These three short audio examples demonstrate various points discussed in the Cubase workshop published in SOS September 2026.
www.soundonsound.com/techniques/cubase-15-using-celemonys-tonalic
All the guitar performances here have been created using Cubase 15’s bundled Tonalic Elements, but to provide a little musical context, I added some scratch drum and bass parts. a little compression aside, no mixing/processing has been applied — each example is intended to represent what Tonalic might offer as a ‘guide guitar’ at the early stages of a songwriting process.
Cubase With Tonalic Audio Example 01.wav
An eight-bar chord sequence is repeated four times, with the same drum and bass part backing providing a musical context. Each section features a single Tonalic ‘guide guitar’ part in a different performance style, based either on a single Tonalic clip or a combination of multiple clips to create more of a ‘performance’. Once an initial clip had been selected, each example was created very quickly, and all of them would adapt to any changes you made in Cubase’s Chord Track.
Cubase With Tonalic Audio Example 02.wav
In this example, two eight-bar sections use the same Tonalic clips — two ‘guide guitar’ performances, panned slightly left/right — but they’ve been adapted automatically by Tonalic’s engine to follow different chords in Cubase’s Chord Track. Again, simple drum and bass performances provide some context.
Cubase With Tonalic Audio Example 01.wav
In this example, Tonalic follows the chords in Cubase’s Chord Track for two eight-bar sections. This time, though, the chords are extended, more harmonically complex, each eight-bar section is played at a different tempo (one at 85bpm, the other at 120), and they feature a different Tonalic guitar performance. The clips were chosen to suit the more ‘jazz’ feel of the chords, though note I’ve used Tonalic Essential here; you’d have more suitable choices in Tonalic Arranger or Studio.
It’s worth noting that selecting a more complex chord (for example, an extended chord that would require five notes to fully voice) doesn’t mean that a Tonalic clip will necessarily voice the full chord. The number of notes played is, I think, constrained by the number of notes in the original performance from which the clip is derived (the Studio version’s Refine mode allows you to see this in a Melodyne-like display). But the engine recognises the complex chord forms, and adapts the performance’s chord voicing in a musically appropriate way.