SUNO Masterclass Part 1/20: From Beginner to Intermediate in Minutes!

0:01 There are many uses of suno and while no particular way is incorrect, not knowing what is available could be very detrimental to your work as a musician or even as a hobbyist. Let's jump into Sunno and let me show you the different degrees of creativity. First of all, we could go into Sunno right here on the homepage and just type in write a song about life being an uphill climb and Sunno writes the song. you hit the create button. This is one of the laziest ways of using Sunno, but again, I don't begrudge people for doing it this way because they very well may not know any better. So, you can see down here, Sunno has already started cranking out the song. I did not tell it the genre. I did not ask it to do it in

0:47 rock, funk, or jazz. It's just going to do it anyhow it thinks. And this is one of the lower level ways of using Sunno. You still get good output, but at the end of the day, it's not as personalized as it could be and maybe not as precisely in the style that you would like. Let's listen to a couple of seconds of each one. Hey found my boot step slow too long to see but it still got me. I lost my breath last week. Kept on through the steep

1:32 pains in my pockets raw. Still I climb still I crawled. Every stone I know. Oh oh oh every bruise I show. Oh oh oh. to my leg. >> Now, now, now that isn't a bad song. Here's a second one. Morning found me low. time slow. >> All right. Well, you get the idea. That is the first level of usage of suno

2:20 going straight into home and putting in a very simple prompt. But we can take it up a level. We can take this concept and we can dedicate time to writing a full song. Let me show you how I would do this if I was in a time crunch using my tools. Watch this. Right here is a songwriting assistant available to my members. And what you're going to see me do is use this tool to write that same type of song, but it's going to be more personalized. So, I'm going to start speaking. I grew up in a land, a land far away. Things were difficult. I can't even say. They were very, very hard. But then I moved and I realized I couldn't

3:05 even groove. Life was harder. Why does life have to be so hard? A loaf of bread cost an arm and a leg. I need help. I need to be set free from life of penry. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? What are we going to do? I'll just have to be strong and hustle. Be bold. Be strong. Work hard. My dad used to say, "Work hard." And that's why I'm grinding and toiling every day. Things will get better. Then I hit stop listening. And there's some parameters. And even if you're not using a tool as sophisticated as mine, you need to make these decisions. Watch this. You need to decide is your song going to be a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, or a verse, chorus, verse,

3:52 chorus, bridge, chorus, or any of these others. I'm going to choose the second option. I want a bridge in there. Bridges are very important. They help abate the energy and they help bring the energy depending on what you want. And as far as the rhyme scheme, I'm going to choose aabb. My tool is going to take what I have given it. It's going to keep it the integrity of it and it's only going to work on rhyming the words I couldn't rhyme. Then I'm going to go ahead and say minimalist. And that means I don't want too many words in the song. Have you ever heard a song that is so long and you can barely remember the words? You don't want to write songs like that. So, I want a minimalist approach. And I know there's some times where the song has got to be long, but I

4:38 generally go with minimalist. Then I'm going to hit structure my song and my tool is going to take my words and it's going to put them into that format. I'm going to save my song. Very important you save your songs. Now, if you use Sunno, your songs are saved by default anyway. Okay, with that done, we're going to jump straight back into Sunno. And now, watch this. I am going to give it my song like that. I could still go ahead and add one extra ingredient, but for now, let's see which choice of style Suno will take on this song. You

5:24 see, this is what is missing in a lot of people's workflow. They may have a style, but not their personal lyrics or their personal lyrics and not a style of choice. And even when you get a style of choice, you have to get down to specifics. Let's listen. Here we go. My shoes are one thing on this gravel road. Every step I take the loads. >> Not bad. Let's go to the next one.

6:17 My shoes are worn thin on this gravel road. Every step I take feels twice the load. The sky keeps moving. The go feels far, but I know this ache is making me hard. Hands on my knees. I breathe and rise. Dust in my mouth. FIRE IN MY EYES. Upill upill. I keep on climbing upill. >> All right. So that's what happens when you give suno a song without enough specificity. Now let's go back to home. I want to show you a different way you could do this. Okay. Instead of just

7:03 prompting from home casually, just giving it a bunch of things randomly, go into the side panel to create. When you get into create, right here, you want to choose advanced at the top. And now we're in advanced. We're going to put in the lyrics, but then we're going to go a step further and put in a very detailed style prompt. Now, to do that, I am again going to invoke my tool. And my tool is going to help me craft a thorough prompt that goes into specifics. I'm going to click on Phil's

7:50 funk. And here I have the ability to choose '7s funk all the way to 2000s. And let's say I choose 2000's kind of funk. I could go ahead and choose various ingredients down to the drums. So let's take a close look here. I have live kit. I have shaker. I have congas. I have the low end. I have the walk-in funk. Say I wanted that brass attack, fourpiece brass, and various other ingredients that I can mindfully choose.

8:35 This is going from just random prompts to specifics. You become an artisan as you will of sound. And down here, you can see my prompt is been crafted and put in square brackets, which helps the specificities and the direction. I'm going to copy that. And then I'm going to go back into Sunno. And now I have greater levels of control. I'm going to paste that in. And while I don't have any melody just yet, I could dictate if I want it on a major key or on a minor key, but we'll talk more about that later. Here in options, we're going to crank up the

9:20 style influence. As you can see here, these sliders are very important. The more you slide up there, the stronger the influence is going to be. And I'm just going to title this uphill. So again, look at the level of specificity. See that? All of that level of precision is very important. Let's go ahead and just hit create. Now you're going to hear the same song, same lyrics, different melody because I didn't give it a melody, but different lyrics. You're going to hear the power of specific prompts, being intentional in

10:07 crafting your music. Let's check it out. Listen to the specificities of the ingredients. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

11:03 Yeah. I grew up in a land, a land far away. Things were difficult. I can't even say. It was very very hard. But then I moved and I realized I couldn't even groove. Life was hard. Why does life have to be so hard? >> A loaf of bread cuz I'm in a lake.

11:49 >> I need help. I need to be set free from life. >> Now you get the idea how you can totally change the direction of a song by the prompts you give it. Let's listen second one different key. Hey.

12:38 Oh yeah. Grew up in a land a land far away. So you can see my friends, if you are precise and direct and intentional with your prompts, you can get great leverage. I also have a bunch of tools on a website called Musicspiration. I'm going to go to Musicspiration. That is the free version. It doesn't have as many bells and whistles as my Phil's Playground, but it has some pretty great stuff. So, let me jump in and give you another demonstration of how you can craft prompts. When you get to music, you want to go over here to AI prompts. Click on AI prompt tools. And I've got

13:25 starter tools. And I've got some more advanced tools. So, what we're going to do is just use this one right here called prompt superersizer. And over here in the dropdown I'm going to choose let's go to let's do reggae. Okay let's do roots reggae children relax. Let's just generate that prompt. Copy that prompt. And now let's go back into suno. Now without much work if you wanted to just change the vibe of this song and make it cool and iy you could do that. put that in. And I'm just going to say uphill reggae. I haven't even done any

14:13 work on this other than just change the prompt for the style. You see, it's already cranked up. Let's go ahead and hit create. And this just changes the entire song from funky to a different genre. And you should experiment with these to find which genre fits your songs best. But here we go. Check this out. >> Very different vibe. What am I going to do?

15:00 I grew up in a land. a land far away. Things were difficult. I can't even say. It was very, very hard. But then I moved. And I realized I couldn't even go. Life was harder. Why does life have to be so hard? A loaf of bread? Cuz I'm in a I need help. I need to be set free. >> So you get the idea. Total change. Let's

15:47 go to the next one. Yeah. M I grew up in a land, a land far away. Things were difficult. I can't even say. It was very, very hard. But then I moved and I realized I couldn't even groove. Life was harder. Why does life have to be so hard? A loaf

16:33 of bread? Cuz I'm in a m I need help. I need to be set free. >> So you get the idea now. specificity in prompts. Now, let's go over a few more steps that will help when you approach Sunno. What you want to keep in mind is approach Sunno not as an entire solution, but as an amplifier of your creativity. Most people are doing it completely wrong, and it's not their

17:19 fault because no one showed them. But as I've shown you over the past number of minutes, you got to come to Sunno as a co-creator. And in this journey, you got to understand there are three levels. There is prompting, describing what you want. Most people just stop there and they give it a description and just hope for the best. And that is the tourist mode as I showed you in the very beginning. But then we get into directing and this is where you start shaping the emotional and textual intent. Not just what's in the song, but what it feels like. And then you can get into producing. This is the pro level. And you're using language to control rhythm dynamics. As I showed

18:06 you, you saw me highlighting the different aspects as we went over it. Space sonic character. And that is exactly what I want you to take away from this. Experienced musicians often struggle more at first. Why is that? Because they want precision control. They want to specify the exact chord progression, the exact BPM. And Sunno will respond to specs in audio better than it responds to specs, cordal specs in text. That is the part a lot of people don't understand. So they type in chord progressions thinking sooner will follow flawlessly. No, it will not. It's not there at this point. It will get

18:51 there eventually. But if you want to prompt down to specifics, your best bet is to use an instrument. What exactly do I mean? Well, let me turn my keyboard on and I will demonstrate this for you so you can see how Sunno could work with audio. And this will be more like the ultimate level. When you get into Sunno, as usual, you want to be in advanced. And if you're going to put something new in there, you could. For now, we could use what was there initially. And I could take this style out and I

19:38 could instead just say I want something neo soul. Okay. Now I could find myself a neosoul groove from something I have created in the past. And if I fed this to Sunno, it will give me what I'm looking for. So, here we go with something from the world of Neo Soul. And I'll play this.

20:27 Okay. So, that's exactly what I'm going to feed into Sunno. And to do it, I'm going to hit audio. I'm going to hit record. I'm going to hit this button. And I am going to begin playing. This is going directly, I hope, into Sunno. So, let's press record.

21:28 Okay. Well, that's the end of the illustration. I'm going to put in here instrument stem and song demo. And continue. And let's continue. Now, we've given Suno an exact idea, right, of what we're looking for right here. Let's play it. You can hear it in here. All right. So, I hope you heard that. Okay. So, if you really want it to get what

22:14 you're trying to reproduce exactly, you got to crank up the audio influence a whole lot. Okay, I'm going to go a step further and use a female vocal. So, I select female from here. And the next thing I do, because I've given it something quite specific, all I do is hit create. Now, the melody is kind of buried in the cordal play that I gave, but Sunno is so smart that it's gonna find the line of best fit. It's going to understand the chords and it's going to try its best to extract a melody that will map back to those

23:00 chords or even back to those higher keys that I was playing in the electric piano. So, Suno is ready. It doesn't waste time. Let's check it out. I grew up in a land a land far away. Things were difficult. I can't even say

23:49 it was very very hard. But then I moved and so listen one more time to what I fed soon to understand. You see, Sunno took exactly what I gave it and delivered something even glossier. It added some more zing and I didn't need to tell it too much. You see the power in prompting with audio is it immediately gets what you're trying to do. Now, I could have gone an extra step and I could have gone back to

24:34 musicpiration.com and I could have found myself a Neosoul prompt, right? I could look for let's see neosoul and I could just cook something here like this. Generate the prompt and I could go back into sunno. Okay. Even though I like what Sununo gave me. Right. Here's the second one. >> I mean, Sununa is just ridiculous. But let's go ahead and put in this additional seasoning. Watch this. Now I

25:21 have more specificity in the style. I'm going to dial down my influence just a bit into the 60s so that I can get a variation. I'm going to call this Neo2. Okay. Actually, let's let's go way down cuz I I want Sunno to do something different. Let's go into the 40s. Let's go into the 40s and hit create. And you're going to hear still likely to be the same key, but it's going to be different from what I just played exactly. And this is how you hyper iterate inso. You get so many different possibilities as a producer and you take the best of them and you the ones that don't make it, you you bin

26:09 them. It's that simple. crazy. >> I grew up in a land, a land far away. Things were difficult. I can't even say it was very very hard. But then I moved and I realized I couldn't even

26:58 harder. Why does life have to be so hard? So, what you're seeing here is being more specific with the audio and that sculpts everything in a direction that is peculiar to you. Now, you might say, "Phil, I'm not an instrumentalist. I just sing or I'm a bathroom singer." It makes no difference. A bathroom singer can hum a melody into Sunno and get a personalized touch. Let me give you an example. So, I've given you so many ideas here, right? Let's say you don't play an instrument. Go into Sunno and you sculpt the sound with your voice.

27:45 Watch this. Let's hit record. And I'll just come up with an idea. Let's say I wanted a a jazzy a jazzy song. Check this out. Grew up in a land where there was nothing. Can't even say I had nothing. Okay, very minimal. I barely did anything. But watch what Sunno is gonna

28:30 do as a result of what I put in. All right, let's skip. Now, when we come down to the style, this is where you have to let the style align with the audio. And to do that, we are going back into musicspiration because it's just so easy. or let's go into my other tool because I just came out with a new jazz engine and I want to take it on a test spin. So, I'm going to randomize until I get something in the 1950s. All right. And let's see. There's certain things I want. Walking bass. Okay.

29:16 And some alto sacks and tennis sacks and a horn section. You see? And then I'm going to copy this. And now we're going back into the land of suno. Just like this. Keep current. And now when I put my styling, it knows that this is going to be jazz. Okay, let's go up here. Check it out. Okay, I'm going to crank up my vocal. So this was my vocal. So, you get the idea. And we're just gonna say uphill jazz. Now, watch what happens when I have my

30:05 audio, not an instrument, right? But well, I guess you could say the voice is the ultimate instrument. Uh, and then let's just let's just create. So, you have the ultimate instrument with text and a killer square bracket prompt machine that aligns to what you're truly looking for. I'm telling you, my friends, the output is tremendous. This is this is what puts Suna on overdrive. Check this out.

30:57 I grew up in a land, a land far away. Things were difficult I can't even say. It was very, very hard. But then I moved and I realized I couldn't even groove. Life was hard. Why does life have to be so hard? A loaf of bread. Cuz I'm in LA. I need help. I need to be set free from life. What am I going to do?

31:44 >> I mean, Sunno, this is why I tell you, Sununo is sick. It's certified sick. It's ridiculous. It's already sounding like a full finished production. And that's because the level of specificity to the prompts and the lyrics and everything, it all adds up and it just gives you it it puts it on overdrive. Suna goes crazy and wants to show off that it's got it all together. That's why you need to up your game. Let's check this one out. >> This one I can't even remember which one is which.

32:50 I grew up in a land, a land far away. Things were difficult. I can't even say it was very very hard but then I moved and I realized I couldn't even grow. Life was hard. Why does life have to be so hard? A loaf of bread cuz I'm in a leg. I need help. I need to be set free. >> All right, my friends. >> You are witnessing the craziness that Sunno can produce. It is a tool of

33:37 tools. So Sununo is not a door. Okay, it's not a door replacement. Can it act as a generative audio workstation? It can. It can be many things. That's Sunno Studio. But I just see Sunno as an accelerative creative partner. You could say it's a creative accelerator, if you will. This is what a lot of folks don't truly get about Sunno. It is not just uh here is a song, crank out the song. No, it's a back and forth as you saw me going with it. Now, Sununo doesn't read your prompt like a human reads instructions. It weights every concept against every other concept. The words you put first

34:24 get more weight. So you need to frontload what matters most. Which is why you always put the genre first. When you combine genres, there is kind of tension, right? The model doesn't split the difference. It creates a tension between them. A jazz metal fusion isn't half jazz and half metal. It's something new born from the clash. if you've ever used that because Sunno allows you mash up tracks. That's another possibility I haven't even shown you. There's instrument hierarchy. If you write jazz piano trio with drums, bass, and guitar, and strings and brass, well, the model gets confused about what's supposed to be in front. So, you got to give it a clear lead instrument. You also need to understand that

35:11 sunno needs as much detail as you get into the instrument specifics. If you want there to be some effects on that guitar as you slide, it has to be there. Don't just wish and hope sooner is going to do it because it won't. If you want to hear like the piano pedal sound, you got to prompt for stuff like that. I call this a six layer prompt stack. Every great Sununo prompt hits most or all of these layers. You don't always need all six, but the more layers you consciously include, the more intentional your output. Number one, genre, the world we're in, right? Funk, neo soul, jazz, fusion. Start there. Then talk about era. What

35:59 decade does it feel like? Is it the ' 70s funk? Totally different, right? from 2000's funk and different from that G funk sound, right? And then we get into instrumentation. What's playing? Be specific about the lead instruments. Don't list everything without clarifying what part each plays. Does it feel like triumphant? That's the emotion. Is it euphoric? What about production texture? How was it recorded? Does it have analog warmth? Is it tape saturation? Does it have some reverb? You got to bring all those pieces to the table and vocal direction. Who's singing? How? Is it a gritty male lead? Is it conversational delivery? Do you hear a lot of the breath of the singer? Is there

36:45 restraint? Those are things you need to include as you work with. So, I showed you different layers and levels. As I used funk as my first example, you saw me craft it and then I took it into my tool. And my tool has a boatload of specificities. When you really get into it, it's got error and then it gets into the individual instruments. And there's so many ways you could do this, but focus on the main points that I've shared with you today. I hope you had fun joining me cooking out in Sunno. If you enjoyed it, smash the like button and remember, go to musicspiration.com. You will get tons of free tools that you

37:33 can use to learn music and also up your game in the world of AI. Thank you for joining me. I'll see you next time.