When v6 arrived, every older model went with it. The prompt you saved in a notes app — the one that gave you a keeper three times out of five in v4.5 — now comes back as something flatter, poppier, or just different.
The prompt didn't get worse. The model reading it changed. Most of what breaks is a handful of habits that older models forgave and v6 doesn't. Here they are, with the fix for each.
1. A tag list instead of direction
The classic older prompt is a pile of tags:
deep house, piano, chill, summer, groovy, warm, female vocals, uplifting, 124 bpm
v6 follows sentences that tell each part what to do far better than it follows a list. Keep your tags — they're your sound — but put them in order and give the parts a job:
Deep house, 124 BPM, warm and swung. Breathy female lead, close-miked. Rolling four-on-the-floor kick, open hats on the off-beat. Round sub bass under piano chords; the piano is the hero. 16-bar intro, vocal enters at the first verse. Ends on a filtered fade.
Same words, now in the order a producer would brief a band: genre and tempo, the vocal, drums, bass, the hero part, the arrangement, the mix and the ending.
2. Weights and image-model syntax
(piano:1.3), ((warm pads)) and jazz++ come from image generators. Suno reads the brackets and numbers as words. Unwrap them and say the important thing first instead.
3. Negatives in Styles
"No autotune" asks for autotune: Suno is bad at "no" in Styles. Move a song-wide negative to Exclude as a short category word: autotune.
A negative that holds for only part of the song is different. "No drums in the intro" can't go to Exclude — drums there would ban them from the whole track. Say what plays there instead: "16-bar intro, piano and pads alone".
4. Artist names and model tags
"In the style of …" either gets blocked or trips the copyright filter, and "v4.5" in Styles does nothing — the model is a setting. Describe the sound the name stood for: the drums, the bass, the vocal and the mix.
5. Styles hidden in the lyrics
Older guides taught [Genre: deep house], [BPM: 124] and [Mood: dreamy] at the top of the lyric box. v6 may sing them or ignore them. Move them into Styles, where they belong.
6. Bare tags, (x2) and directions in parentheses
- Bare
[Verse]tags say where a section starts but not how to play it. Add a cue after a pipe:[Verse 1 | close and dry, bass only]. (x2)and[Repeat Chorus]get sung out loud or skipped. Write every repeat out in full.(whispered)at the end of a line gets sung, usually as a second voice. Put the direction in the header:[Bridge | whispered, piano only].
7. No ending
Older sheets rarely say how the song stops, so v6 fades, loops or cuts off mid-phrase. End with an explicit cue: [End | hard stop on the downbeat].
8. Then set it like v6
- Variety 0 for the take you want to keep, so Suno doesn't rewrite the prompt you just fixed.
- My Taste off for a final take.
- Keep Styles under 1,000 characters, most important first; around 800 leaves room to edit.
Verify the control names in your own composer — they move between releases.
A conversion checklist
- Tags put in v6 order, with each part given a job
- Weights unwrapped, model tags and artist names gone
- Song-wide negatives moved to Exclude (under ten terms); part-of-the-song ones said positively
[Genre:]and[BPM:]lines moved into Styles- Every header cued, every repeat written out, no directions in parentheses
- An
[End | …]cue, Variety 0, My Taste off
Or paste it in
The free v6 prompt upgrader finds every one of these habits in a prompt you paste and cleans it up in your browser. In the studio, Convert an old prompt goes the rest of the way: your own wording opens the new Styles word for word, and you get cued lyrics, Exclude and a settings card. Start free.