From the makers of Melodyne comes Tonalic, a plugin that puts a real session musician “by your side”
Celemony’s latest plugin reshapes real performances to fit your arrangement with no AI, MIDI or loops involved.



Celemony has introduced Tonalic, a new plugin that rethinks how producers work with guitars, bass, drums and percussion in the box.

Rather than relying on MIDI, loops or generative AI, Tonalic uses actual studio performances from world-class session players and adapts them to fit your music in real-time, creating an experience that feels like having a musician playing right inside your DAW.

At the heart of Tonalic is a brand-new engine developed by Celemony, built on the company’s famed Melodyne software. The result is a system that can intelligently “adapt performances by the finest studio musicians to any song” and “integrate them organically into any production”.

Forget about working with loops and samples. Instead, Tonalic introduces a new workflow based around small icons called Tonalics, which represent a song’s musical patterns. When dragged onto a Tonalic track, they instruct the engine where and how a part should be played – automatically adapting it to the song’s chords, tempo and groove.

Notably, the Tonalic regions themselves contain neither audio nor MIDI data. They act purely as performance instructions, guiding the engine to select the most suitable passages from the original recordings, and then adapt them to the current song. According to Celemony, this approach allows the results to remain tight and convincing, yet shot through with flashes of studio magic.

“The whole process is dynamic and automatic,” says Celemony. “Whatever direction the song takes, Tonalic notices, follows suit and takes musical decisions that invariably gel and sit well with the spirit and idea of the song. The results sound so organic and authentic you’d think the performer had played the material that way in the first place.”

The source material itself is extensive. Tonalic draws from over 7,000 performance patterns recorded by more than 30 session musicians in studios around the world. Contributors include rock and pop mainstays such as Tim Pierce and high-profile names like Foo Fighters bassist Nate Mendel and Skunk Anansie guitarist Martin “Ace” Kent. The library is also set to continue growing over time.

Tonalic is available in two editions – Tonalic studio and Tonalic arranger – both featuring identical content but differing function sets. The studio version adds deeper editing capabilities, allowing users to modify individual notes within performances, much like Melodyne.

The plugin integrates as a software instrument in all major DAWs, with particularly deep ARA-based integration in Presonus Studio One 7 and Fender Studio Pro 8.

Tonalic is available now via subscription or prepaid license, with pricing starting at $14.9/€14.9 per month. To celebrate the launch, Celemony is offering the first month for just $1/€1. Users can switch at any time between the prepaid and subscription license models, between the two editions.

Source: https://musictech.com/news/gear/celemony-tonalic/