This tool is sold with one argument between the lines: If you watch all videos an their homepage, you will see that the effort during the production is relatively low in relation to the quality and uniqueness of the output. Less time needed for adjustments and the final touch.
I have just downloaded the Tonalic Essentials as I free gift. I have repeatedly tried to access the Studio Edition and get onto the £1 trial subscription for a month. Even with the help of AI I’m in a loop, that looks like if you’ve got the free version you can’t upgrade. Anybody succeeded?
if you don´t find a solution you could create a new account
I’m enjoying your posts as usual, @rickpaul 
Brilliant idea, as a way to remove a cr*ppie room sound!
Wondering, have you ever compared Waves Vx DeReverb with SpectraLayer?
This thought comparison of Tonalic with UJAM’s Virtual Guitarist series or NI’s Session Guitarist series is very helpful, thanks (bolded, italics are my emphasis)!
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I’d love to feed it a keyboard-played lead electric guitar line (unavoidably yuck- sounding) and get back something, perhaps using an iterative process, that sounds great that I’d be happy to put on my tracks.
I don’t think it can do that right now.
That is also my impression with respect to Tonalic. (Still haven’t tried it, though.) I think it is more for accompaniments than leads.
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Not really. To be honest, I didn’t even realize SpectraLayers Pro had a de-reverb module, though, just checking now, I see it does. I have tried the dereverb module in iZotope RX, but my sense is Waves Vx DeReverb is more specialized, or at least does a better job, for the case of a vocal mic (which is the only application I’ve attempted using any sort of de-reverb process for to date). From a workflow standpoint, though, it seems either RX or Vx would be more straightforward to use within Cubase for this function – no ARA (or external processing) required since both can function as plugins.
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I finally got a chance to try Tonalic, in the free Tonalic Essentials version for Melodyne users, on my current in-progress recording. The “TL;DR” version is I really like it, but there are pros and cons versus my main alternative for the specific uses I was making (acoustic and electric rhythm guitar parts – the Essentials version only has guitar parts, and only a subset of what would be available in the paid subscription versions), which would be the UJAM Virtual Guitarist series (or possibly the NI Session Guitarist Series).
Some general observations:
As far as I know, Tonalic doesn’t yet support ARA in Cubase, though I didn’t actually try it. I used it as an instrument on an instrument track. You can work on multiple Tonalic instrument tracks in a single instrument window by using a multitrack view within it.
Coming from my experience with the UJAM Virtual Guitarist and NI Session Guitarist products, the first thing I found (a pro for Tonalic) is that it isn’t necessary to switch patterns (or “tonalics” here) as frequently. There is some built-in variation, beyond just the chord tracking. I’d been doing that in my first attempt at a rhythm acoustic guitar part, and I ended up going back and redoing it after rewatching one of the Celemony videos that mentioned the variations.
I was initially just going to sequence one acoustic guitar part, but I ended up doing two of those plus one electric guitar part. The first one is the toughest since you need to program the chords into the sequence window (or whatever it’s called). I guess there is a way to drag MIDI to it. I’d been hoping the Cubase chord track would be usable, but, if so, I was doing something wrong, because that didn’t work. It wasn’t all that hard to just program the chord changes, though – it just felt redundant since I’d already set those up in Cubase. (I mostly just use those for my reference when tracking – I don’t typically drive any instrument parts from the chord track.)
There are various ways to check out the basic patterns on offer, with the key one that I find useful being, once you’ve programmed the chord changes, just playing patterns along with your tracks to see how they feel. This is after doing any narrowing down, for example for the specific instrument, genre (not so applicable in my case since there were none in the Essential collection that were literally the genre of my song), strummed/picked, etc.
Once you find something you like, you can start sequencing the patterns to build a track. Each set of patterns provides multiple “main” patterns (most I found had 3-5 of those), plus some transitions (which could include pickups and builds), and “endings” (which are mostly stops, and held notes or chords). Don’t let the “endings” name fool you. These can be useful in areas beyond just actual endings, for example if you just want to hold a chord for some amount of time, even in the middle of a song section.
There are some capabilities for tweaking the feel, such as swing, a positive or negative offset, and a timing parameter that can push or pull. The timing parameter is something I used to make the feel of the patterns better fit the drum track I’d already set up for my song. You can also make the pattern halftime or double time. I went for halftime with one of the three tracks I set up, keeping the others at the normal time.
There was a lot of experimentation involved in trying to fit my song, especially in working with transitions. Tonalic is somewhat limited in terms of the number of options within any given set of tonalics, and those are tied to a specific instrument sound. This is one area where something like UJAM AMBER2 can provide more flexibility since the sound can be controlled separate from the patterns, and AMBER2 (and the other UJAM Virtual Guitarist products) tend to have quite a few more patterns, with on the order of 2 dozen common patterns plus about a dozen patterns within a specific style. However, with the UJAM products, you don’t get a visual look at the patterns, whereas you do with Tonalic, and the visual really helps me in terms of sequencing patterns.
One thing I found in getting the best I could do with the parts I programmed with Tonalic is that there were a few areas of “wrong notes” (i.e. where the variations in the tonalics were decidedly not optimal for my song). This is an area where having the Studio version with its Refine capability would have been helpful. It may be that I could take the rendered audio and manipulate it with Melodyne Studio via ARA (I’ll decide whether I want to try that once I get further in my production), but it would be much more intuitive to do it within Tonalic prior to rendering the audio.
Speaking of rendering, since there is no MIDI on the track, and Render in Place requires selecting MIDI, I found that I needed to draw a blank MIDI clip the length of the track in order to render the parts to audio. Doing this could be important if only subscribing to a higher end version of Tonalic for a short period but wanting to do further work on a project using it after your subscription lapsed.
The bottom line for me on this specific project was, despite yesterday and the start of today being mostly learning curve, I ended up getting three parts done, and quite a bit faster than I’d have been able to do with the UJAM or NI products I’ve used for this same sort of thing in the past. The electric guitar part won’t be as flexible as other options since there was no option (at least that I found with the Essentials version) to just get a dry track to process with other plugins, but that’s no big deal with the acoustic guitar parts since those just go through a mic and preamp. I may end up needing to make some pitch tweaks in Melodyne Studio, or it may be that I’ll end up just working around the small bits here and there that feel non-optimal. But I do like the general workflow.
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Just to follow up on this specific bit, there were a number of areas of “wrong notes”, and on each of the three parts I’d created with Tonalic Essential, that bugged me sufficiently that I decided I needed to try and remedy them in Melodyne Studio. While I was successful in remedying most of the issues – there were a few where the offending notes were not appearing in the Melodyne display, so there was nothing to grab onto to change, but those weren’t egregious issues, so I ended up “settling” – it decidedly wasn’t a lot of fun. Also, because it has to be done at the audio level, it means not being able to change my mind on the Tonalic instrument tracks’ sequencing without potentially having to go back and redo the tuning.
Thus, my feeling that, for Tonalic to be truly useful, especially with respect to the promise of living up to its potential for efficiency in getting musical results quickly, the Studio version, with its Refine capability, is really likely to be necessary. That said, the results I got with Tonalic, and how quickly I was able to get them (over a 3-day period that also involved a fair amount of learning curve time), felt quite good, and probably still materialized more quickly, compared to what I’d have likely achieved with the UJAM Virtual Guitarist series (and probably even more so compared to than with the NI Session Guitarist series, which is much more limited in its patterns than the UJAM VGs).
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Thanks for the excellent review, @rickpaul !
Did you get a sense for how Tonalics world perform on a free-form/variable tempo project, or one with multiple key sigs?
No, the song I did was just one tempo and one key. That said, I’d think it should be okay in following a tempo map. As for key signatures, you do specify one key but you’re also specifying the chords, so maybe….??? The thing that perhaps might be a little risky on the latter might be the transitions, but, if you were using the studio version, there would also be the potential for using the Refine capability to tweak elements that didn’t quite work via the defaults.
I also wonder how it would do with time signature changes – that’s an area that some of the pattern-based virtual instruments sometimes have trouble with, or at last make you do a lot of extra work to make work well. For example, if you stick a single 2/4 bar in the middle of mostly 4/4 stuff, you might have to use a controller setting to tweak the offsets for where measure divisions reside. (I think that is something NI’s Session Guitarist needs, but Session Percussionist doesn’t even give a way of doing, which ended up making me give up on the latter for the first song I attempted with it.)
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I asked Celemony:
“How does Tonalic handle projects with varying tempos and time signatures?”
And Ulf replied:
…"It depends on the DAW you use.
With ARA and Studio One/Pro, the tempo changes are adapted automatically. If you use the Tonalic Instrument which is the way to go with most other DAWs, you will need to learn the changes".
The latter sounds a bit like Toontracks EZ series, a little bit, or more, of a head ache for use in variable tempo, variable sig projects.
I’ve never had any problem with Toontracks’ SD or EZ series dealing with changing tempos. For time signature changes, it is necessary to add those changes within the sequencer within SD3 or EZD3 (at least for synchronizing things when auditioning – you can cut up grooves as you like to make those sync up).
I’d like to understand what you’re saying in the part I highlighted a little better.
When i use EZD3 or EZBass in a variable sig project, I just resign myself to bars in the EZ grid and EZ’s bottom “song line” being off one, two, or three beats, etc., compared to Cubase.
I’m wondering if your experience is different … ?
If you right click in the EZdrummer ruler, you’ll get an option to bring up the Time Signature Editor:
Then you put the cursor at a point where you want to change the time signature and right-click (in the area below the ruler now), and pick Add from the menu:
Then, you’ll get a new time signature that defaults to the one that is already active, but you can replace the numerator (and/or denominator) with the value you want:
There are a limited number of options for the denominator.
The unfortunate thing is EZD (and SD) doesn’t just follow Cubase’s time signature track, so you do have to effectively recreate those changes inside EZD/SD’s time signature editor. But, if you’ve only got a few changes throughout the course of a song, it’s not too onerous. (My most typical case is inserting a 2/4 measure in a song that is mostly 4/4 at a transition point between sections to give some emphasis. Of course, if you want the time signature to return to the main time signature, you have to enter that at the point where you want the time signature to return.)
The other related thing is, if the grooves in EZD are 4/4, but maybe you want a 2/4 measure, you may have to chop those up to get what you want feel-wise – an example might be taking only the first and fourth beats within a single bar measure so you get the beginning and end intended without the extra two beats in the middle. But that’s not all that different from chopping things up for other fit of grooves to song purposes – I tend to do a fair amount of editing when building a drum track in SD3 (which I use most of the time, even when using EZXs), both in terms of chopping up grooves to fit better and with the other facilities, like making a specific drum busier or less busy and/or just editing parts with the grid. I mostly do that in the SD3 editor, though I eventually drag the grooves to the Cubase instrument track and mute the grooves within SD3 (especially for project archival purposes in case I might want to use the same MIDI with something other than SD3 in the distant future).
That is something I didn’t know - thank you!
As far as the rest, makes sense of course. I do like the way you work and communicate in general - much appreciated!
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I meant to add previously: that’s a great way to make the 4/4 groove optimized musically for a 2/4 bar. Another way to get nice 2/4 grooves is to exclude all other time sigs but 2/4 in the “Sig” filter in the top section of the Grooves tab.
(Talking EZD3 here, I think EZBass has the same ability to present only 2/4 riffs to us, but I can’t exactly remember if that’s true.).
True, but the potential issue there is they won’t match the feel of the groove set I’m using, and I’m typically picking grooves from the same set for any given song.
I don’t have any of the other EZ products (i.e. keys and bass) as I just play those parts from a keyboard. The parts I tend to program/sequence are drums/percussion and (most of the time) rhythm guitar parts (e.g. using the UJAM Virtual Guitarists or NI Session Guitarists, and now Tonalic on my current project).
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EZBass is pretty cool, with nice-sounding “guitarry” articulations like multiple slide options, hammer on/off, etc. that would be hard for me to play on the keyboard (I play my bass parts in on the keyboard as well).