u/Inevitable-Law7964

My advice on how to make this feature work for you: think of your music not in terms of what you usually make, which is how Suno auto-populates it, but anything you might possibly want to make.

Example:

> Production: Instrumental leitmotif, orchestral color, abrupt dynamic shifts, sonic fullness and depth, wide range, resonant bass, cinematic percussion, acoustic vocal production style.

> Lyrics & mood: Odd facts, identity uncertainty, attraction with menace, playful power games, moods of humor or emotional poignancy, thought-provoking.

> Vocals: English-led; Multiple styles and vocalists, choral backing, abrupt shifts between high and low notes, theatrical character voices.

(A lot of the "lyrics & mood" stuff, the engine put there automatically based on my music, and I kept it & added a few more descriptors. Everything else, I wrote myself, with the exception of "English-led".)

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What do you notice about what's not here?

That's right. No genre identifiers. Another thing you won't find in the list is specific instruments.

What I do have in there that's working for me: production styles, sonic qualities, moods, thematic overtones.

I work with a wide range of genres in Suno - chamber klezmer to trap house, noir jazz to comedy country, musical theatre and dream pop, orchestral folk, industrial, EDM, avant-garde.

Most of the language ultimately works for everything I do, and produces a distinctive sound.

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Now, if you just copy-paste what I have, your music will lowkey sound like mine. Which is fine if you *like* that sort of thing (though I ask for credit and a follow at @Phantasmoplasm, if you choose to borrow!)

The big reason I'm sharing this is so you can go through and get a better idea of *why* the language is working, in a way you can apply to your own preferences, to start making this feature work for you, not against you:

- Consider the qualities you always like in music independent of genre - production techniques and vocal qualities that always get your notice.

- Write them out in vague generalities, not specifics - unless you just can't let go of your emotional support accordion, in which case who am I to judge. :)

- Allow for things you might want to do in the future. For example, let's say you really enjoy songs with positive vibes, but you may want to address serious topics. Instead of saying "Happy", you might say, "Emotional presence, uplifting energy, encouragement" - this would enrich a happy or sad song.

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Well, I hope this has been a useful guide! I'm sure I also have more to learn!

Feel free to share your own taste profile here if you want to (ideally, with an example of your music) and/or share your experience adjusting it. Is it working for you?

I'm Phantasmoplasm. Probably almost no one knows me. I wasn't very active but enjoyed making weird gags, inside jokes about Los Angeles, circuitous postmodern stuff, metacommentary. I made Audrey Hepburn read the first lines of the Lovecraft story Nyarlathotep, stuck Lucy in a muscular Marx "I'm joining the war on autism on the side of the autism" shirt once, did other similar kinds of silly shit.

I'm looking for where some others might have gone. I loved humanbeingbeing and their videos. So vibrant and amazing! Neopalladio also had a cool funky style. I'd be over the moon to be able to find either of them.

I wouldn't mind tracking down Dnormous either, or really anyone who was doing weird shit.

There are so many more names I don't really remember so feel free to share your favorites too if you know where they've gone.

(Where I've gone is Suno & I am also Phantasmoplasm there.)

Someone on r/aiMusic issued a challenge to make a musically bad song on Suno, which is indeed difficult.

Their point was that the engine defaults to making generic music that is neither good nor bad. I had fun fighting it to generate a pretty awful song. Even learned some music theory in the process.

Anyway... Let's have some challenges!

Either drop me a request, or make your own challenge post and link it here. I'd like to try new things that I didn't think of myself as an exercise to explore the engine. I bet others could benefit from it too.

(I usually write my own lyrics, so I may not get to all, but I'll try to go first come first serve unless I'm really stuck or really inspired.)

I just realized something the other day.

When I was a young adult in the late 90s & early 2000s, graphical user interfaces were viewed with suspicion, and text terminals were viewed as the "authentic", "skillful" way to do something with a computer.

Now it's the opposite. Doing something on a computer with a GUI is viewed as skillful, using a text interface is considered faddish noob shit.

(At least, outside of coding. Coders are generally using the new text interfaces in their work.)

So you can, if you want, historically frame the AI controversy as a new version of the GUI vs terminal wars. Just kind of fascinating, really. I wonder if the next wave is transformer architecture systems with GUI stapled on to make them "less uncool".