The task
Suno writes music from lyrics and a style line, but it does not know where the stress falls in a Russian or Ukrainian word. Put the mark in the wrong place and the model sings it that way. The orders came one after another, each with its own conditions.
The kids’ football club Bessarabia wanted a stadium chant: drums required, a Moldovan-Romanian flavour required, and it had to sound grown-up rather than like a children’s choir. Three versions in Russian and three in Ukrainian. The traders’ club Full Hamster asked for an upbeat motivational song: shorts and longs, endless arguments about charts, waiting for altseason, and nine members’ names had to be heard. Then songs about Izmail and about how wine is made in Bessarabia, both with Moldovan phrases, and a sea shanty for a friend, a ship’s electrician, on his 54th birthday.
Why, and what the idea was
Lyrics are written for singing, not for reading. Each name sits at the position in the line where its own stress falls, otherwise Suno mangles it. The word Bessarabia, stressed on “ra”, falls naturally into amphibrachic metre, so it never had to be forced, and for the stadium we added a separate block of syllable-by-syllable chanting: “Bes-sa-ra-bi-ya!”.
In Full Hamster the main find was in the club’s name itself: it is a hamster club, and the man at the head of it is called Lev, which means lion. That gave the line “we are a hamster family, but each of us has a fang, because we learned to roar from the lion”, and Lev got his own verse before the final chorus. The second hook is in the name too: in crypto a hamster is the one who gets fleeced, and here he is full.
The voice of the series is held by a saved Suno persona, Sirena MC: it is switched on by a button in the interface, so the style line no longer describes vocals, otherwise the description argues with the saved voice. For the anthem the persona was deliberately removed: it gives one voice, and an anthem needs a crowd, so the vocals were set with the words “male crowd chant”.
How it went
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| Stage 1 | First batch: three subjects, three versions each, the chosen ones taken to full structure: intro, two eight-line verses, pre-chorus, bridge, final chorus. Clean text went into the chat while the marked-up version stayed in the file. Since then stresses go into the chat too, and every text gets a version with capital letters in case the font does not draw the mark |
| Stage 2 | The Bessarabia anthem: three Russian and three Ukrainian versions, the Ukrainian ones written from scratch for Ukrainian phonetics, not translated. The chosen pair: “Forward, Bessarabia” at 100 BPM and “Beat, Drum” at 96 BPM, both to be generated with the same model so they sound like a pair |
| Stage 3 | Full Hamster: nine names and a separate block about the founder. The first version was funk at 118 BPM; after a listen it was rewritten as R&B at 104 BPM, which matched the persona. Before delivery the stresses were checked by a script: 83 marked words and every unmarked polysyllable as separate lists. Three real errors, two lines rewritten |
| Stage 4 | Three songs in one evening: a Balkan dance about a driving instructor at 150 BPM, My Queen in two languages, then a rap version at 140 BPM four minutes after the request “harder”, and Milfa at 124 BPM with no saxophone |
| Stage 5 | Izmail on the Danube, 112 BPM, Moldovan phrases, a ship’s horn in the intro and the bridge. The metre script found one error: “muzhikAm” replaced with “muzhchInam” |
| Stage 6 | Wine of Bessarabia. After three Moldovan songs in a row it became audible that the tune, tempo and instruments were the same. The cause was a nearly identical style line. The lyrics were left alone; the sound became a lautari waltz in 6/8 with violin, nai and cobza, and clarinet and accordion went into the exclusions |
| Stage 7 | To Oleg: a sea shanty, deliberately not Moldovan. Ship bell, stomps, claps, mandolin, with accordion, clarinet and cimbalom excluded. The track was generated; the series now has four finished tracks |
Tools and method
Lyrics are written with our own 607-line “songwriter” prompt that works on any model: several versions in different schools, a strict rhyme check, stress markup, ready-made Style of Music and Lyrics fields. Ukrainian has its own stress mechanics and its own set of cheap rhymes, so the prompt has a separate Ukrainian mode.
The style line is short, because the model hears a long list worse: genre, three instruments, tempo, key, mood. The Moldovan flavour is set with three instruments: “Moldovan folk fiddle, panpipe nai, cimbalom”. For Ukrainian, “sung in Ukrainian” goes first in the line and “Russian language, Russian accent” goes into the exclusions, otherwise the model slides into Russian phonetics. Artist names cannot go into the style field, moderation cuts them, so a reference is broken down into features: aggressive 808, fast hi-hats, dark minor synth, rap verses, melodic hook.
The beat is set two ways at once: meta tags in the lyrics such as [hard 808 kick] and [beat drops], and features in the style line. The main structural device: before the last chorus the bridge goes half-time, the drums almost disappear, and the final chorus comes in at full power.
Stress checking is done by a script, not by eye: it lists every marked word and every unmarked polysyllable separately. Acceptance criterion: no monosyllables with a mark, no polysyllables without one, and the run is repeated after edits. Every card gets a section “If it came out wrong”: one change at a time, otherwise you cannot tell what worked.
Result
The first 45 seconds of the track Sytyi Khomyak (Full Hamster), full version 3:36: an intro chanting the club’s name, the first verse and the pre-chorus “a fall is a gift”. Persona Sirena MC, R&B at 104 BPM, major key.
For Bessarabia we delivered six anthem versions and two ready-to-paste cards, one per language, plus capital-letter versions. For the traders’ club, a track with nine names and a verse about the founder. In one evening, three songs, among them the rap version of My Queen and Milfa, where the word “milfa” stands at the start of the line on a strong beat and there is not a single line about the body: the admiration goes through her walk, her gaze and her decisions, otherwise you could not play the song in her presence. The cards for Izmail on the Danube and Wine of Bessarabia were delivered with Moldovan phrases: “Bine ai venit”, “Hai, frate! Noroc!”, “Sanatate, frati!”.
Four tracks have been generated and exist as mp3: Full Hamster, My Queen, Milfa, To Oleg; their covers are in the gallery. Whether the anthem, Izmail and Wine have been generated we do not know: the cards were delivered, the launch is up to the client.
Separately we worked out where to publish the finished tracks. You cannot upload directly to Spotify, only through a distributor: RouteNote with no subscription for 15 percent of royalties, DistroKid or TuneCore for 24.99 dollars a year. To recoup the subscription you need something like 6 to 8 thousand streams, so RouteNote is the starting point. Spotify does not ban AI music, but commercial use of Suno tracks is allowed only on paid plans, and that is the main barrier, not the platform. And one more thing: Spotify does not bring listeners on its own; short vertical videos with a piece of the chorus come first.
Mistakes and what we took from them
