Cubase 15: Using Celemony’s Tonalic

Tonalic is fully integrated into Cubase, making it incredibly easy to create performances that automatically follow the Chord Track as your song idea develops.

A partnership with Celemony brings Cubase users a powerful new virtual session musician...

I was really impressed with Celemony’s Tonalic, the full version of which I reviewed in SOS May 2026. It’s a very different prospect from the sort of generative AI engines that have grabbed headlines in the last couple of years, so do give that review a read if you want to explore it in more detail. But the bottom line is that, in both its Arranger and Studio versions, Tonalic does a remarkable job of putting multiple, believable virtual session musicians inside your DAW.

What does this have to do with Cubase? Well, the recent 15.0.30 update brought to songwriters working in Cubase Artist or Pro an intriguing new feature: Celemony’s Tonalic can be integrated directly into the Cubase feature set. What’s more, you get free access to Tonalic Essential, a ‘taster’ version that gives you all the core functionality of Tonalic Arranger, but focuses only on guitar. That could be useful in itself to many writers, but it also demonstrates very well the wider possibilities of Tonalic. And since, in Cubase, those possibilities extend beyond what some other DAWs can do, that’s what I want to take you through today. For example, in this integrated form, Tonalic can follow the chords in your Cubase Chord Track: change a chord or two as your song idea develops, and Tonalic’s performances will also automatically adjust.

Session Player

The content supplied with the Elements version is drawn from the Tonalic sessions recorded by Uwe Bossert (Tonalic’s musical director). It consists of both nylon‑ and steel‑strung acoustic guitar, as well as electric guitar performances. While this only represents a fraction of the content available with an Arranger or Studio subscription, there’s still a collection of nearly 300 patterns that’s organised into ‘sets’. Sets are groups of multiple patterns designed to be used together, so as to make building a coherent performance easy. But with suitable choices, you can easily mix and match content from different sets.

The range of performance styles includes strumming, picking, arpeggios, power chords and melodic lines and, as well as the main patterns within a set, you also get transitions (parts that can emphasise a song section change) and endings. So if you simply wish to create a guitar‑based ‘placeholder’ track to use as your song idea develops, this compact content collection included is more than adequate.

Creating such a placeholder guitar track involves three steps. First, create a chord sequence for the Cubase Chord Track. Second, choose performance clips in the new Tonalic panel, in the Project window’s Left Zone, and add them to a track in the main Project window. Third, if required, fine‑tune the performances in the Lower Zone’s Editor panel. When creating a guide track like this, rather than a finished performance, this can all be done remarkably quickly. It’s not dissimilar to the way you might use MIDI clips and any virtual instrument, then. But there’s more to Tonalic than that, so next, I’ll drill down into the nitty gritty of...