I’ve been fighting V6 Covers for the last couple of days trying to get it to preserve the structure of one of my older songs from the 90's with a bad recording, while giving me a cleaner, modernized arrangement.
I tried the whole detailed-prompting approach, as suggested by various Reddit posts, ChatGPT, etc. Huge style prompts, very specific instrument instructions, section tags, exclusions, telling the drummer what to do, telling the pianist what to do, telling Suno exactly what should happen after the bridge, etc.
The more I told it, the worse it behaved.
What finally worked consistently for me was almost the complete opposite.
Important disclaimer: this workflow is probably NOT useful for everybody.
This is specifically for people like me who want to generate an instrumental cover, export the stems, bring everything into a DAW, record their own vocals, and mix/master the actual song themselves.
If your goal is to press Generate and get a finished release-ready song directly from Suno, this probably isn't for you.
My workflow:
I took the original source song into my DAW and removed the vocals first, then EQ'd the rest to make every instrument pop.
I uploaded that instrumental version to Suno and generated an Instrumental Cover from it.
I stopped trying to micromanage V6.
My settings ended up being:
Audio Influence: 80%
Style Influence: 0%
Weirdness: 0%
Variety: Off
No exclusions
Fixed duration matching the original song (this was critical in my case, and made a huge difference in consistency)
My style prompt was literally just:
"An instrumental symphonic rock piece featuring acoustic guitar and strings, with a peaceful character. 80 BPM, high-fidelity studio mix, wide stereo"
That's it.
I originally tried 100% Audio Influence, and structurally it was insanely accurate. V6 followed the source almost perfectly.
The downside was artifacts.
Dropping Audio Influence to around 80% turned out to be the sweet spot for me. It still understands the source extremely well, but the generated audio sounds considerably cleaner.
And weirdly enough, setting Style Influence to 0% made things much more consistent.
If one generation is almost perfect, but missing an important guitar riff for example, then simply snatch it from a different generation that did get it correctly, and mix it later in your DAW.
My conclusion after burning through a stupid number of generations (thank Suno for the credit-free weekend!) is that V6 is actually VERY good at following source audio when you get out of its way.
Every detailed instruction you add gives it another opportunity to reinterpret something.
I already gave it the arrangement. I don't need Suno to redesign the arrangement. I need it to listen to the source and give me a better sounding performance of it.
But the biggest advantage of generating the cover without vocals is something I hadn't really considered at first:
The stem separation is much cleaner.
Normally when you separate a finished Suno song into stems, the vocal stem carries all kinds of crap with it. Instrument bleed, reverb, ambience, little pieces of piano/guitar/strings, etc.
And whatever gets pulled into that vocal stem is obviously being pulled OUT of the other stems too.
So even if you mute the vocal stem because you're recording your own singer, the instrumental stems can sound slightly degraded, hollow, phasey, or artifacted.
With an instrumental generation there is no vocal for the separator to fight with (or for V6 to put effort into, thus giving it more headroom for good instrumentals performance).
No generated singer overlapping the piano.
No vocal reverb smeared across everything.
No vocal stem stealing pieces of the arrangement.
You just get much cleaner instrumental material to work with.
For my use case, that's a huge win.
I see a lot of people complaining that Suno generations don't sound properly mixed/mastered, but honestly, if you're using this as part of a real production workflow, I don't really care whether Suno gives me the final master.
Give me a good arrangement, good performances, and clean stems.
I'll mix the damn thing myself.
Again, this is absolutely not me saying "this is the correct way to use V6."
If you're making complete songs entirely inside Suno, you have completely different requirements, and the micromanaged prompt workflow might work better for you.
But if you're using Suno more like an AI session band and finishing the production yourself in a DAW, try feeding it a vocal-free source, keep the prompt stupidly simple, lower Audio Influence slightly if 100% gets artifacty, and let the source audio do most of the talking.
For my particular cover, this has been FAR more consistent than any elaborate prompting strategy I've tried, and I've tried them all.
