how I actually make the songs
Suno with Claude
Here's the gist. I bring the hook and the lines I care about. Claude does the paperwork. Suno does the singing, and I roll the dice until it sounds right.
1. Sketch the hook
Start with the bit you'd shout in the car. Everything else hangs off it.
Dang It! was a guy saying "dang it" every time a phone broke. That's the whole song. The verses just give him more phones to break.
Hook: a gang shouts "Dang it!" every time something breaks. Deadpan guy telling the story like a weather report.
2. Hand over the lines you want
A few lines or phrases you won't let go of, and what the song is about. Tell Claude they're yours and stay as written. It will try to smooth them out. Don't let it.
If there are facts in it, have Claude check them now. You won't re-record. Nobody re-records. A slip goes in the description: "the lyric says X, the record says Y."
3. Name the band (to Claude, not Suno)
Give Claude a band or a song. "Tom Waits doing a carnival auction." "That Detachable Penis record." It breaks the sound into building blocks: tempo, instruments, the voice, the production. Suno won't take artist names in Styles, so the name never goes in. The building blocks do.
New God's for Sale came out of "dark Tom Waits" and ended up like this:
dark minor-key junkyard cabaret, sinister carnival-barker blues, gravel-throated bourbon-wrecked male baritone, bullhorn-distorted carny pitch, wheezing out-of-tune calliope, prepared piano, bowed saw, slap upright bass, 78 vinyl crackle, menacing, gallows humor, 84 bpm4. Anti-styles do half the work
The Exclude box is for whatever Suno drifts toward when you aren't looking. Ask a Tom Waits thing for "junkyard" and it reaches for a banjo. Every time. So:
country, americana, bluegrass, banjo, fiddle, major key, cheerful, pop, autotune, female vocals, choir, EDM, polished5. Voice tags, word for word
The singer goes inside each section tag, and it's the same words every time.
[Verse 1: deadpan male narrator, flat spoken word, dry and nasal]
[Chorus: deadpan male narrator, flat spoken word, dry and nasal]Change one adjective and you get a different singer. I lost a female MC this way. She came back a guy halfway through the song. Mood goes in the lyrics and the styles, never the tag. Arrangement cues get their own line, like [Band back in].
A few more Suno quirks: parentheses get sung or echoed, [Spoken] kills the melody, and numbers read better as words.
6. The sliders
- Vocal Gender: set it. Don't leave it to chance.
- Weirdness: around 40% for a straight genre. 55 to 65% when I want junkyard.
- Style Influence: 70 to 75% is where I sit. It sticks to the styles without going stiff.
- Max Mode: on.
Lyrics cap out at 5,000 characters. Have Claude count.
7. Roll it, pick one, stop
Make a handful of takes. Skip to the hook first. If the hook doesn't land, nothing else matters. When one is good, it's the one. Chasing the perfect take is how you lose a weekend.
The prompt I paste
Write me a Suno v6 song. Hook: [the hook]. Lines I want in it, keep them as written: [lines]. It's about: [the idea]. Sound like: [band or song]. Give me Title, Styles, Exclude, Settings, and the full Lyrics with the singer in every section tag, same words each time. Don't name the artist in Styles. Fact-check anything real.
Then paste each block into its box in Suno. That's it.
tl;dr
Hook first. Your lines stay yours. Band name to Claude, building blocks to Suno. Exclude what it drifts to. Same voice tag every time. Take the good take and move on.
Got a song? Make a music video for it, if that's your thing.
