Structure a song with section tags

Section tags are the part of a Suno prompt with the highest ratio of effect to effort. They cost a few characters, they go in the lyric box rather than the style box, and they are the difference between a track with an arc and ninety seconds of the same idea repeating until it fades.

What a tag actually does

A tag marks where the arrangement should change. [Verse 1], [Chorus], [Bridge] and [Outro] are the familiar ones, and on their own they already give the model a shape to fill.

The more useful form adds a direction after a colon:

[Intro: stripped back]
[Verse 1]
[Chorus: powerful vocals]
[Bridge: stripped back]
[Outro: fade out]
[End]

[Chorus: powerful vocals] is doing something a style description cannot: it applies an instruction at one point in the song instead of across the whole track. Asking for powerful vocals in Style gives you powerful vocals everywhere, including the intimate verse you wanted underneath.

Always close the song

[End] is the single most valuable tag, and the most frequently omitted.

Without it, a generation has no instruction about where to stop, and the common failure modes are all versions of the same thing: the track fades arbitrarily, repeats a section to fill time, or runs to the length limit mid-phrase. If your lyrics arrive without a closing tag, one is added for you — but knowing why it is there matters, because it is the first thing to check when a song will not end cleanly.

Untagged text still works

Plain text is a valid input. An untagged block is treated as [Verse 1], so you can paste lyrics you already have and get a sensible result without formatting them first.

Anything you wrote in brackets is preserved exactly, including tags that are not in the recognised set. If you have a convention of your own — [Pre-Chorus], [Drop], [Hook] — it survives to the lyric box untouched. The model may or may not act on it, but nothing is silently rewritten.

Structure is where instrumentals live or die

For an instrumental, tags are not optional — they are the entire arrangement.

A vocal track has lyrics giving it shape. An instrumental has nothing but the tags, which is why an instrumental prompt without them so often produces one loop repeated to length. [Instrumental Break], [Breakdown: stripped back] and [Outro: fade out] are what turn a loop into a piece with a beginning and an end.

Pair that with an explicit vocals entry in the Exclude field. Instrumental prompts frequently produce stray humming or wordless vocal pads, and the structure tags will not prevent it — that is the exclusion list's job.

A shape worth starting from

For a three-minute vocal track:

[Intro: stripped back]
[Verse 1]
[Chorus]
[Verse 2]
[Chorus: powerful vocals]
[Bridge: stripped back]
[Chorus]
[Outro: fade out]
[End]

Change one thing about it per version rather than redesigning it wholesale, and you will learn quickly which sections this particular song actually needs.