If you learned Suno on v3 or v4, your lyric box probably looked like a config file: [Genre: Synthwave], [Mood: Melancholic], [Instrument: Saxophone solo], [Tempo: 120], maybe a [Verse 1] somewhere in between. People shared tag lists with hundreds of entries.
Very little of that is worth typing in v6. The model reads lyrics more like a lyric sheet with stage directions: section names, a direction for each one, who sings, and where it ends. Tags that worked as hints to an older model are now, at best, ignored, and at worst sung.
Suno doesn't publish an official tag list, so take this as a working reference rather than a spec, and check it against your own takes.
Tags that do something in v6
Section headers, with a cue after the pipe
The single most useful tag is the section header, and it works best with a direction attached:
[Verse 1 | close and conversational]
[Pre-Chorus | rising, building into the hook]
[Chorus | full voice, hook up front]
[Bridge | whispered, piano only]
[Final Chorus | full voice, biggest lift]
The label tells v6 what part of the song it's in; the cue after the | tells the singer and the band how to play it. A bare [Verse] leaves the delivery to chance, and v6 tends to fill chance with its average.
Two things make cues land more often. First, say each one twice: if the bridge header says whispered, piano only, the arrangement sentence in your Styles should say bridge whispered, piano only too. Second, keep cues about performance. "Rising", "half-time", "drums drop out" are things a band can do. "Emotional" and "epic" aren't.
Names that work well: Intro, Verse (numbered), Pre-Chorus, Chorus, Post-Chorus, Bridge, Break or Breakdown, Drop, Hook, Final Chorus, Outro, End. Club genres also respond to Build and Drop.
The ending tag
[End | clean ending]
The last line of your lyrics. Without it, v6 decides where the song stops, which is how you get the fade that lasts a minute, or a third chorus nobody wrote. Pair it with an ending sentence in Styles ("Ends cold after the final chorus.").
Voice tags
For more than one singer, tag who sings, with their gender, on its own line:
[Singer A, female]
You still take the long way round
[Singer B, male]
Only when you're in the car
[Both]
Neither of us says it
An answer voice (a second voice that responds to the lead) works the same way: [Male vocal] on its own line for the answer, [Female lead] to hand back. Our duets guide covers why the gender matters and how to bind each voice in Styles.
Inline cues
Short lowercase directions on their own line, between sung lines:
[beat stops]
[guitar answers]
[2-bar gap]
Use them sparingly. Zero to four in a song is plenty, and never one that contradicts its section's header. They don't count as lines and aren't sung when they're written like this.
Tags that stopped earning their place
Meta lines in the lyrics. [Genre: …], [Mood: …], [Style: …], [Tempo: …], [Key: …], [Vocalist: …]. These belong in Styles, where v6 reads sound. In the lyric box they're at best ignored and at worst read as a section header with an odd name. Move them into a sentence in Styles: genre and tempo first.
Instrument tags on their own line. [Saxophone solo] sometimes works, but it works more reliably as a cue on a section that exists: [Bridge | saxophone solo, drums half-time].
Repeat shorthand. [Repeat Chorus], [Chorus x2], (x2). v6 might repeat, might not, and might sing "times two". Paste the chorus again in full. Every chorus before the last should be identical, word for word.
Directions in parentheses. In the lyric box, parentheses are for things that are sung: backing vocals, echoes, ad-libs. "(softly)" becomes a backing singer singing the word "softly". Directions go in the header cue.
Prompt weights and model tags. (guitar:1.4), [v4 style], [high quality]. None of these were ever part of Suno's format; they came from image-model habits. They're words to v6, nothing more.
Long tag lists in Styles. "pop, dance, electronic, upbeat, catchy, female vocals, synth, 2020s, radio" reads to v6 as nine competing instructions. One lead genre tag, then sentences about the parts, works better. The v6 prompt guide shows the order.
A copy-ready skeleton
[Intro | filtered keys, kick enters on bar 5]
[Verse 1 | close and conversational]
[Pre-Chorus | rising, building into the hook]
[Chorus | full voice, hook up front]
[Verse 2 | close and conversational]
[Pre-Chorus | rising, building into the hook]
[Chorus | full voice, hook up front]
[Bridge | stripped back, piano and voice]
[Final Chorus | full voice, biggest lift]
[End | clean ending]
Put your lines under each header. For genre-specific versions (a UK garage Pre-Hook, a house Breakdown, a drill Hook that opens the song), every page in our Suno prompts by genre has the headers for that genre's arrangement.
Check your tags before you paste
The free lyric checker flags bare headers with no cue, repeat shorthand, directions in parentheses, a missing ending, and choruses that drift from each other, then explains each one. It runs in your browser. If you have a whole library of old tagged prompts, the prompt upgrader moves meta lines into Styles and writes out repeats for v6 in one pass.