How I Made My Own Songs with Suno AI

· 10 min read · case-studies sunoai-musicmusiclyricspromptingai

I make my own songs. Not by playing an instrument — by writing lyrics, crafting style prompts, and letting Suno AI produce the voice, the arrangement, and the mix. This post is the full workflow: how the current model family works, what I actually type into the prompt boxes, and seven finished tracks you can play right here.

Why make your own music with AI?

Two reasons, one personal and one practical.

Personally: I like experimenting with creative AI. A song is a tight, self-contained project — lyrics, style, structure, performance — that exercises the same prompt-crafting muscles as building a bot or wiring a pipeline. And the output is shareable in a way a config file never is.

Practically: this is now a client skill. Small businesses need jingles, background music for videos, event music, and branded audio — without a studio budget. If I can deliver a usable track from a one-page brief, that’s a service, not a party trick. Suno’s current v6 models (released Sep 9, 2026) made this dramatically more controllable than the V3-era version I started with in April 2024.

The current standard: what Suno’s models look like in 2026

Version confusion is the first thing to clear up, because old guides online reference models that don’t exist anymore:

ModelWhenWho gets it
v6 / v6-wildSep 9, 2026Paid plans (flagship + experimental)
v6-miniSep 9, 2026Everyone — fast, efficient, great for drafts
v5.5Mar 26, 2026Paid — added Voices, Custom Models, My Taste
v4.5-allOct 21, 2025Free plan (no commercial rights, attribution required)
V4 / V4.5 / V52024–2026Paid plans, superseded

The v6 family added the control features that changed how I work:

My own tracks below were made with the earlier V4-era workflow (April 2025). The fundamentals — style field, lyric metatags, iteration — are unchanged, and I note where v6 would have saved me steps.

My workflow: lyrics first, style second

The order matters more than people think. Most beginners open Suno, paste a genre into Simple Mode, and get a generic song. I do the opposite:

  1. Write the song as a document first — title, structure, lyrics. The emotion and the story come from me; Suno supplies the performance.
  2. Craft the style prompt — genre + mood + era + instruments + vocal persona + production, often 200+ characters, describing the journey of the song, not just its genre.
  3. Add metatags to the lyrics — [Verse], [Chorus], [Bridge], [Whispered], [Belted]. Without these, Suno defaults to a flat verse-chorus-verse with no emotional arc.
  4. Generate 3–5 takes per song and keep the best. Repair via Extend/Reuse Prompt, and restate the genre in every extension because style drifts.
  5. Iterate on pronunciation — AI singers read phonetically, so I respell (“through” → “thru”, hyphenate unusual syllables) and always test proper nouns in a short clip first.

The worked example below shows exactly what this looks like.

The songs

Seven tracks, hosted on my own media subdomain (content.hoelee.com via Publitio) and embedded with plain HTML5 audio. Press play:

1. 轮回的渡船 — The Ferry of Reincarnation

Chinese folk ballad (古风民谣). The ferryman of the River of Forgetfulness, Meng Po’s soup gone cold, a soul that refuses to reboard the wheel of rebirth. Written as a mythic love story about choosing someone across lifetimes. Starts hushed over sparse strings and builds to a full, anguished chorus.

2. Happy Way to School

English children’s song — the original prompt called for a “fizzy, orange-soda indie folk” sound: acoustic guitar, playful whistling, and bright kid-friendly vocals. It’s the walk-to-school ritual turned into a tiny anthem: ponytails bouncing, kittens at the café, friends in step.

3. 新靓 — Heart Sutra, Meditative Beats

The 般若波罗蜜多心经 (Heart Sutra) chanted over rhythmic, meditative production — the brief was “meditation depth + groove energy”. 观自在菩萨 opening, the full 色不異空 passage, ending on 揭諦揭諦. An attempt to make ancient scripture something you can actually move to.

4. 新劲 — Fresh Energy

A harder-edged companion to 新靓 — same meditative lineage, more percussive drive. No lyric sheet on this one; it lives as a vibe piece.

5. 泡泡星球漫游记 — Bubble Planet Adventure

Kids’ indie folk, and the one with the most documented backstory — the full original brief, style prompt, and lyric sheet are in the worked example below. Bubble planets, candy fountains, a galactic playground.

6. 日漫心经 — Heart Sutra, Anime Style

The same classical text, reimagined with an anime-inspired sound palette — big chorus energy, dramatic key lifts, the emotional grammar of contemporary J-pop openings.

7. 未接来电 Unread Heartbeats (v2)

A mandopop ballad about that one missed call: the dial tone as a heartbeat, the read receipts that stay unread. v2 is the final master — tighter arrangement, cleaner vocal mix. (The original take stays in my archive.)

Worked example: Bubble Planet Adventure, from brief to track

This is the full chain for 泡泡星球漫游记 — the only one I kept every scrap of paperwork for. It shows the workflow above in concrete form.

Step 1 — the concept brief (my notes, in Chinese):

独立民谣（Indie Folk）：木吉他+口哨声组合，适合突出童趣感 人声选择「精灵少女」音色库，自带俏皮气声 打击乐：玻璃瓶敲击音效呼应「橘子汽水」意象 副歌加入反向混响（reverse reverb）增强魔法感

Step 2 — the English style prompt (what actually went into Suno):

Indie folk vibe with acoustic guitar and playful whistles, fizzy like
orange soda, featuring sprite-girl vocals and clinking glass bottle
beats, reverse reverb brings dreamlike magic

Four decisions compressed into one line: the instrument (acoustic guitar + whistles), the feel (fizzy like orange soda), the voice (sprite-girl with airy delivery), and the production trick (reverse reverb on the chorus for the magic feel).

Step 3 — the lyric sheet with metatags:

[Intro][Whistling][Indie][Girl]
彩云兜着阳光转圈圈
贝壳装满彩虹的碎片
跳进橘子汽水的夏天
海鸥掠过浪花的琴键

[Chorus][Indie Folk][Reverse Reverb][Whistling]
泡泡载着梦飞向屋檐(飞呀飞呀)
尾巴挂着星星的秋千(晃呀晃呀)
鲸鱼喷出糖果的喷泉(甜到脚尖)
魔法地图画满冒险线(转个圈圈)

[Verse][Indie][Girl]
橡皮艇划开银河水面
萤火虫点亮薄荷月圆
棉花糖云朵蓬松柔软
流星滑梯通向我窗前

[Chorus]… (repeat)

[Interlude]

[Bridge][Fantasy Pop][Giggles]
水晶风筝追着蝴蝶结
跳跳糖在舌尖开派对
彩虹滑板穿过梧桐叶
月亮船摇着光的湖水

[Outro][Indie Folk][Girl]
每个气泡都是新世界
装得下所有奇妙遇见
在泡泡星球蹦跳向前
明天又是崭新的乐园

[Fade to End]

Note what the metatags enforce that a bare lyric sheet wouldn’t: section labels ([Bridge], [Outro]), delivery ([Whistling], [Giggles]), a production change mid-song ([Reverse Reverb] only on choruses), and a stylistic shift in the bridge ([Fantasy Pop]). The fill-in parentheticals — 飞呀飞呀, 晃呀晃呀 — tell the singer exactly how to ornament each line.

Step 4 — generate, listen, repeat. 3–5 takes per section, keep the best, extend the chorus that landed. The final track plays above.

What I’d do differently with v6

If I made these today, four things change:

  1. Section edits instead of full rerolls. 轮回的渡船’s bridge took six generations to nail. With v6 I’d say “make the bridge slower and sparser, just voice and a plucked guzheng” and keep the rest intact.
  2. Single-line lyric swaps. The 忘川 couplet went through four wordings; v6 edits one line without rebuilding the song.
  3. Voices / custom models. v5.5’s Voices would let me keep one consistent singer across all seven tracks instead of seven different AI vocalists.
  4. Stems and Studio. On the Premier plan, Studio (a browser DAW with multitrack + MIDI export) means fixing a vocal artifact instead of regenerating around it.

The craft layer — decent lyrics, an emotional arc, honest metatags — carries straight across model versions. The models get more controllable; the songwriting stays the job.

The result

Seven original songs, written and produced with Suno AI, hosted on my own infrastructure (content.hoelee.com), embedded here with plain HTML5 audio and synced lyrics — no music-studio budget, no booking a vocalist, no session musician. The whole catalog lives in one folder on my NAS, versioned like any other project.

If you’re curious about AI music, start with your own lyrics and an honest style sentence — genre, feel, voice, one production trick — then iterate until one take surprises you. That’s the whole craft.

Want original music — or AI-powered anything — for your business?

I build websites, Telegram/WhatsApp bots, and self-hosted infrastructure, and I produce original AI-assisted music for brands that want a jingle, background tracks, or event audio without a studio budget. There’s no session musician to book and no licence maze — you get an original track you can actually use. If that sounds useful, I’d love to talk:

Lee Teong Hoe

Full-stack developer & DevOps engineer. I build web apps, self-host infrastructure, and automate things — this blog is my living portfolio.

LinkedIn GitHub Gitea hoelee.com

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