You spent twenty minutes on a Styles prompt. Tempo, drums, the bass part, the vocal, the mix. You hit Create, open the song details, and the Styles Suno actually used aren't the ones you wrote. Or they are, and the song still ignores half of them.
Both happen a lot in v6, and both have causes you can control. Controls move between Suno releases, so verify each one in your own composer — but the principles hold.
1. Variety rewrites your Styles
Variety is v6's "surprise me" slider. Above zero, Suno is allowed to rework the Styles you typed before it generates — Suno's own help pages say as much. That's useful when you're exploring. When you've written the prompt you want, it's the most common reason your words disappear.
Fix: for a final take, set Variety to 0. Save higher values for sketching ideas.
2. My Taste and the Magic Wand add their own words
Suno can personalise Styles from what you've liked before (My Taste) and "improve" a prompt with the Magic Wand. Both can be great for a rough idea. On a finished prompt they add words you didn't choose, and those words can fight yours — a "cinematic" or "pop" nudge on a tight garage track is enough to change the drums.
Fix: for a final take, turn My Taste off and don't press the Magic Wand. Paste your Styles exactly as written.
3. Style Influence decides how hard your words count
Style Influence sets how much weight the Styles field gets. It defaults to the middle, which suits a short prompt. A long, precise prompt at the default gets roughly half the authority you meant it to have.
Fix: when the prompt is detailed, raise Style Influence (around 70–85% is a good place to start) and listen for whether it sticks.
4. Past about 1,000 characters, the end gets lost
The Styles field has a hard limit of about 1,000 characters, and in practice the start of the prompt matters more than the end. If your ending, your mix notes or your vocal line live in the last 200 characters, they're the first to be ignored.
Fix: aim for about 800 characters, and put things in the order Suno listens:
- Genre, tempo and feel — the lead tag first ("UK garage, 2-step, 132 BPM, late-night and swung")
- Production era or colour — one phrase
- The lead vocal — gender, timbre, delivery
- Drums, then bass
- Keys, guitars and textures — six at most, with one hero part
- The arrangement — one or two sentences, naming each vocal section the way your lyrics do
- Mix placement — where things sit ("vocal close and centred, sub mono")
- The ending
5. Negatives in Styles become positives
"No autotune" contains the word autotune. Models are bad at "no", so a negative in Styles can pull in exactly what you wanted out.
Fix: put negatives in Exclude, as short category words (autotune, trap hi-hats, EDM risers), and keep it under ten. Never repeat an Exclude word in Styles.
6. Quality words do nothing
"Radio-ready, professionally mastered, high quality" sounds like an instruction but describes nothing Suno can play. Every v6 song is "mastered". Those words spend characters you need for the bass part.
Fix: use placement words instead of quality words. "Polished low end", "vocal close and dry", "wide pads, mono sub" all tell the mix where things go. A timbre word like crisp or warm is fine when it's attached to an instrument.
7. Settings typed into the prompt are just words
Typing "weirdness 20%" or "style influence high" into Styles doesn't move a slider. It just adds words the model may or may not interpret.
Fix: set sliders in More Options. Keep Styles for what the band plays.
8. A section Suno doesn't hear twice may not happen
If your Styles says "whispered bridge, piano only" but your lyrics just say [Bridge], Suno often plays a normal bridge. The cue needs to be in both places.
Fix: put a performance cue in every lyric header — [Bridge | whispered, piano only] — and repeat the same words in the arrangement sentence of your Styles.
9. Check what Suno actually used
The fastest way to know which of these hit you is to compare. Open the song in Suno and look at the Styles and lyrics it shows for that clip: that's what the model actually got. If it doesn't match what you pasted, one of the eight causes above is at work.
Comparing two long prompts by eye is slow, so Session Sheet does it for you. Paste the song's link into a package's Suno results and, when the clip doesn't match any version you wrote, What Suno changed lists the phrases that were dropped or added, spots a cut-off, shows the lyric lines that changed and the section headers that went missing — and names the likely cause with the setting that prevents it.
A final-take checklist
- Variety 0
- My Taste off, no Magic Wand
- Style Influence raised for a detailed prompt
- Styles under ~1,000 characters, most important things first
- Negatives in Exclude, under ten words
- Placement words, not quality words
- Every section cue said twice: in the lyrics and in Styles
- After the take, compare what Suno used with what you pasted
Or let it be built that way
Before you paste, run your prompt through the free Styles checker: it shows where the 1,000-character cut-off falls and catches negatives, grading words and Exclude conflicts, with one-click safe fixes. Session Sheet writes Styles in that order, keeps them inside the budget, moves negatives to Exclude, strips evaluative words, says every cue twice — and hands you a settings card with Variety, Style Influence and the rest for each take. It's free to start.