So, been trying out Tonalic Essentials with Cubase 15 Pro as ARA plugin. It seems very buggy to me. Is it just me?
Cannot stretch events, only duplicate them - this might just be the way the ARA plugin works.
Events do not show any “note” data inside them, just 2 horizontal lines.
I have simple 4-chord groove in 3/4 and added a strummed acoustic guitar part. The chords are written into the chord track. Tonalic constantly anticipates the chord change by a whole beat, which sounds terrible. I cannot find any setting to prevent this. There is nothing overlapping in my chord data or anything like that.
I exported my drum track and imported it to Tonalic to use a Groove Master, which resulted in a very clunky guitar part, made even worse by the above.
So far, it seems very clunky and timing consuming unless you want to use it to build a track only using Tonalic!
The instrument mode, which is what I have been using since release, works much smoother since it all stays internal to Tonalic. You just do not have as much flexibility like the chord track and need to manually work that out between Cubase and Tonalic with constantly copying over midi tracks/updates.
I am sure this will all get smoothed out…its all new and obviously needs refinement. I am just glad its started!
my experieince with the Tonalic VSTi version was that if you have chord changes that are not on the beat, tonalic doesnt get them which is so annoying, i often have “vorgezogene Akkordwechsel” in my songs and i always manually need to change that in chordtrack from tonalic itself to make that work, i was hoping with the ARA release and integration in cubase this would be an issue of the past, but it doesnt seems so
fixing it manually in the VSTi instrument was an option, but i guess you cannot with the ARA Version if tonalic missinterprets the chords position from the chord track wrong.
(i havnt installed the latest cubase version yet as i´m in the middle of a project and dont want to mess around with it yet)
playhead exactly on the chord at the cubase chordtrack, tonalic chord is off
Melodyne had a similar issue. My workaround was to make sure the tempo track was enabled and, even if the tempo was static, make sure one tempo point was set, then disable. That seems to work every time. Melodyne is looking for something to sync up with in the tempo.
thank you for the tip, i´m using a tempo track already though and of course also made sure tonalic gets all the tempo and tempo changes from the project through the tempo-learn button
i also tried couple of different things already, when importing the chords into tonalic, like shortening the notes in the midi chord track, and stuff like this but it made no difference
i reported this also to celemony at the end of january, and they provided me with the workaround to fix it in tonalic inside. which works, but its extra time.
i thought i cant be the only one that has chord changes not on the 1 of beat? lol
however
I guess, the more user are reporting this to celemony, the better, so they will start acknowledge its an issue for more users and work on their chord timing interpretation a bit
everything works on my systems, various ARA programs, WaveLab, SpectraLayers, Melodyne studio, everything. Just Tonalic doesn’t. Not even “as an instrument”.
Freebie or not, I don’t want to spend even one more minute to explore - or attempt to “repair” - something that doesn’t even show its basic functionality right out of the box. Deinstalled.
Cheers,
Markus
– 20260613 - OBSOLETE POST: please read my response at the bottom of this page. Tonalic essential is now working as expected. –
Thanks for the workaround @Paul_J. It worked for me! It looks like an active tempo track is required, as it’s also mentioned on their support page:
Chords play at incorrect positions when Active Tempo Track is disabled
When switched to Fixed Tempo Mode by disabling Active Tempo Track, timing information passed to ARA extensions may become inconsistent. This can cause Tonalic’s chord playback to no longer align with the Chord Track.
Recommendation: Keep Active Tempo Track enabled when working with Tonalic in Cubase or Nuendo.
thats great news, happy to hear this workaround worked for you with the Tonalic ARA version.
once i finished the current project i´m working on, i also do the update
I finally got a chance to use the ARA version of Tonalic on my current project yesterday and wanted to revisit this thread with that in mind. (Previously, I’d only done some quick testing with the ARA version, but I had used the instrument version on an earlier project a month or so back.) Some thoughts on some of what has been discussed above, a few other observations, plus one new (at least that I hadn’t noticed anyone mentioning previously), but thankfully short-lived, issue I encountered. I’ll start with the last part:
I started out doing some searching for acoustic guitar parts to use in my project, and I found some candidates, both seeking strummed and picked parts. No problems on the preview front now that I’d applied the 32-bit floating point audio engine workaround. When I picked one of those (strummed) to start putting in my project, however, doing both some playing back of parts I’d dragged into the project and some previewing in the lower zone, things got dicey, including there being points where no audio would play from Tonalic, be it in the track or the lower zone previews. What I observed at this point that was that the little user/login icon in the lower zone had a pink (if I remember correctly dot) on it and the circle part of it kept going around, like a progress or “working on it…” loop. This lasted a while, and I don’t recall if it just cleared by itself, whether I restarted Cubase and that made the difference, or whether I restarted Cubase and it didn’t make a difference but eventually cleared. The problem did not recur for the rest of my session (probably 2-4 hours).
My best guess on this is that there must have been some temporary issue talking to the Tonalic server to download and cache whatever ends up resident on the Cubase end. However, I think (and I wouldn’t swear to it) that I was still able to preview parts in the right zone during this time.
This aspect was a little disorienting to me at first as I’d try lengthening a clip with the wrong handle, but I eventually got used to it. I also learned you can shorten clips using the bottom-right stretch handle, and this ended up being particularly useful when needing a section shorter than whatever a specific Tonalic clip’s length was, for shortening ending clips that were too long for the context, and for shortening pickup parts (that one may have been with the bottom-left stretch handle?). I also noted I could cut the clips for similar purposes. And, in general, Tonalic adjusted the parts in reasonable (i.e. musically useful) ways.
I see this is “normal”, but it isn’t very useful, and, of course, was not consistent with the original demo videos with Studio One. I hope they eventually make Cubase show the note data, too, as it makes it much more convenient to give context on any needed editing.
I wonder if the 3/4 time signature is relevant in this issue. In my project, which is 4/4, I did notice Tonalic sometimes pushes the chord change somewhat, but it feels to me like what a real guitar player would do in the context of my project (which is in a traditional country style in this case). I do know working with time signatures other than 4/4 can also sometimes be challenging in Toontrack’s Superior Drummer at times, despite their having plenty of grooves in different time signatures and some features that are supposed to help adapt grooves to different time signatures. I do wonder if the timing/feel-related controls in Tonalic could help here? Maybe you tried those already, though, and they didn’t help in your case?
The other thing I did notice, both in this project and the one I’d done earlier using the instrument version, is that some loops simply didn’t work with my project due to embellishments outside of the chords (e.g. for note leading) that might have worked in some contexts but not mine. In most such cases, I simply had to choose other loops for the sections where that was a problem. (In my original use with the instrument version, I also ended up using Melodyne Studio after rendering the Tonalic parts to audio to “correct” a few “wrong notes” where I thought the tradeoff between the feel of the loop and the extra work was worth going with the extra work.)
I’d originally attempted using the instrument version of Tonalic on my current project, but gave up and just played some virtual acoustic guitar parts on sampled instruments instead figuring there wasn’t anything in Tonalic that matched (or I’d end up spending way too long finding something if there was). However, I wanted to revisit Tonalic with the ARA version now that at least the chord track integration was there and the general workflow should make finding and using loops more convenient.
When I started here, I was still feeling like the feel wasn’t working for the parts I found that were closest, so I exported my drum track to audio and imported that to use Tonalic’s Groove Master feature. In my case, it felt like that really helped on the feel front. While I encountered a few other hiccups here and there (i.e. in the sense of my learning curve and smoothness of my workflow), it seems to have made a positive difference for this project.
In my case, I am not using only Tonalic. By the time I tried the ARA version of Tonalic in my current project, I already had drums (based on sequencing and editing grooves in Superior Drummer 3), bass (MODO Bass 2, played on keyboard), lap steel and fiddle (Indiginus’ The Steel and The Fiddle, respectively, initially played manually, then heavily edited for controls like expression and keyswitches), and piano (IK PianoVerse, played manually). I also had two acoustic guitar parts (one each using Acoustic Samples’ Sunbird and GD-6, played manually from a keyboard), plus lead and background vocals. The feel of the song was solid, but I wanted to see if I could do better on the acoustic guitar parts by using Tonalic. I was especially interested in whether I could get sections of the song where my keyboard-based “strumming” (just played, not using actual strumming capabilities in the instruments, which I was playing in Solo mode) might be able to be improved. The question was whether I could either augment the guitars I’d already done or replace them entirely using Tonalic. I spent a total of about 4 hours in my attempt, with a fair learning curve (not to mention the issue I mentioned above), with probably an hour of that overall part of the session taken up by other things (i.e. outside the project), so maybe about 3 hours total with the Tonalic-specific part.
This reminds me quite a bit of loop-based sequencing in general, where there will always be some tradeoffs that related to capabilities (e.g. in audio loops you can’t really change the instrument or sound, or really even the types of chords, whereas some loop-based virtual instruments do chord recognition but make it hard to find patterns with the right feel, and just playing virtual instruments may mean a lot of MIDI editing to get more believable, expressive parts), the amount of time taken to go from any initial ideas to a final result, and the likely need to compromise your original ideas to get believable results.
In the case of Tonalic (at least the Essential version that I’m using), the sound is pretty much baked into any given set, so can you find a sound that will work for your project (even if it’s not the idea sound you’d prefer) that also has a playing style that works in that context, enough flexibility to change things up a bit for different parts of the song, etc.?
On the strummed part, I fairly quickly found a set that would work pretty well for most of what I wanted. There were a few things here and there where, for example, I might want to change up the feel halfway through the loop length, and it took me a while to figure out some of the mechanics, including how things work when you drag one clip over another, but then change your mind. (It seems like it keeps the original clip there since, if you remove the new one, it fills in the space.) I also needed clear held out chords at the end of one section that didn’t ring too far into the next section, and it took me a while to figure out that just changing the length of the ending clips would do that (as opposed to just truncating the chord ring out unnaturally).
On the picked part, I found another set that worked in some parts of the song, but didn’t quite work in others. In particular, I wanted to use that same set in the parts where it didn’t work, but where it would work if using the half-tempo feature. But you couldn’t just change that on clips within one section. If you changed it, it would change away from the project-matched tempo for the other clips that were working on the track. It turned out, though, that I could use the same set on a second track, changing to the half-tempo only on that second track, and it ended up being relatively seamless in the overall two Cubase track for the single picked part. It could be confusing, however, as to which was active when in terms of what showed up in the lower zone. I had to keep selecting clips to get it to switch tracks, and if I deleted a clip, it might switch back to where it had been before. It would have been nice if the half-tempo/normal tempo/double-tempo control could be configured on a per-clip basis, rather than having to use multiple tracks. (In some loop-based virtual guitar instruments, you can use a keyswitch to switch back and forth.) Ultimately, I’ll just need to merge the two rendered tracks at the audio level.
I don’t think there is really any “prove me wrong” in this stuff, only how well it does or doesn’t work for any individual’s workflow, project-specific needs, and alternatives for filling those needs. In my specific case on this latest project, I can do picked acoustic guitar parts pretty easily and (at least reasonably) believably by just playing them on a keyboard. I have other virtual instruments (e.g. UJAM Virtual Guitarist AMBER 2), that I might have used for the strummed parts, but I wanted more fingerpicking on this song, and it always takes me a long time figuring out which Amber loops to use where in a song, and then there is a lot of keyswitching to add. Of course, it doesn’t follow the chord track, though I may be able to render the chord track to MIDI and move things around a little to fit Amber’s range to get a starting point there. The short of it, though, is I’d have spent a lot more time getting the strummed part from Amber than I did with Tonalic yesterday to get both of its parts, despite the one weird hiccup and learning curve issues. Of course, I might not have found loops that felt right for my song (especially since I only have the Essential edition).
So I guess the bottom line for me, at least for this project, was that it worked pretty well for me and probably got better parts than I’d have gotten in any similar amount of time with my other tools. Now I do have to figure out what I want to do with the earlier guitar parts I’d added in terms of replacing them or using parts of those alongside the Tonalic parts.
Thank you so much for your review. I am still struggling to understand Tonalic. Using the instrument and creating a ‘performance’ with two or three other Tonalics, but can’t figure out how to import them into Cubase. or I just need to record the audio? and call it a day? I will try and work this out. If I choose something from the right zone, import into cubase–yes those 2 lines are off putting–I have noticed that in the instrument view, some of the main parts are not what is showing in the right zone. The naming convention is a bit off to me. So for instance if I do use just instruments, like the performance, I have to dig thru the right zone to find them and then import to a audio. I’m sure i am doing something and quite a few things wrong, just a bit irritating at the moment. But thank you for this review and I believe you had a initial review in another part of this forum.
If you’re using the VST3 instrument version, the right zone Tonalic is not applicable, other than to the degree that you could search through the same content as you can directly in the instrument version.
My recollection of using the instrument version (somewhat vague in that it was over a month ago), was that you sequence the parts within the instrument, with using an instrument track for each part you want, and you can view the parts within the instrument itself, be it one at a time more multiple parts at a time.
Once you’ve got what you want there, I think what I did was just draw a blank clip on each associated instrument track that covers the length of the part needed, then select that clip and render to audio to get an audio track, after which I disabled the instrument track. I don’t know if another option might be to drag the Tonalic clips directly onto the instrument track (a la what I do with Toontrack Superior Drummer grooves once I’ve got things sequenced within SD3 itself, after, which I mute those clips within SD3 to avoid having both the MIDI-driven hits and the internal hits sounding).
But now that the ARA version (i.e. right zone and lower zone) is available, I doubt I’d use the instrument version. I guess some said above it seems to work better for them, but the ARA version has worked just fine for me (aside from the one glitch in connecting to the server, but I’d guess the instrument version could have a similar thing happen, too, if there were actually connection problems).
I’m viewing the right zone as mainly a search engine with previews, where you can also have those previews be in the context of your song (i.e. via the chord track and maybe the Groove Master). Once you find something you want to use, you can drag it into the Cubase project window, and if you drag in an empty area, it will create a new audio track with that Tonalic clip in it. Once you’re at that point, though, it makes more sense to use the lower zone for further sequencing of clips from the set the clip you found via searching was in (besides the main parts, there are also transitions, pickups, and endings associated with each set) to keep things to the same instrument and general feel (albeit with variations). At that point, it is somewhat similar to other ARA editors, where you select a clip you want to work with, and that will show that one in the lower-zone. Once you’ve got everything you want, you can also select those Tonalic clips and render to audio then disable the Tonalic track (or you could continue using it as a live Tonalic track, similar to having the same option with an Instrument track).
If you haven’t already seen it, there is a good video on using the ARA version of Tonalic in Cubase at:
I’ve now come to the conclusion that Artefakt Guitar from Steinberg is the better option compared to Tonalic. Also, Artefakt Guitar is a full pro version from the start, where you can edit and refine everything. It fits my workflow better, and there are no issues like reported here with Tonalic.
They’re extremely different. I bought Artefakt guitar when it initially came out and upgraded. I’ve tried using it a few times on my productions, but without any success to date. And, of course, it is mostly aimed at hard-edged electric guitar styles, which I use occasionally, but certainly not in every song.
For me, the UJAM Virtual Guitarist series and NI Session Guitarist series are a closer comparison to Tonalic, and, in both cases, they cover quite a few potential styles, albeit at the cost of buying multiple products. Like Artefakt Guitar, these are also buy-once products, though perhaps less flexible (or, in the UJAM case, not as intuitively flexible) than Artefakt Guitar in terms of editing/refinement potential. I have used products from both of those series successfully in quite a few of my recordings across a number of genres. (I also frequently use the virtual guitar-type products from MusicLab and Acoustic Samples, though mostly for hand-played parts, rather than loop-based parts. I also use the Session Guitarist series just as much for hand-played parts as loop-based parts, though I’ve used it in both contexts.)
The key things I can say about Tonalic Essential thus far are I’ve had good luck in fitting it into both of the recordings I’ve tried it on thus far (both in country-flavored genres, with two acoustic guitar parts in both and also an electric guitar part in the first one), and I was able to come up with the parts I used quite a bit more quickly than in any of my other loop-based products. (I can generally come up with parts more quickly when I play the parts directly from a keyboard, but then there might be a good deal of programming required in some of them to add keyswitches and controllers.)
But, yeah, I really wish Tonalic were a buy-once thing for the full capabilities and library (or at least the guitars subset of that – I’m not sure if I’d be likely to end up using any of the other instruments, though, if I do eventually go for the full version subscription, I’ll at least try some other types to see how useful they are for me). Of course, it would also depend on how high the price tag for that buy-once product was whether I could afford it or not.
I’ve been doing some testing with Tonalic Essential in Cubase and I think I may have identified a limitation (or possibly a bug) related to tempo ramps in the Tempo Track.
Initially, I thought Tonalic was simply failing with complex tempo tracks, but after more testing in a clean project I believe the issue is more specific.
Test Setup
I created a new project and used a Tempo Track containing gradual tempo ramps (accelerando and ritardando).
For example:
85 BPM
gradual ramp to 90 BPM
later some ritardandos
one or more sudden tempo changes
Tonalic clips were inserted normally and audio playback worked.
What I Observed
When the project tempo is constant, everything seems fine.
However, when a Tonalic clip plays across a tempo ramp, it appears that Tonalic only reads the tempo at the beginning of the clip.
For example:
Tonalic clip starts while the project tempo is 85 BPM.
The project tempo gradually increases during the clip.
Tonalic seems to continue playing as if the tempo were still 85 BPM.
At the next Tonalic clip, it appears to re-read the current tempo and re-align itself.
The result is that:
the first beat of the clip is correctly aligned,
subsequent beats gradually drift away from the Cubase grid,
the amount of drift increases throughout the clip,
then the drift resets when the next Tonalic clip starts.
The effect becomes much more noticeable with longer clips and larger tempo ramps.
My Current Hypothesis
It seems as if Tonalic samples the project tempo only at clip start rather than continuously following the Tempo Track throughout the clip.
In other words:
Fixed tempo = works correctly
Sudden tempo change between clips = seems acceptable
Continuous tempo ramp during a clip = timing drift
Questions
Can anyone reproduce this behaviour?
Does Tonalic officially support continuous tempo ramps?
Is there a setting that forces Tonalic to follow the Tempo Track more accurately?
Has anyone successfully used Tonalic on projects with accelerandos and ritardandos?
I’d be very interested to hear whether other users see the same thing or if I’ve overlooked something in my setup.
On 1, both of the projects I’ve used Tonalic on, the first with the instrument version and the second with the ARA version, have had fixed tempos, so I (obviously) haven’t seen this. I don’t have time to try it at present.
On 2, the answer is that it does support tempo changes. See the video I’ll link below for the instrument version, and that video implies that the ARA version should follow tempo changes:
The video doesn’t mention tempo ramps, though the example they are using looks like it has a lot of tempo changes (if I’m interpreting the screen correctly). But does that DAW implement “continuous” tempo changes by sending out a bunch of individual tempo changes? (Side note: In the past, I had problems with an NI instrument, NOIRE, dealing with tempo changes – probably ramps in my case – on playback, though it rendered okay. It turned out this was a widely reported issue related to a delay used within the instrument, whether you were actually using the delay in the sound you were using or not.)
On 3, my suspicion is that, as long as you’re using the ARA version, there shouldn’t be anything special to do, but this may be worth contacting Celemony support on if you don’t get any resolution here. On 4, as noted above, the projects I’ve used it on don’t have tempo changes, no less ramps.
Just thinking out loud what happens if you put in a bunch of step tempo changes to at least come close to simulating a ramp? Does that play back okay? Also, does the issue also occur when rendering to audio or only on playback? (See my side note on NOIRE above.) The only other thing I can think of at the moment is, if Tonalic truly does have a limitation of only reading tempo at the start of a clip, is if cutting the Tonalic clip into segments might be an interim workaround (i.e. minimizing the drift). That said, it also might mean that each cut starts at the beginning of the Tonalic sequence rather than where it left off in the larger clip that was cut into smaller parts.
I’ve been using Tonalic ara for about a week. My thoughts so far - the sounds are outstanding. The use of the chord track to guide the tonalics is fiddly. The chord track itself isn’t that intuitive in that say you have a chord of A and a beat later D. You can’t just shorten the chord symbol for A until you enter the D and drag it back. Fine for simple chords but can quickly out of hand when entering chords with inversions and differs bass notes etc. Also not clear to me how to drag in different tonalics correctly for say a build up over a variation in the chords. You can’t shorten the tonalic bars but how that relates to the actual playback isn’t obvious. Over a number of bars the chord track can get really messy looking and quite easy to lose your place as you end up with what appears to be a lot of overlapping blocks. So a work in progress as far as I can see. But great potential with this.
Tonalic does seem to respond reasonably to chord track changes within a Tonalic clip. Mind you, my experience in this area is with only one or two changes, at most in the space of a clip, and mostly (exclusively?) on beat boundaries, so, if there were a bunch of changes, including changes on offbeats, maybe it would be different.
That said, many of the Tonalic patterns I have used do things that aren’t necessarily sticking within a chord – e.g. they might be sticking within the scale of the key and chord. So lots of chord changes in such instances might get notes that don’t seem to go well with what you have in mind. This would be a clear case where the highest end Tonalic subscription with its Melodyne-like Refine capability could be useful. (Short of that, if you have Melodyne Studio, that could be used to do similar tweaks after rendering to audio. I had to do that on one Tonalic track on the first project I did with the instrument version of Tonalic.)
I do think that creating a chord track that conveys all your intentions, especially as they may differ between instruments (e.g. a guitar might play simpler chords than a keyboard in the same area) is a complicated subject. I tend to create pretty simple chord tracks, but I’ll often play more complex chords in the context of following those chord tracks. I do, however, use inversions with different bass notes, such as A/C#.
