How to Achieve Perfect Lyrics in Suno

A multi-step process to nail down your lyrics

Suno is one of the greatest inventions in the history of music. I would seriously put it ahead of the electric amplifier and the MIDI interface alike.

But that doesn’t make it any less maddening when an otherwise perfect song is marred by an imperfect phrasing, a weird pronunciation of a word, or even just a suboptimal lyrical choice that simply doesn’t flow properly.

At present, there are three options within Suno:

• EXTEND: This was how we originally addressed the problem, but since it involves losing absolutely everything after the extension point, it’s not a good option, and thankfully, it’s no longer a necessary one.

• EDIT: This is the traditional way to fix a lyrical or instrumental issue and I still use it. In fact, I still prefer the Legacy Editor, although the current one works just fine. The three problems are that it doesn’t work well on very short segments of just a word or two, it changes everything on all tracks in the edited space, and most importantly, even when everything works as planned, the volumes are often uneven between the edited and unedited segments, so the edit often isn’t seamless.

• COVER: This also necessitates throwing out the entire song in the hopes of fixing a small issue. It sometimes works out for the better, but it’s essentially trying to fix a watch with a sledgehammer. I love the Cover feature and use it often, but it’s not the ideal fix for a vocal tweak.

• STUDIO: In theory, this is the way to go. In reality, just regenerating one part of the vocal track seldom produces anything that even potentially approaches viability. I’ve even had the regeneration change the singer from male to female, which doesn’t exactly make for the seamless improvement being sought. Studio remains a very promising feature that I still see little utility in trying to use.

So, what’s the solution?

EXTRACT STEMS + DAW

The process is pretty straightforward, and, in fairness to Suno, would theoretically work in Studio. But I find it much faster to do the following:

1. Extract the Vocal + Instrumental stems from the original and download them.

2. Edit the original and save the song with the changes.

3. Extract the Vocal stem from the edited song.

4. Load the Instrumental, the Vocal 1, and the Vocal 2 stems into your DAW. I use Reaper, as it happens.

5. Keep Snap on. Select the Vocal 1 track, and press S on each side of the phrase that you edited. It’s possible to work within the wave samples, but it’s best if there is a bit of silence on each end.

6. When the phrase is selected and split, remove it.

7. Select the Vocal 2 track and press S on the same vertical line as the removed sections.

8. Copy-and-paste, or simply drag, the new section into the old section.

9. Repeat as needed depending upon your changes.

10. Delete the Vocal 2 track.

11. Render to final audio.

This process is much faster, and much more reliable, than any of the other methods, in my experience. And it’s easy enough that even someone without any experience with a DAW can probably do it, especially in Reaper.

Speaking of Suno, I didn’t utilize that process on this remix at all, since there were far too many things structurally hopeless with it to even try. But since this particular mix struck me as kind of cool with its massively overinflated sense of grandeur, I figure it won’t hurt to share it with other enthusiasts here.