A Suno style prompt is the text you put in the Styles field to say how the song should sound: the genre, the instruments, the voice, the mix and the mood. It is separate from the lyrics, and it holds up to 1,000 characters.
Type one line about your song. HookGenius writes the style prompt and the lyrics; you paste them into Suno, which makes the audio. Five free songs.
What does a finished style prompt look like?
Here is one line typed into HookGenius, and the complete style prompt it wrote. The colours mark the five things a style prompt has to say.
What was typed
A country story song about selling the family truck after dad passed, steel guitar, weathered male voice, mid-tempo
The style prompt HookGenius wrote
Traditional country, 76 BPM, loose unhurried 4/4, brush snare dragging on two and four. Male lead vocal: low baritone, compact and weathered, slightly frayed at phrase tops, sitting a half-beat behind. Resonator steel guitar through a slightly overdriven tube amp, sustain stretched long and mournful, entering under the last line of each verse. Dreadnought acoustic, felt-pick soft downstroke, thick papery thud. Vintage upright bass, two-beat walk. Dry parlor piano, one chord at the end of each hook. Late-1970s analog warmth, 2-inch tape character, rounded highs, room audible behind the musicians. Rural South Texas accent, vowels pulled long, consonants softened at word endings. Single track, short dark reverb. Steel guitar finishes each swallowed final syllable. Grief-held stoicism, low-flame temperature.
- Genre, tempo and feel. It opens with the kind of record this is and how it moves: a genre, a tempo in BPM, and what the rhythm is doing.
- The voice. Who is singing, described the way you would describe a person: range, texture, where they sit against the beat, how they pronounce the words.
- Instruments and what each one does. Named instruments, each with a job and a moment: the steel guitar comes in under the last line of each verse, the piano plays one chord at the end of each hook.
- The mix. How it was recorded and what it sits in: the era, the tape, the room, the reverb.
- The mood. A few words at the end for the feeling the whole thing should leave.
The typed line asked for a steel guitar, a weathered male voice and a middle tempo. The style prompt keeps all three and decides the rest: which other instruments, when each one enters, and what the room sounds like.
Three more briefs, and the style prompts they produced
Each of these was written by the app from the line shown above it. Read them for the five parts: every one names a tempo, describes a singer, gives the instruments something to do, says how it is mixed, and names a mood.
What was typed
Dark trap about staying up to finish what I started, heavy 808s, half-time hi-hats, calm confident male rap
The style prompt HookGenius wrote
Dark trap, 72 BPM half-time, male mid-low baritone — dry abraded grain, deliberate restraint, rapped syllables landing a half-count behind the kick, consonants clipped, line-ends swallowed. Long pitchfall 808 glide tuned to low-C, sustaining through the bar. Sparse closed hi-hats on the offbeat with occasional 16th-note triplet rolls that dissolve before resolving. Snare on beat three with cavernous room clap. Reversed Rhodes loop cycling through fog, single descending square-wave synth figure repeating every eight bars. Sub-bass swell on the final beat of every fourth bar. Vocal close-mic and dry; 808 and snare room vast — split-world mix. Cold, low-burning nocturnal energy, rapped sections stay in the same grainy texture across the whole record, the same rap persona throughout, loop drops out entirely for two bars at the midpoint
What was typed
80s synthwave driving song about leaving a small town at midnight, gated drums, analog synths, breathy female vocal
The style prompt HookGenius wrote
80s synthwave, 118 BPM, metronomic eighth-note drive, gated snare with dead-air silence after each crack, tightly gated kick, fat slightly overdriven Minimoog bass on a repeated motif with slow portamento every fourth bar, Juno-106 thick chord pads in long swells, Prophet-5 locked sixteenth-note arpeggio with filter barely breathing, high Oberheim string figure entering only on the chorus wide and distant. Female mid-soprano, chest-anchored, dried-out and breathy across the full range with faint rasp at the top, phrases placed a half-beat behind the grid, flattened American English with final consonants dissolved open. Slapback delay, light chorus shimmer, single lead vocal. Dry center, wide synthesized layers, 1984 SSL precision. Nocturnal, propulsive, cold.
What was typed
Piano pop ballad about forgiving myself, starts almost whispered and opens up in the last chorus, female vocal
The style prompt HookGenius wrote
Piano-forward pop ballad, 62 BPM, rubato verses settling into a steadier pulse at the final chorus. Female mezzo-soprano lead — mid-range placement, dry papery grain with classically-trained breath control; chest held back early, roughening through the bridge, opening into full mixed register at the final chorus. Upright piano recorded close with soft pedal engaged — felt dampers audible in quiet passages, medium-hall space. Single cello enters at the second verse, long bow, minimal vibrato, low in the mix. Brushed snare and floor tom arrive only at the bridge. Real strings swell once in the final chorus then retreat. Analogue-warm production, modest reverb, intimate throughout. Held notes left uncorrected. Raw, restrained vulnerability.
What goes in Styles, what goes in Lyrics, and what goes in Exclude Styles?
Suno’s song form has three boxes that are easy to mix up. The style prompt is only the first.
| Box | What belongs there | From the country example |
|---|---|---|
| Styles | How the whole record sounds: the five parts above. | Traditional country, 76 BPM, loose unhurried 4/4, brush snare … |
| Lyrics | The words, the section tags such as [Verse 1] and [Chorus], and any direction that applies to one section only. | The story about the truck, verse by verse. |
| Exclude Styles | What you do not want to hear. | female lead vocal, choirboy tone, breathy whisper-pop, autotune, robotic vocal formants |
HookGenius fills all three. It puts what you do not want in Exclude Styles and keeps the style prompt to what the song is, so the Styles field never has to carry a list of things to avoid.
How long should a style prompt be?
The Styles field holds 1,000 characters. We read that off Suno’s own song form on 9 September 2026, the day its v6 models replaced the earlier ones: the box carries a counter that reads 0/1000, and Exclude Styles has the same limit. The lyrics box holds 5,000. The character limits reference has every field.
The four style prompts on this page run from 747 to 843 characters. The limit is a ceiling. A style prompt is long enough when it has said the five things, and none of these four needed the whole box to do it.
What does a thin style prompt leave out?
This is a style prompt we typed by hand to show the difference. It is the kind most people start with:
country, sad, male vocals, steel guitar, emotional, slow
Set it beside the country example above and count what is missing:
- No tempo. “Slow” is a direction. 76 BPM is a number.
- No singer. “Male vocals” could be anyone. A low, weathered baritone who sits half a beat behind is one particular person.
- Instruments with nothing to do. A steel guitar is named, but not when it plays or what it answers.
- No room. Nothing says whether this was recorded close and dry or in a hall, last year or in 1978.
- Mood words doing all the work. “Sad” and “emotional” say how you should feel, and leave open what should be played.
Two things do not belong in a style prompt at all. The story of the song goes in the lyrics. And HookGenius never puts an artist’s name in the Styles field: when you give it a song or an artist as a reference, it describes that sound in words like the ones above.
Questions about Suno style prompts
Is a style prompt the same as style tags?
No. Style tags are single words or short phrases, such as a genre or an instrument. A style prompt is the full description that goes in the Styles field, and it can be made of tags, sentences or both. The examples here use sentences because a sentence can say when an instrument enters and what it does. For the tags themselves, see the Suno style tags guide.
Where does the style prompt go in Suno?
In the box labelled Styles on Suno’s song form. Your words go in the Lyrics box beside it. What goes in Styles and what goes in Lyrics for the voice covers the one part people most often put in the wrong box.
Should a style prompt include a BPM?
All four style prompts on this page state one, from 62 to 118 BPM. A number tells the reader of the prompt more than “slow” or “upbeat” does. We have not measured how closely a rendered song keeps to the number, so we do not claim it.
Which Suno models does this apply to?
Suno’s current models are v6, v6-wild and v6-mini; they replaced the earlier ones on 9 September 2026, which is the day we read the 1,000-character limit off the song form. The examples on this page were written on 8 October 2026.
Does HookGenius make the song?
It writes it. You get the style prompt, the lyrics with their section tags, and the Exclude Styles line; you paste them into Suno, and Suno makes the audio. The Suno prompt generator page shows the whole flow, and the Suno prompt guide covers writing every field by hand.
Have a song in mind?
Type one line about it. You get a style prompt like the four above, and the lyrics to go with it.
Write my style promptWant to write every field yourself? The Suno Mastery Guide is the long version.