By name: suno-songsmith description: >- Turn a song or album idea into release-ready Suno material: a precise Style prompt, fully structured lyrics with metatags, a title, and the iteration plan to refine it. Use this skill whenever the user wants to make music with Suno (or Suno AI / Suno V5 / V5.5), write song lyrics intended for AI music generation, build a Style prompt, format lyrics with metatags/structure tags, plan a concept album, write a genre-switch or beat-switch song (a track that starts in one genre and erupts into another), or asks for help "making a song," "writing a track," "generating music," or "a Suno prompt" — even if they don't name Suno explicitly but describe wanting AI-generated music with a vibe, genre, or mood. Claude is the pre-production engine; it produces everything the user pastes into Suno, since Suno itself has no public API.
Suno Songsmith
What this skill is for
Suno generates a complete song — vocals, instruments, arrangement, and mix — from text. The gap between "interesting AI music" and "music I'd actually release" is almost entirely pre-production: a precise prompt, deliberate song structure, and well-crafted lyrics. That pre-production is exactly what Claude is good at, and it's what this skill delivers.
Claude does not generate audio (Suno has no public API). The deliverable is always text the user copies into Suno's Custom Mode: a Style prompt, a Lyrics block with metatags, a Title, and a short iteration plan for refining the result. Be honest about this boundary — never imply Claude produced a playable track.
The mental model: three control systems
Suno's Custom Mode is the only mode worth using for serious work. It exposes three independent controls, and good output comes from using all three together:
- Style field — natural-language genre, tempo, instrumentation, vocal character, production, mood. Defines what the song is.
- Lyrics field — the words, plus
[bracketed]metatags that direct arrangement and per-section behavior. Defines structure. - Creative Sliders — Weirdness, Style Influence, Audio Influence. Define how literally Suno reads the prompt.
A great Style prompt with no structure tags, or great lyrics with a vague style, both underperform. Always address all three.
Workflow
Follow this whether the request is one track or a whole album. Don't dump the whole process on the user at once — move through it conversationally.
1. Capture the brief
Get just enough to start: the core idea or emotion, a genre or reference vibe, and whether it has vocals. If the user is vague ("make something chill"), propose a concrete direction rather than interrogating them. One round of clarifying questions maximum; infer the rest and state your assumptions.
2. Lock the style
Build the Style prompt using the formula and descriptor rules in
references/prompt-architecture.md. The single most important rule: 4–7
descriptors. Fewer gives Suno too much freedom; more makes the descriptors
fight each other and produces mud. Read that file before writing any Style
prompt.
3. Write the lyrics (skip if instrumental)
Write real lyrics with genuine craft — structure, prosody, rhyme, and a hook
that lands. The bar is "sounds like a specific person wrote it from lived
experience," not "competent": favor concrete sensory detail over abstraction,
conversational phrasing over poetry, and actively avoid the AI-cliché tells
(neon, shadows, whispers, echoes, etc.). Then mark them up with metatags — and
use sung ad-libs in (parentheses) for backing vocals and energy where the genre
calls for it. Lyric craft, the anti-AI-tell list, and title-writing are in
references/songwriting.md; the full metatag and ad-lib/formatting vocabulary is
in references/metatags.md. Read both before writing lyrics.
4. Assemble the deliverable
Hand the user a clean, copy-paste-ready block in the exact format below.
5. Give the iteration plan
Suno is non-deterministic and the same prompt yields different takes. Tell the
user to generate a batch, pick the best, and refine — not to expect a perfect
first shot. Include 1–2 specific things to adjust if the first batch misses
(e.g., "if the chorus feels too busy, drop one instrument descriptor"). The full
generation loop and troubleshooting table are in
references/prompt-architecture.md.
For albums, do concept and tracklist work first — see
references/album-production.md — then run steps 2–5 per track while keeping a
consistent sonic identity across the record.
For genre-switch / beat-switch songs (a track that starts one genre and
erupts into another), the ordinary workflow isn't enough — the switch has to be
earned by the emotional concept, and Suno needs specific cues to perform it.
Read references/genre-switch.md and follow its method whenever the request
involves a genre change, beat switch, or "starts X, turns into Y."
Required output format
Always deliver in this structure so the user can paste each part into the matching Suno field:
🎵 TITLE
<the song title>
🎛️ STYLE PROMPT (paste into the "Style" field)
<4–7 comma-separated descriptors: genre, tempo, key instruments, vocal style, production, mood>
🎤 LYRICS (paste into the "Lyrics" field)
[Intro]
...
[Verse 1]
...
[Chorus]
...
(full structured lyrics with metatags; omit this block entirely if instrumental)
🎚️ SLIDER SUGGESTIONS
Weirdness: <low/mid/high + one-line why>
Style Influence: <loose/default/strong + why>
🔁 ITERATION PLAN
- Generate <N> variations and pick the closest.
- If <likely problem>, then <specific fix>.
For instrumentals, drop the LYRICS block but still include a short
[Instrumental]-tagged structure outline so Suno knows the arrangement.
Hard guardrails
- Never put a real artist's name in the Style prompt. "Sounds like [artist]" is unreliable, often filtered by Suno, and a copyright risk. Translate the reference into descriptive equivalents instead — e.g., instead of a named pop star, write "powerful belted female vocals, piano-driven pop ballad, stadium-sized production." This is both the safe choice and the one that actually works better.
- Don't help recreate a specific existing copyrighted song. Original composition only.
- Write original lyrics. Never reproduce copyrighted lyrics, and if the user pastes lyrics that look like a known song, flag it rather than formatting them.
- Adding genuine human creative input (original lyrics, real recorded elements, arrangement choices) is what gives the user a real ownership claim — mention this when relevant, but don't lecture.
Reference files
Read the relevant file(s) before doing that part of the work — don't work from memory, since Suno's behavior and tags are specific and change between versions.
references/prompt-architecture.md— Style field formula, descriptor menus by category, Creative Sliders, the iterate-don't-pray generation loop, and a troubleshooting table. Read before writing any Style prompt.references/metatags.md— Full metatag vocabulary: structural, vocal, instrumental, dynamic, the per-section[Section: modifiers]syntax, sung ad-libs in(parentheses), and using text formatting (caps, ellipses, stretched vowels) as vocal direction. Read before structuring lyrics.references/songwriting.md— Lyric craft for AI vocals: song forms, prosody and syllable matching, rhyme (incl. multisyllabic chains), hooks, the sound-human / anti-AI-cliché toolkit, title writing, per-genre lyric notes, and pronunciation traps. Read before writing lyrics.references/album-production.md— Concept development, tracklist sequencing, sonic cohesion across a record, interludes, and a release checklist. Read for any multi-track or album request.references/genre-switch.md— The method for genre-switch / beat-switch songs: making the switch emotionally earned, the soft→hard skeleton, multisyllabic rhyme for the fast section, "ramp in, cut out" transitions, and the Suno cues that make the flip actually happen. Read for any genre-change request.