Celemony Tonalic

Tonalic: a collection of session musicians captured by Celemony and available to perform virtually within your own DAW.

Tonalic is a new ‘virtual instrument meets session musician’ concept underpinned by Melodyne’s respected pitch‑shifting technology.

If you have used Melodyne, you will need no convincing about Celemony’s expertise in manipulating the pitch (and, indeed, timing) within audio recordings, including those containing polyphonic sound sources. However, their latest project Tonalic applies that expertise in a very different context — in Celemony’s own words, Tonalic provides “a musician by your side”.

If Celemony’s audio processing technology forms one cornerstone of Tonalic, the other is a substantial collection of audio content. This is derived from recording sessions featuring an impressive list of musicians and recorded in some equally impressive studio environments. It’s this content that Tonalic’s engine lets you adapt to suit the tempo, key and chord structure of your song. So, just how good is Celemony’s team of on‑call virtual session musicians?

Tonalic Concept

Tonalic is available in two versions — Arranger and Studio — on either a monthly or annual subscription basis. Studio offers some additional features, but both versions give you access to the same collection of performance recordings. This audio content is built around ‘Sets’, with each Set containing a compact set of performances from a specific musician and themed around a particular musical style/idea. A Set might contain several main performance Patterns (alternative phrases/parts similar in performance style), Transitions (useful for moving between musical sections) and Endings.

Currently, the Sets are focused on electric and acoustic guitar and bass, drums, percussion, and some other stringed instruments such as mandolin, ukulele, banjo and sitar. Celemony state that the collection will expand over time, and the subscription model is intended to ensure the musicians who supply the content can be properly remunerated for their efforts.

Given Tonalic’s processing technology, it’s a pretty safe bet that the audio is in some sort of bespoke format that allows the software’s algorithms to do their thing. Celemony are at pains to state that there is no AI‑based technology at play here, but there are elements of musicality built into the engine to ensure that the natural human feel of the original performances are retained as the software does its thing. All the audio content is stored online with on‑demand downloading when a specific Pattern, Transition or Ending is used. Yes, an Internet connection is therefore required but, in my own experience, the approach worked seamlessly and was very responsive.

While the technology that delivers Tonalic’s virtual session musician performances specifically leans into Celemony’s area of expertise, in broad terms, elements of the concept do bear comparison with other existing ‘virtual musician’ products. Obvious examples would be Toontrack’s EZkeys or EZbass, where MIDI‑based performances (also supplied by highly skilled players) can be adapted to suit your own choice of chords, key and tempo. Other examples might be PG Music’s Band‑in‑a‑Box or UJAM’s Virtual Guitarist series that can also provide both sound sources and performance options that can adapt to your project’s harmonic structure.

This underlying concept — a virtual instrument that can also deliver a convincing performance — is therefore a familiar one even if, under the hood, the technology used to achieve the resulting performances might be unique to each product. But, like the other products mentioned above, with Tonalic, it’s your chords and your song. You then direct the virtual instrument/performer to provide some suitably professional guitar, bass and drum performances for that song. And there’s no AI; there are no instrument‑based performances generated from a text prompt.

Tonalic Tour

Tonalic can run as a standalone version (essentially intended just for auditioning the audio content), as a plug‑in in the usual formats (VST3, AU and AAX), and via ARA (currently only compatible with Studio One/Fender Studio Pro but wider ARA support is in development). I did the bulk of my own testing within Cubase Pro 15 using the VST3 plug‑in. This installs just like any other virtual instrument and, in use, it worked very smoothly.

Tonalic’s stylish UI already makes it feel like a very polished product. On starting up, the upper portion of the display provides a flexible browse and search environment, including options based upon an initial selection of instrument type, broad performance style, or the musician involved. Depending upon your search criteria, you are then presented with either a list or a Set of performance clips, and these can be auditioned within your DAW project (if playback is running) or with a musical context provided by Tonalic instruments (if your DAW playback is stopped), as configured via the Preview options.

Tonalic features a very flexible browser/search environment to explore its impressive collection of performance content.

The lower portion of the UI contains Tonalic’s Chord Track and the timeline‑based track space onto which you drag, drop and arrange the performance clips, much like you might arrange audio or MIDI clips on the timeline of your DAW. Chords can be added to the Chord Track from the included Chord Panel, by dragging and dropping MIDI clips (Tonalic will extract the chords from the clip) or, after double‑clicking on the Chord Track to create an empty chord slot, by playing a chord via your MIDI keyboard. Tonalic’s chord knowledge seems extensive so, whether you want simple power chords or something more harmonically complex, the software will support it. As we will see later, Tonalic rather cleverly handles chord inversions/voicings within the engine, so don’t expect to see slash chord labels within the Chord Track itself.

Chords can be added to the Tonalic timeline in a number of ways, including via the built‑in Chord Panel.

Once placed on the timeline, the clips are termed 'Regions' and if you want to repeat a pattern across multiple bars, you simply drag a Region’s right edge; it will extend and, if that spans a chord change (or changes), the harmonic form of the performance will automatically adjust to fit. This is where Celemony’s remarkable pitch/tempo adjustment algorithms come to the fore as the results are completely transparent to the listener.

Each Set includes a collection of Patterns, Transitions and Endings that can be arranged along the timeline to create a complete performance.By combining patterns along the timeline, you can build a complete performance. This is particularly easy if you do that by browsing a specific Set where the combination of main Patterns, Transitions and Endings are all derived from a single musical idea/session, but you can mix and match clips from different Sets/instruments if you wish. The whole process very is intuitive and, of course, easily edited and refined as your song’s arrangement evolves.

Usefully, if you have multiple instances of Tonalic within your project, you can toggle on a multi‑lane display showing all of the currently active lanes associated and edit any of them within any single instance of the plug‑in.

Who’s Who?

The line‑up of musicians involved with the creation of the initial musical content for Tonalic is just as impressive as the technology. At the time of writing, there are some 31 musicians whose sessions you can dip into to provide parts for your own compositions. There are some seriously impressive session/live performance CVs here and names such as Kenny Aronoff, Brent Mason, Tim Pierce, Ace (Martin Kent), Bryan Sutton, Corey Britz, Nate Mendel, Paul Kleber, Rob Harris and Randy Bowland — amongst others — will be well‑known both within and beyond the inner circles of the high‑end session musician world.

I’m not sure what the hourly session rates for any of these top‑class musicians would be, but it would be considerably more than Tonalic’s monthly subscription price.Their collective skills span a huge range of musical styles; jazz, rock, blues, folk, country, classical, punk, funk, soul, R&B and more. While I’m sure the content coverage — in the hands of Tonalic’s musical director Uwe Bossert — will expand and diversify over time, the initial content platform is of a very high standard.

Making Arrangements

If you toggle Note View on in the track area (the button is located at the bottom left), as you arrange your clips as Regions along the timeline, it is fascinating to watch as their notes (or, perhaps more technically correct, note instructions) start to interact with both the chord changes and the adjacent Regions on the same track. Tonalic attempts to construct a musically coherent performance guided by voice leading principles and also to ensure some level of performance variety. The result is some very realistic performances that might be difficult to achieve by just chaining audio (or even MIDI) loops together. The performances sound played rather than processed; it’s all very natural and with no obvious audio artefacts.

When using multiple Tonalic instances, the impressive Groove Master feature provides something that’s rather like a global quantise option. Once opened, the compact panel lets you choose a ‘master’ source for all the tracks to lock in to. By default, this is simply the click (a straight groove locked to the musical grid). However, you can also choose one of your Tonalic tracks as the master source of the groove and all other tracks will be adjusted to follow this.

Rather wonderfully, you can also import grooves. Tonalic provides a compact collection of presets for this based upon MID files and containing grooves taken from Logic and MPC sources. However, you can also create your own grooves to import, either as MIDI or audio files so, if your project already has a part whose feel you want Tonalic’s performers to follow, that’s possible to do.

Finally, when viewing a specific Set in the upper panel — and from which you are going to select performance elements to drag to the timeline — at the bottom right of this panel, you have Swing, Timing and Nudge controls. If adjusted, these will apply globally to any of the performance clips from the Set placed upon the track. Equally, however, if this track is set as the Groove Master, Swing settings here can then also be applied to the other Tonalic tracks.

Tonalic’s groove quantising is impressive, and the end results can have the very distinct feel of good musicians playing in a room together. It is also remarkably easy to use so encourages experimentation.

Studio Time

If the above options meet your needs from Tonalic, then the Arranger version will suffice. However, the Studio version provides two key additional options to further finesse the performances.

First, you get a compact set of options for shaping the sound of each Tonalic instrument. As with the swing options mentioned earlier, these controls appear in, and are applied at, the level of a Set. For the harmonic instruments — guitars, bass, ukulele, etc — you can adjust Drive, Ambience and Effects. For the electric guitars and bass, Drive does what you would expect and gives you a means of adjusting the overall gain of the sound. For the acoustic instruments (including the drums), this feels more like subtly adjusting the mic preamp saturation. Ambience controls a reverb‑style effect. The Effect control is only active for those Sets (instruments) that feature a prominent effect. This might include delay or modulation on some electric guitar Sets, for example. For the drums, you get an additional Cymbals control that allows you to adjust the blend between the cymbals and the kit shells to taste.

While these controls are very effective, compared to many other virtual instruments, the degree to which you can alter the character of the sound of the underlying audio recordings is fairly limited. That said, for the acoustic instruments and the cleaner electric guitar/bass sounds, dialing back the Drive and Ambience controls leaves you with a dry enough sound that you could apply your own processing choices (including amp sims) within your DAW. Cymbal/kit shell balance and ambience aside, with the drums, what you hear is pretty much what you get.

However, do bear in mind that the sounds you are starting with are top‑class. The instruments have been beautifully recorded and, straight out of the box, are ready to sit within a mix with a minimum of fuss. Would it be great to be able to switch the electric guitar and bass into a ‘DI’ mode? Or to have the option to adjust the kick and snare volumes within the drum mix? Yes, it would. Maybe that will come but don’t think that you need either of these options in order to make Tonalic’s instruments sound great; they already do.

Tonalic Studio’s real secret weapon, however, is its Refine mode (the button’s located at the top right of the Track area) and it’s here that Tonalic’s Melodyne heritage becomes very apparent. With a Tonalic Region selected, Refine view then shows a Melodyne‑style view of the notes within that Region. Located top left are four tool options for working with the note objects: Voice Leading, Pitch, Amplitude and Timing. The latter three do pretty much what you might expect, and blur the lines between the editing of audio performances and MIDI notes. I’m not sure you get quite the degree of flexibility that Melodyne offers before such edits become obvious but, for example, it’s certainly possible to move notes within arpeggiated guitar chords by a semitone or two to add additional variety, or to change the volume of a note for rhythmic emphasis.

Tonalic Studio’s Voice Leading provides a remarkable way to control how your virtual musician works their way through your chord sequence.

However, of all these controls, the Voice Leading option is the most impressive and creative. It provides a stepped line superimposed upon the guitar or bass performance within the selected Region. By dragging a step up or down, you can adjust the overarching pattern of rising and falling pitch within the performance while still following the chord sequence. With chord‑based instruments, this is achieved by revoicing the notes within the chord, essentially creating a different inversion of the chord just as a real guitar player would do on a guitar neck. This allows you to dramatically change the musical mood created by even the simplest of chord sequences. Want your four‑chord sequence to lead to a rising conclusion for a sense of positivity or fall to strike a sadder, more melancholic mood? Either can be done, it’s incredibly easy to use and the results can feel a little like magic.

For drum Regions, Refine is perhaps less useful. For example, for a full kit, you see two rows of notes, with the lower one containing all the kit shells (kick, snare, etc) and the upper one the cymbals. Yes, you can go in and edit individual drum hits (for example, to make a snare hit louder), but it wouldn’t be a lot of fun to edit a whole performance in this fashion.

I’ll Hum It...

Well, perhaps not hum it, but whatever chord sequence you happen to come up with, after just a little dragging‑and‑dropping of clips, Tonalic will certainly play it on some combination of drums, percussion, guitar, bass and various other strumable or pluckable instruments with some considerable aplomb. It’s an elegant workflow with a very shallow learning curve. And, from a guitar player’s perspective, I absolutely love the additional control Studio’s Voice Leading options give you for shaping how any given set of chords are performed.

Of course, you do have to work within the performance and musical styles currently in Tonalic’s musical vocabulary. This initial collection does cover a broad range of musical styles — flavours of pop, country, folk, funk, soul and rock are well supported — but if your musical interests are niche rather than mainstream, you might currently have less raw material to work with. However, if what Celomony add by way of expanding the performance collection matches the quality of what’s available now, it will be very good indeed.

Time To Book A Session?

So how well does Tonalic live up to Celemony’s tagline of being ‘a musician by your side’? Is this a creditable collection of AI‑free virtual session musicians for your DAW? There are some significant pros and perhaps a couple of less significant cons. On the ‘pros’ side, the technology is undeniably impressive. As a result, instrument performances created with Tonalic can both feel and sound like real recordings made by real musicians. The way they can be made to groove together is impressive and, in the Studio version, the additional control provided by the Voice Leading feature is brilliant.

In the ‘cons’ column, you might place the relatively modest sound‑shaping options, the mostly mainstream nature of the musical performance styles currently available (although what’s here is excellent) and, for some people, the fact that it’s a subscription‑only product.

At its heart, Tonalic serves a similar function to any other virtual instrument that includes a ‘performer’ element within its feature set. For example, during testing, it was interesting to use it alongside the likes of Toontrack’s EZ trio — drums, bass and piano — and I was happily able to start in either world with a chord sequence and then encourage the other to join in. Just as with EZkeys or EZbass, once your project’s chords are in place, Tonalic’s capacity to let you easily experiment with different performance options is liberating and, when you find what you like, the believability of the final performances is remarkable.

While I can certainly understand why some more casual users are not so enthusiastic about the concept of subscription models, I think busy songwriter/producers, crafting songs for demo, release or media applications, will absolutely love what Tonalic offers for a fixed (and relatively modest) monthly/annual business cost. All that said, Celemony have a launch offer letting you fully explore for a month for just €1. If you are on the fence, this is as close to try before you buy as you can get.

Hats off to Celemony because, right from the off, Tonalic is very, very good indeed.

Personally, I think Celemony have done a remarkably good job of delivering on their ‘musician by your side’ claims. Even in this first iteration, Celemony have hit a home run with the UI and engine; it’s beautifully done, easy to use, and gets great results fast. Here’s hoping the project gets the kind of support that allows Uwe Bossert and the Tonalic team to keep expanding upon the collection of sessions/sets. Seeing this happen will undoubtedly persuade more potential users to take the plunge. That said, hats off to Celemony because, right from the off, Tonalic is very, very good indeed.

STOP PRESS: Celemony updated Tonalic shortly after this review was written. See SOS News for more info.