeats the first 110 milliseconds of the voice four times before the full read, so your name gets a rapid-fire lead-in. Echo adds two slap-back taps at 240 and 480 ms. Pitch down slows and lowers the voice tape-style. Air horn adds a horn sample when the server has one; if not, it is skipped silently.

5. Choose a music bed

Music bed is a single choice. Impact hit is the default: a pitched sweep from 900 Hz down to 40 Hz with a noise burst at the start, sitting under the voice. Riser is a sine and noise sweep from 80 Hz up to 1.6 kHz that peaks at the end of the clip. Dry (voice only) leaves out the bed entirely, which is the right pick when the drop will sit over a track that is already playing.

6. Set the length and render

Pick 3 s, 5 s or 10 s; 5 s is the default. The clip is never shorter than the length you choose, and if your read runs long it stretches up to 60 seconds. Press Render 3 variations. Renders are paid with Club Ready Music credits, and the three results appear in the Renders panel on the right with a play button each.

7. Audition and download

Play all three. Variation 1 is the most stable read; 2 and 3 are a little looser and a touch faster, which often sounds more natural on a shouted name. Press MP3 for the finished drop with FX and bed, Dry for the voice alone at the same loudness, and Copy link to share the render. Both files are 44.1 kHz stereo at 320 kbps.

Tips

• Keep the first word strong. Stutter grabs the first 110 ms, so a line that starts with your name stutters your name, and a line that starts with 'and' stutters 'and'.
• Render the same line in two voices and keep both. A Hype drop for peak time and a Smooth drop for the opening hour cost two renders and cover a whole night.
• Drops are fixed at −8 LUFS. Loaded into a sampler they will sit level with a −8 crate without any gain adjustment.
• If the name still comes out wrong after a phonetic spelling, split it with a hyphen or a space to force the syllables, for example 'Mar-lowe'.
• Download the Dry file as well as the MP3 even if you only need one now. Having the clean voice later saves a re-render.

Common problems

• The voice mispronounces the name. Rewrite it phonetically in What should the voice say? and render again. Change one syllable at a time so you can hear what fixed it.
• The drop is longer than the 5 s I picked. The read itself was longer than five seconds. Shorten the script or choose 10 s so the bed and the voice are sized together.
• There is no air horn in the result. Air horn needs a sample file on the server and is skipped when it is missing. The rest of the chain still renders.
• All three variations sound almost identical. That is expected on a short, calm line in the Smooth voice. Hype and Robotic show more spread between variations.