Made a full song with real vocals in Suno AI and I have zero music production background, here is how
I am not a musician. I cannot play an instrument, I do not know music theory and I have never used a DAW. I have had song ideas floating around in my head for years with nowhere to put them. Suno AI changed that and I want to describe what it actually produces rather than how impressive it sounds in a press release.
You can start in Simple Mode by describing a genre, mood and topic in a sentence or two. The AI generates a full track with instrumentation, vocals and lyrics. The output is a complete song, not a loop, not a stem, a finished piece with structure. The vocal quality in the v4 and v4.5 models is noticeably more realistic than earlier versions and the improvement is significant enough to matter.
Custom Mode is where it gets more interesting if you want real control. You write or paste your own lyrics, specify the style parameters in detail, choose vocal gender and other characteristics. The difference between a generic prompt and a detailed Custom Mode brief is substantial in terms of how close the output gets to what you actually had in mind.
The Audio Upload and Remix features let you use your own recordings as a reference or starting point. I recorded a rough vocal melody on my phone and used it as a reference for the AI to generate around. That kind of input significantly shapes the output direction.
Personas on the Pro plan let you save a specific vocal and stylistic identity and reuse it across songs, which matters if you want consistent branding across a catalog of AI-generated music.