Six versions cover almost every request you will ever get: the full vocal master, a true instrumental, a TV mix, a clean edit if the lyric needs one, cut-downs at 60 and 30 seconds, and stems. Deliver them as 24-bit, 48 kHz WAV files, because 48 kHz is the native sample rate of video production and divides cleanly against the frame rates editors work at.
The more useful half of the answer is which ones to make now. Only the instrumental is worth building across your whole catalog in advance. Everything else is made in the 24 to 48 hours after someone asks for it. Rendering six versions of every song you have ever written is months of studio time spent on files that will mostly never be opened, and the writers who do it tend to be the ones avoiding the harder work of getting briefs in front of them in the first place.
| Version | What it is | Make it |
|---|---|---|
| Full vocal master | The record as released or finished | Always, obviously |
| Instrumental | Every vocal gone, lead and prominent backing | In advance, for everything you pitch |
| TV mix | Lead vocal out, backing vocals and harmonies kept | In advance for your top 20 or so |
| Clean edit | Explicit language removed or replaced | In advance, but only if the lyric needs it |
| Cut-downs | 60, 30, sometimes 15 and 6 second edits | On request, same day |
| Stems | Grouped submixes that sum back to the master | On request, within 48 hours |
The instrumental is the one that is quietly disqualifying to lack. Editors cut between the vocal and the instrumental constantly inside a single scene, dropping to the bed the moment a character speaks and lifting back to the vocal when the dialogue stops. A song with no instrumental cannot be used that way, so it gets skipped without comment. Roughly a third of the requests writers report receiving involve an instrumental, and they nearly always arrive with a same-day turnaround.
An instrumental has every vocal removed. Not lowered, removed. If a listener can still hear a sung word, it is not an instrumental, and an editor who discovers that under dialogue will not ask you for a fix, they will use a different song.
A TV mix keeps the backing vocals, the harmonies and any wordless vocal texture while dropping the lead. The point is that it still sounds like the record. A stripped instrumental often sounds like karaoke, because the vocal was carrying melodic information the arrangement never needed to duplicate. The TV mix fills that hole with the parts that were already there.
Advertising works to fixed durations, so the edits requested are almost always :60, :30, :15 and :06. Television promos and trailers add their own lengths on top, but those four cover the standard ask.
The mistake writers make is fading. A :30 is not the first thirty seconds of your song with a fade at the end, and it is not a chorus lifted out with a hard cut. It is a purpose-built edit that arrives somewhere, has a resolve at the end and lands exactly on the duration, often to within a frame. Build it from a musical decision: get to the hook faster, cut a verse, land a final hit. If you have never made one, take one song and cut a :30 and a :60 as practice before a real request forces you to do it in an afternoon.
Stems are grouped submixes that sum back to the master. Four to six groups is typical and plenty: drums, bass, instruments, pads or synths, lead vocal, backing vocals. Sending forty individual tracks from your session is not helpful, it is a data dump, and the editor has to spend an hour rebuilding your mix before they can touch it.
Here is a workable rule. Before you pitch anything, have the full master and the instrumental ready for every song in your pitch-ready set. Have TV mixes for your best twenty. Have clean edits wherever the lyric requires one. Then, in the pitch email itself, state in one line that instrumental, TV mix, cut-downs and stems are available on request, and give a turnaround you will actually meet. Twenty-four hours for edits and forty-eight for stems is credible and achievable if your sessions are archived properly.
Which brings up the unglamorous prerequisite. That promise is only safe if you can still open the session. Writers lose placements because the project file references plugins they no longer own, or lives on a drive that died in 2022. When you finish a song, print the stems once and archive them alongside the master, even if you never send them. It costs ten minutes at the moment the session is still open and saves the placement two years later.
One more thing worth saying plainly: alternate versions do not rescue a song that does not fit the brief. They remove friction from a song that does. The ordering problem, which of your songs actually matches the request in front of you, comes first, and it is covered in how to read a sync brief and in the hour-by-hour walkthrough at the sync licensing pitch.
Keep the convention identical to your masters, with the version in parentheses, so that alphabetical sorting groups every version of a song together:
Store alternates in a subfolder rather than loose beside the masters. A folder where every song appears six times makes finding the primary recording harder than it needs to be, and the primary is what you pitch. The same logic applies to tags: the fields that identify a file are worth getting right once, which is the subject of what metadata your songs need before you pitch them. The folder structure itself is covered in how to organize a sync catalog.
Pitchkit does not render audio. It will not build your instrumental, cut a :30 or print stems, and no software substitutes for the decisions in those edits.
What it does with alternates is get them out of your way. When it indexes a catalog it recognises alternate versions, instrumentals, TV mixes, acapellas, cut-downs and roughs, and hides them from match results, so one song appears once as the primary recording instead of filling your shortlist with five near-identical rows. Duplicates are collapsed the same way. You paste in a brief, and what comes back is a ranked list of songs rather than a ranked list of files.
Related reading: the five audio features music supervisors actually care about, pitch email templates, and how sync placements actually pay.
Six versions cover almost every request: the full vocal master, a true instrumental with lead and prominent backing vocals removed, a TV mix that keeps backing vocals but drops the lead, a clean edit if the lyric contains explicit language, cut-downs at 60 and 30 seconds, and stems. Only the instrumental is worth making for your whole catalog in advance. The rest are made in the 24 to 48 hours after someone asks, because making six versions of every song you have written is months of work for versions nobody requests.
An instrumental has every vocal removed, lead and prominent backing alike, so nothing sung remains under dialogue. A TV mix keeps the backing vocals, harmonies and any wordless vocal texture while removing the lead vocal, which leaves the track sounding like the record rather than a karaoke bed. Editors reach for the TV mix when a scene needs the song's character underneath dialogue, and for the instrumental when any sung word would collide with the script. Terminology varies between libraries, so name the file explicitly rather than assuming the recipient shares your definition.
WAV at 24-bit and 48 kHz is the working standard for film, television and advertising, because 48 kHz is the native sample rate of video production and divides cleanly against common frame rates. Deliver every version at those specs, print stems from the same session start point so they all begin at zero and share an identical length, and leave bus compression and limiting on the full mix only, not on individual stems. For the first listen, a 320 kbps MP3 is fine and keeps its tags. The 24-bit 48 kHz files are for after someone says yes.
No. Pitchkit does not render audio, edit, or export anything. It is catalog matching software: it reads BPM, key, energy, brightness and danceability from your existing files, optionally transcribes lyrics locally with Whisper, and ranks your catalog against a brief you paste in. Where it touches this topic is in results. Alternate versions such as instrumentals, TV mixes, acapellas and cut-downs are hidden from match results so that one song appears once, as the primary recording, instead of flooding your shortlist with five near-identical rows.
Download the free trial: every feature on your first 30 songs. Brief matching, artist references, lyric transcription and pitch folders all included. No account, no card, no expiry. One $39 purchase removes the cap.
Download free trial: 30 songs →