I signed up, but it wasn’t what I thought it would be, it seems to be just a bunch of mainly guitar styles that are based on whatever chord is playing, so for example, unless you are specifically using the Chord Track to define chords, taking input from a MIDI file or part in the DAW, just maps out the basic 3 note chords, not 2 note chords as I would expect, being performed by legendary performers.
I’ve had Tonalic Essential as a Celemony (Melodyne) user for a while now, and I used it on one song in Cubase. The Essential version is limited to guitar parts only, and only one player’s parts at that. There are a variety of styles, but whether those will work for any specific song is up for grabs. To be fair that isn’t all that different from loop-based virtual guitar instruments (e.g. UJAM or NI Session Guitarist), though some of those (e.g. UJAM) will at least provide more variety, as well as consistency in sounds within any given preset (and the ability to tweak the sounds to a degree), unlike Tonalic, where each individual set may have sounds different from others, so the patterns you’re getting aren’t as freely combinable (which would also have been true of typical audio loops, and there you also wouldn’t have had the chord recognition that Tonalic, UJAM, and NI Session Guitarist give).
You have to go with the paid Tonalic subscriptions to get other instruments (e.g. drums, bass, mandolin, …) and players, and it seems to me that the highest end plan (Studio) is probably the only one that will really give really good flexibility.
In particular, when I used Tonalic on one of my songs (using the VST3 Instrument version since the new ARA support for Cubase/Nuendo was not yet available – there you had to enter your own chords in Tonalic, even if you already had a Cubase chord track), I used it for two acoustic guitar parts and one electric part in an Americana/country-flavored song (“New Mexico”, which released on all the typical streaming sites earlier this week). It worked reasonably well for that, but there were a few places where there were notes that were obviously (i.e. to my tastes) wrong. If I’d had the Studio version, I could have used the Refine capability to tweak those notes, but I didn’t. After rendering the results to audio, I was able to use Melodyne Studio to adjust the areas with wrong notes, but that was more tedious than it would have been to just do it within Tonalic, and my feeling is that most songs are going to need at least a few tweaks of this sort to suit what we’re (or at least I’m) likely to be looking for.
I also tried it on one additional song (more of a traditional country thing), but I just wasn’t finding anything that worked for me for that song. It would have been interesting to see if I’d have had better luck on the second song with the full set of players, but at least at present, my budget is sufficiently constrained that a $25 a month subscription isn’t likely to be in the cards.
I really like the idea of the new integration with Cubase in that I usually do make chord tracks in Cubase (more to as cheat sheets for me while I’m tracking parts than for the actual chord track uses), and having Tonalic follow that is helpful. However, I’m have not succeeded in getting the right zone preview function to actually let me hear the parts (possibly a Windows thing? – I noticed the Cubase/Nuendo getting started video was using Mac), which is actually a step backward from using the instrument version, where I could at least preview patterns. But hopefully that will be fixed (or some insight into what those of us who are experiencing are missing will be provided) soon. I also really like the concept of Tonalic in that it seems to have a lot more potential for control, at least in the studio version, than loop-based virtual instruments. But the subscription cost, is a big concern for me.