Suno Studio review: Is this AI DAW really the future of music production?£18 per month subscription, suno.com
As we start 2026, the battle for AI music-generating dominance is as fierce as ever. Suno has added Studio to its line-up, and we’re seeing competing products such as Moises AI Studio and ACE Studio flock to market.

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We are now entering the era of the AI DAW. Up to this point, generative AI music involved inputting a prompt that would create a whole piece of music, but you had little control to edit the specifics beyond just extending the track. These new AI DAWs give you much greater control, with the ability to work on individual stems, generate specific instruments and even extract MIDI data.
Suno Studio is technically still in Beta and has a long way to go until it fulfils its potential. However, it’s an intriguing glimpse of a future that makes AI tools much more flexible and usable without it feeling like you’re giving up all creative control.
Since its launch in 2023, Suno’s influence has been far-reaching and controversial, with roughly seven million AI songs created on it every day. This review focuses on the recent release of Suno Studio, which adds extra DAW-like control alongside the main Suno feature set (Suno says that it’s a “Browser-based Generative Audio Workstation”.
I’m approaching Suno Studio as a producer who’s been writing electronic music for over 30 years, looking to find ways to enhance my workflow rather than completely change or replace it. Can Suno Studio really inspire me when I’m stuck, and generate improved versions of rough samples or ideas, or will it just offer up AI slop?

How to use Suno Studio
Although you can get a Pro plan for £6 a month to generate AI music, you’ll need the full Premier Plan at £18 a month to get access to Suno Studio. This also gives you 10,000 credits per month to experiment with — plenty for the average user.
Suno Studio is a browser-based tool that can be accessed as a tab alongside the other Suno features. The main interface is split into four sections: a creation window, a library that displays your tracks and projects, the main arrangement window, and a clip and track detail window.
The first interface is where you generate your content. You can add your own lyrics (or get Suno to write them for you), you can prompt for the style of track that you’re looking for, and you can tweak a number of other parameters to tailor how closely or loosely Suno will follow your guidelines. It’s obviously different from directly composing your own music, but prompting a well-written, original sounding and cohesive track is still a skill that has to be learnt to get the best results. The online documentation can get you started, but the finer details about how to get decent-sounding tracks are ambiguous. Your best bet is to pore over the many YouTube videos with tips from other creators and then experiment yourself.
Image: Press
Suno Studio’s generative AI music in practice
One of the main issues with AI generation is the lack of consistency. You’re essentially putting information in, clicking ‘Go’ and hoping for the best. And each time you generate anything, you’re using up some of your (admittedly generous) monthly allowance of credits. Suno has gone some way to improving the situation with the ability to upload a piece of audio as a starting point that can then be remixed. There’s also a feature called Inspo, which lets you build a playlist of four tracks that it uses as inspiration for a new piece, and also Persona, where you can teach Suno the sound of a specific voice and then use the same vocal for every track. I find the Remix audio function extremely useful when working on tracks where I’ve hit a dead-end. It provides endless new musical motifs, chord progressions and drum fills that I would never have come up with, and I can cherry-pick the best of these ideas to then recreate within my Logic Pro project.
Persona is less successful. I generate a couple of voice profiles from some of my old tracks with different singers, but it takes all of the edge off of them and makes them sound generic and too polished, even turning one from an English to an American accent. Making generic music is an argument that’s often thrown at Suno and AI music, as the technology’s natural tendency is to go for the most popular and common-sounding results. I find this especially when working on electronic dance music; it seems desperate to make everything sound like over-produced EDM. It can be wrangled into sounding more characterful and original, but it takes time, practice, and often experimenting with multiple generations of audio.
There’s no doubt that you get a dopamine hit when generating prompts, as you wonder whether the next one might hit on gold. But if you’re a working professional, then the lack of consistency and time-wasting required might prove a dealbreaker when working to a deadline. Although the overall sonics will generally sound well mixed, it doesn’t stand up well to increased scrutiny. Top-end transients tend to appear smeared, and you still hear the subtle artefacts of a lower bit-rate output. It’s definitely come a long way in two years, though, and a careful choice of prompting with phrases like ‘high-quality’ and ‘studio-quality’ can improve the results. The musical content that can be generated (when all goes well) is often excellent. It has flair, with musical and production embellishments that sound professional.
You may have read about the recent deal between Suno and Warner Music. Suno plans to replace its current AI models with licensed ones built on authorised data sometime in 2026, which will no doubt affect the style and quality of its output. Dubious ethics aside, the ever-growing pile of AI slop tracks and the threat to musicians’ livelihoods are genuine concerns for the industry. As things progress, I hope that an expanded feature set encourages producers to be more creative with these tools.
Image: Press
Suno Studio as a DAW
The most exciting element of Suno Studio is its ability to work at a more granular level. Any audio that you import or generate can be split into stems to work on further with a DAW-like workflow.
On a basic level, you can change volume, panning, the arrangement of any track, and a six-band EQ for further shaping. The quality of the stem separation can be a little hit and miss, with some parts being attributed to the wrong instrument stem. However, for the most part, it’s not far off what you would get using one of the current third-party stem separation services. Finally, being able to get access to a capella vocals and individual instrument parts is a dream come true for someone who loves to sample snippets of records in a traditional sense.
Another hugely useful feature is the ability to extract MIDI parts from a stem. I use it to generate intricate chord stabs for a garage track, and then export the MIDI to refine it in Logic Pro. The output can sometimes be a bit messy, as it’s simply converting the audio into MIDI, but the beauty of this workflow is that you can use your own pristine instrument sounds to improve the sound quality.
Perhaps most impressive is that you can load in a track and then generate a specific instrumental part over a chosen section. So you could highlight a middle eight and say that you want an “energetic saxophone solo”, and it will listen to the rest of the track and create something appropriate.
Suno Studio lets you record, so you can even sing in a melody and then convert it into a chosen instrument. As a test, I roughly record several parts using just my voice and a microphone. Then I convert them all into drums, bass, brass and vocal parts. The workflow is a bit clunky and it takes quite a few tries, as the generated parts drift out of time and some have mismatched swing. Several short parts also get turned into complex, wandering epics. It’s like having a real guitar player that can’t stop showing off with wild jazz noodling when all you want them to do is play the simple progression you’ve given them. Despite these frustrations, the final results were pretty impressive given how bad my original performance is. I can see myself using this generative replacement of audio to take some of my boring piano chords and give them a performative boost.
Some music creators may choose to work solely within Suno Studio, but for many, the ability to finally download audio and MIDI stems means they can import parts into a more powerful DAW for editing and processing. I encounter several bugs when using Safari, but things run smoother when I switch to the recommended Google Chrome.
EQ in Suno Studio. Image: Press
Suno Studio — the future?
It’s pleasing that Suno has listened to its users, and the many features that are being added offer finer control and more repeatable results. But there’s still an air of mystery about how to create a successful prompt, and the large amount of unpredictability can lead to time-consuming frustrations. Sometimes you think you’ve written a prompt that explicitly tells it what you want, but it still disobeys you and adds in an extra random synth solo on top of your a capella.
Suno Studio is still in Beta. I feel like my journey with using AI to enhance my music is just beginning, and I can see my own knowledge and prompting skills improving over time alongside Suno’s audio quality, feature set and predictability.
For all the times it frustrates me and doesn’t give me what I want, there are moments where it truly blows me away and creates a part that transforms the track I’m working on. Even if it’s not totally there yet, it’s an exciting glimpse of a future where we can work alongside these tools without them simply writing the music for us.

Key features

Browser-based Generative Audio Workstation
Lets you generate whole tracks or individual parts
Remixes your audio
Record ideas and then recreate parts using different voices and instruments
Persona feature lets you create re-usable voices
Inspo creates a new track based on up to four inspiration tracks
Auto lyric and artwork generation
Generate downloadable stems from your tracks
Audio to MIDI conversion
V5 models offers more intelligent and natural sounding songs and tracks
Premier Plan required for Suno Studio: includes 10,000 credits per month

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