I thought it was going to be like a revoicing application but alas, it isn’t.
There are revoicing programs for, voice but not instruments, unfortunately as much as I believe it to be part of the future of music production.
I’ve been hunting around but I haven’t found anything useful yet.
Maybe they/Celemony need to just go to the nickel and diming strategy by selling each artist pack individually? Maybe even more granular than that? Each artist has a instrument category and each instrument has a style pack. 20 bucks a pop.
We seem to love that and have not complained about it. Give us some demos. We like the pack, we buy the pack?
Uwe Bossert would be the musician makin bank!
no its not revoicing, its not listening to your existing song material, it just has the tempo and the chord track as reference for it to work
hi i dont do subscriptions and never will ,I know you say this is nothing to do with steinberg but !! never the less they are promoting this product and therfor supporting the subscription model , if i suspect that cubase will follow this path in the future then i will simply never update or pay them a penny more and change my DAW I have been using cubase since SX and have upgraded since cubase 10 so please dont let this be the thin end of the wedge hope you are listening Stienberg .
I agree with you.
Should musicians receive royalty payments?
Of course, but if there are also guitar plugins without a subscription, that proves it is possible. However, we can all think differently about it and we all have a solution. Personally, I am happy with Tonalic, and you can find many applications for it. I use the tool because you can easily save and reuse it after making adjustments.
Succes
From my perspective, what Steinberg have done is provide a deeper level of ARA integration than they’ve done in the past, for example with the Chord track part (and, hopefully in the future, something that allows displaying the meaningful patterns in clips), and that Cubase did not have prior to 15.0.30 (but Studio One did have). Perhaps that functionality will also carry across to other ARA plugins in the future (e.g. it would be nice if Melodyne could also read Cubase’s chord track instead of depending on interpreting it from the note data). And the free Tonalic Essential version, while requiring an account on the Tonalic site, does provide some value (I’ve used it on four recordings to date, three with the ARA version that became available in Cubase 15.0.30 and one with the Tonalic Instrument that Celemony provided to its customers earlier, where it was necessary to manually enter the chords in Tonalic itself).
If the subscription doesn’t provide sufficient value to you, by all means, don’t subscribe. (I may someday, but, at least for the time being, it is not something that fits my budgetary constraints.) I do have a bunch of permanent purchase virtual instruments (e.g. the UJAM Virtual Guitarist series and a number of instruments from the NI Session Guitarist Series) that I’d generally have used in the same contexts I’ve used Tonalic Essential for to date. Thus far, though, since I started using Tonalic Essential in that context, I’ve been able to achieve similar or better results in a lot less time than it would have taken me with those alternatives.
Yeah, this is the part that helps me understand why Tonalic probably needs to be a subscription. If it were a significantly less expensive subscription (e.g. the UAD Spark for $99 a year to get access to all UAD native plugins) for the higher-end Tonalic subscription, I might have already gone for it. But, beyond the additional patterns (which come with the lower end paid subscription), it is really the refinement capabilities that are only in the higher-end version that I would want, and, at least at the moment, I’m mainly interested in it for rhythm guitar parts.
An alternative might be if they did it similarly to how Toontrack does the basic Superior Drummer or EZ Drummer, where you get the full power of the basic software and some limited sets of patterns, but then add collections of additional patterns, for example to suit a specific genre and instrument, for permanent purchase. Then they could compensate the players off product royalties (and probably some upfront pre-payment of royalties if a one-time work-for-hire thing didn’t suffice). Toontrack has gotten a lot of money off me over time with that sort of arrangement, but there has never been a keep paying or lose access concern, and the SDX and EZX add-ons I picked up 20 years ago (yep, I got my initial EZD and first few EZX’s back in 2006!) can still be used in my current projects.
That would probably to result in Celemony’s get more of my money (assuming reasonable pricing) since, for example, right now I’m mostly working on some traditional country and Americana stuff, but at some later point I might be more likely to work on pop/rock or something else, and a reasonably priced “Nashville Guitars” add-on, once you have the basic product (which should be the functionality of the higher end subscription, but only the Essential library or perhaps that plus some other starter sets, for example to add initial bass and drums sets to tease for that side of things). At least at the moment, I’m only interested in guitars (and other string instruments like banjo and mandolin) since I do my drums with SD3 and the various addons and manually play my bass parts from a keyboard with virtual bass instruments (mostly MODO Bass 2 at present). (If I ever do go for a Tonalic subscription, I’ll at least experiment with it for bass. Not sure about drums as I really like the flexibility of being able to mix and match grooves with kits that wouldn’t likely be an alternative in Tonalic.)
But it’s Celemony’s call, and they’ll get some business this way and miss other potential business due to the arrangement. IMHO, it really doesn’t reflect at all on Steinberg, though I’m super glad Steinberg added the ARA functionality that lets Tonalic work better, whether or not I ever go beyond Tonalic Essential.
yes I agree with what you say But I can’t justify on going charge for anything except my electricity ,
and I’m considering plug in solar for that.
I would have to spend a lot of time learning there workflow and and then being tied to It,
As I only do this stuff as a part time hobby I will never find the type of money they want on a monthly basis,
especially as there can be many months in between projects, not to mention different project types.
The model Black magic design uses for Davinci resolve means i get all future updates and full functionality
for a 0ne off fee 2 to 3 hundred pounds, so i know i will always have it even if they go bust, I just loose updates,
it is imho greedy to pay as you go it breaks the workflow if you don’t keep up with the payments,
so as i say i will never go to any subscription model end of story,I buy my cars I don’t lease them and never will.
Maybe that’s why the Scots get a reputation for being Mean but it is easier to save a pound than make one LOL.
I feel the same way; I don’t think this model will be a success either. Furthermore, I think Tonalic is great, especially when you work within the instrument. You create the track, then render in place, and then briefly edit it in Melodyne. You just have to find the most convenient way yourself.
You do it as a part-time hobby but call it “greedy” for other people to get paid for their work?
What do you do for a living? How do you get paid? Are you greedy?
Just wait til you need to pay a subscription fee to use your computer or drive a car. And recite into your smartphone your daily devotion to the omnissiah before it lets you login, and checks your credit score.
Value for the producer but not value for the listener. Carboard fake sounds is not good for the entertainment value and wellbeing of the general public.
This is the same argument that the people justify piracy for. “I can’t afford FL Studio so I just crack it and if I make money with it then I’ll pay for it.”
It’s just stealing, nothing more.
Just to be clear, I’m not trying to convince you to pay for a Tonalic subscription. My only “argument” (if you want to call it that) with your comment was the implication that Steinberg either shouldn’t have added the Tonalic ARA integration or shouldn’t have promoted it. I predict the integration work will have benefits in other areas (e.g. my hope that it will also make Melodyne work with the Cubase chord track), and the Tonalic integration, even with just using the free version, has already benefited some (like me since I’ve already used the ARA version for maybe a half dozen tracks across two recordings – after having used the non-ARA free version Celemony provided to customers for a few more tracks on an earlier recording). There are plenty of things Steinberg includes in Cubase that I’ll never use (e.g. most of the media library content), but, as long as the Cubase updates provide enough things I do want, I pay the upgrade fees and just ignore the parts I don’t want. And they’ve also occasionally provided freebies that effectively get you on a third-party developer’s mailing list that lead me to other things that do interest me (that is exactly how I got into UAD native plugins, with the PolyMax synth, which I’ve actually only used on one recording to date, having been the “gateway drug” that got me trying out some of their other plugins that later became key parts of my workflow – I think Sound City Studios was the first of that sort, then a free year of Spark subscription that came with another purchase got me hooked on many others, and I eventually bought a package in one of their big sales that got me all the native plugins available at the time).
As for subscriptions, I’m mostly with you on that. There are only a few software subscriptions I do at present (Microsoft 365 and a specific Adobe photography plan that isn’t available for new customers, but which I’m grandfathered into). In those cases, it is because there really aren’t any practical alternatives for my needs and workflow. (In the MS case, I’m a pretty heavy user of Access, Outlook, and OneNote, and I also use Excel quite a bit and Word semi-frequently. While there are decent alternatives for Excel and Word, there really aren’t for the other three, at least not the way I use them. In the Adobe case, I use Lightroom Classic every week and Photoshop, including its generative AI capabilities, anytime I’m doing cover art for my recordings, making a Spotify Canvas, creating backgrounds for my lyric videos, etc. Unfortunately, they just raised the subscription price for that plan by 50% – $10 a month to $15 a month – and that got me investigating alternatives. But, I didn’t find anything that really met my needs at a reasonable price, no less would be something I could use to convert my uses in time to avoid the higher cost’s kick-in. So I’ll at least be on it for another year, and who knows beyond that.)
One thing I will say here is, even with the pre-ARA version of Tonalic, I watched a few videos and got up and running with it extremely quickly, using it on the first recording I tried it on and speeding my workflow on that compared to if I’d done it my usual way (probably with UJAM Virtual Guitarist series products in that specific case). While I am working on music full-time at this point, I’m super slow in my production process, typically taking on the order of a month of elapsed time on each recording.
That is indeed one factor that makes me hesitant about a Tonalic subscription. I thought about the idea of trying to redo my workflow to more of an assembly-line process, where I only do a month of Tonalic but do a bunch of recordings of the parts I’d use Tonalic for, working with the rest of the recordings either ahead of that month or later on. However, that’s really not an ideal that appeals to me as I’m also trying to put my recordings out into “the world” (i.e. the streaming services) on a regular (preferably approximately monthly, though I’ve decidedly had some big lapses there) basis, and my general workflow works pretty well for me, even if it takes a lot of time. But, thus far, I’ve only use the Essentials version, so there being no subscription cost for that fits my workflow. But this is why I’d decidedly have preferred a model similar to the Toontrack model. (Toontrack has yet to come out with an EZ Guitarist, or I might have become an early customer.)
I don’t know that I’d call it greedy – the way they do it now, there would definitely be ongoing costs for them, and the idea is to keep introducing more content from what I gather from their marketing materials. (This is actually one thing I do like about Adobe, and at the $10 a month rate – i.e. $120 a year, which isn’t much more than the annual Cubase upgrade, and Adobe does deliver a lot of functionality between the two key applications I use – I felt it was worth it. I’m decidedly not happy about the 50% uplift, though that’s at least partly due to budgetary constraints since a whole lot has gone up in cost in the past few years without a commensurate uplift on the income front.)
We’re on the same page here. In fact, not only have I never leased a car, but I’ve also never bought one with a loan – I’ve gone with whatever I could afford to buy in upfront cache. And I also keep my cars for a long time – my previous one was 22 years, and the current one will already get to 12 years later this year.
Probably true enough. Bottom line for me is I try not to be cheap, and I’ve invested a lot in my musical gear and software over the decades, and what I do purchase has to fill some need that is worth the price of admission. That is a no-brainer with Tonalic Essential (since it was free).
My jury’s out on whether it would be for me with one of the paid plans. It would have to at least save me enough time, and deliver enough quality, to let me be a fair bit more prolific than I am now. One salient question I’ve asked myself on this relates to my currently working on an album in a traditional country/Americana style, which will necessarily be pretty guitar-oriented. Rhythm guitar parts are among the more time-intensive parts of building my arrangements, and I have seen that Tonalic Essential improves my efficiency a fair bit. For example, I might get two acoustic parts done in a single day, rather than a day or more for a single part with UJAM instruments. BUT the other parts of my arrangements (e.g. fiddle and lap steel on my most recent three recordings – I spent about $130 late last year to purchase the products that have actually made me more efficient, and which deliver better results, on those instruments) still take a lot of time (playing, comping, programming keyswitches, etc.) in order to get those down. Ditto for lead guitar parts, which won’t likely be helped by Tonalic. Vocal comping/tuning/etc. still takes a lot of time. Mixing still takes a lot of time. I’m reasonably efficient on drum sequencing with Toontrack products (typically on the order of a day or so to pick kits, find grooves that fit my song, sequence the grooves, and edit them to tailor the parts to fit even better) and bass parts (mostly tracking, comping, and a relatively small amount of editing), and I’m especially quick on keyboard parts (piano is my main instrument).
Could the high-end Tonalic subscription for a year ($249 if paid annually) let me finish this album within that year using my normal workflow of doing a song at a time? (I’m currently working on the fourth song of what I expect to be a twelve-song album, but I started on it late last year. That wasn’t all dedicated to these recordings – there was a fair amount of “life gets in the way” as well as a soup-to-nuts write/record/submit project that also vied for time during that same period.) Maybe, and, if so, it might actually be worth it if/when I get into a better spot on the cash flow side of things.
That really remains to be seen. If it is not, then perhaps Celemony will adjust the model at some point.
But one point of comparison might be against using other services that let you hire real musicians to play on your recordings, and the costs there could add up to a lot more a lot more quickly. For those potential customers, the question there might be if Tonalic can deliver the same (or better) caliber of results and possibly deliver those results more quickly. I’ve never had the budget for that sort of thing, but music software purchases have always been among my highest costs within any given year, and most of that goes toward products that will either improve my workflow efficiency or improve my results (or at least that I think will at the time of purchase – sometimes I end up being sorely disappointed).
Another point of comparison might be against the generative AI services. The high-end Suno plan is right around the same price point as the high-end Tonalic plan, and it has the big question mark with respect to the IP-related lawsuits that might well render its outputs unusable at some point down the line. (Most sync libraries currently do not accept recordings made via generative AI for this reason.) At least the Tonalic licensing is clear. And from what I’ve seen of Suno (only indirectly via some collaborators who have used it), you get a lot more control over results with Tonalic.
I guess time will tell. Tonalic is very new, so it could very well need a training wheels period to see where it eventually goes.
Yeah, spread the word: if music producers pay for this that’s next.
That’s irrelevant to the point I was making. Paying once for a perpetual license < continuous payment that has a bigger potential of continuously compensating the contributing musicians. Whatever that product is, cardboard or not, doesn’t change that.
You seem to argue for the sake of arguing though, because the very next thing you quote me saying was “We should all be happy to support live musicians in the studio when we can”. Rather than acknowledging that I think musicians should be hired as much as possible for actual live use in a studio you for some reason decide to take the half-full view on what I wrote:
That’s just a stupid take. If you think paying musicians for a subscription is equal to not only not paying them but taking their stuff and using it as well then that’s just insanely stupid, “nothing more”.
I made a new point. And my point is that when people say something is easier to produce, are we taking into account the quality of the product? When did a synthetic voice become the same quality as a natural recorded one?
Subscription fees are almost always a pyramid scheme. The few times they are not is when a value is continually provided and the customer is using up all of that value.
Why call those people who sang into a microphone one time “musicians” ? Sampling music is a technician contractor. A musician makes music for a living.
How much do you think those people deserve perpetual royalties for that one act of work they did one time? Using our computers and the internet as our passive income factories is being taken too far.
That’s a strawman logical fallacy. Stick to the topic.
For paying musicians I agree that streams should cost the consumer a penny per stream and be divided a third to the artist, a third to the label, a third to the platform. But when you start using AI then you no longer deserve any of it. None. Zero. You did nothing therefore you deserve nothing. Spend that subscription fee on a microphone instead and use that big beautiful voice.
No, you are saying that there is a “next best thing” if someone can’t afford something. But if someone can’t afford something then they can’t have it, plain and simple. “I don’t have time to learn how to mix.” Cool, then you can’t mix. “I can’t afford to hire a graphic artist.” Sweet so you can’t have graphics then. This is the facts of life since the beginning of time, and I’m here arguing with people who are justifying laziness and theft. Who use AI to obtain something they ought not to have because they didn’t earn it. And are not the quality of vessel who can handle having it either.
Ok, argue that with someone who has a different opinion than yours, not me.
The subscriptions we are talking about are literally never “pyramid schemes”. Look up the meaning of that word.
It’s perfectly possible to defend the choice to not get a subscription for a number of reasons without resorting to misusing terminology.
Because of the real world we actually live in they should get a percentage. It’ll then scale according to gross profits. I think it would be unfair for artists to contribute to works and then other people profit from them instead of the creators.
/irony
The point I was making was that when people engage in piracy none of the artists/creators are getting paid by the pirates, but when people pay Tonalic musicians participating in creating that product are getting paid. Therefore your comparison was stupid.
Alright, damn.
the musicians involved share in Tonalic’s success, and a subscription model is the only fair and transparent way to make that possible
Another way would be to pay once for the engine and then “buy” musicians as and when.
When you write “as and when”, do you mean “as needed”?