Forty-one takes

I counted. I do not recommend counting.

Forty-one generations in one evening to get one song I would let another person hear. One idea. One browser tab. Cold tea.

The idea was not complicated. Slow pop song. A woman singing. Piano. That is it.

Take one came back with a man singing. My fault, I had not said.

I typed "female vocals" into the style box. Ran it again.

Take two. A man singing.

Take three I wrote FEMALE VOCALS in capitals, because apparently I thought the model could be shouted at.

Man singing.

By take nine I was rewriting the whole prompt every time. Adding words. Deleting words. Adding a genre. Adding two. Adding an artist name, because someone in a comment thread swore that worked.

By take twenty the takes had stopped being wrong in interesting ways. They were all wrong in the same way. Glossy, competent, dead. Music for a car advert. I had made forty-one versions of nothing.

That evening cost me the evening and nothing else.

That part just changed.

Seven. For life.

From 3 September, Suno meters downloads.

Not generations. Downloads. The file you actually pull onto your machine.

Free plan: seven. Not seven a month. Seven, total, for the whole life of the account. And you are not allowed to sell them.

Pro: twenty a month. Premier: sixty. Nothing rolls over. What you have not spent by the end of the month is gone in the morning.

Someone on the free tier working the way I worked that night burns their entire lifetime allowance before they finish their first idea.

The bit that actually stings

Forty-one takes is not a budget problem.

Forty-one takes means I did not know what I was doing.

And I want to be careful here, because that sounds like beating myself up and it is not. I had read the tips. I had two hundred prompt words saved in a note on my phone, scraped off Reddit and YouTube and one PDF I paid nine dollars for.

I was not being lazy. I was doing the thing everybody tells you to do, which is collect more words.

It did not work. It kept not working. And I could not tell you why.

You know the feeling if you have had it. The song is worse than the one in your head. You cannot name what is wrong. So you change something at random and roll again.

That is not making music. That is pulling a lever.

What fixed it

Not a better prompt.

I found out I had been typing into the wrong box.

Not a metaphor. An actual box, on the actual screen, that I had been ignoring for months. Plus a second one I did not know existed, because it is folded away under a menu.

Every word I ever wrote about that singer went into a field that does not control the singer. Suno's own help pages say so, in plain English, in public.

I had been shouting into the wrong end of the machine and concluding I was bad at this.

Next page is the receipts. Suno's published numbers, what a take really costs you now, and the documentation that explains the thing I spent forty-one takes failing to work out.

Then page three, where I hand the whole method over.