Claude in Nebula

Claude can work in your song with you, like a session musician and engineer you trust: write a bass line, set up a reverb bus, tidy the timing, bounce stems. Everything Claude changes can be undone.

Switch Claude on

  1. Choose Claude ▸ Claude Settings… and press Install in Claude. The Claude app asks you to install Nebula's connector.
  2. Choose Claude ▸ Allow Claude to Control Nebula.

Claude ▸ Pause Claude stops Claude at once; its requests are refused until you switch the pause off. Nothing listens on the network: Claude talks only to this Nebula, on this Mac.

What Claude may do

In Claude Settings you decide, area by area, what Claude may do:

  • Off: Claude may not.
  • Ask: Nebula shows you what Claude wants to do and waits for your yes.
  • Auto: Claude goes ahead.

The areas are reading the song, writing music, sound and mix, tempo and key, the transport, recording, projects and files, deleting, and bouncing. The presets set them all at once: Read only, Assistant (the usual one: music and mix go ahead; recording, files, deleting and bouncing ask) and Full control.

Asking Claude

Talk to Claude in the Claude app as you would to a person in the room: "make the chorus drums busier", "the vocal is too quiet in bar 17", "bounce stems of everything". Claude reads the song first, then changes it. Each idea is one undo step with a name you will recognise, so Edit ▸ Undo (⌘Z) takes it back.

Claude can also read this manual, so you can ask how to do something in Nebula.

Comping with Claude

Once you have recorded a few takes, ask Claude to "comp the best vocal take, bar by bar". Claude measures every take in the folder, bar by bar: how far each is off the key (and off the chord track's chords), how far off the grid it lands, how loud it is, whether it clips, and how much noise sits between the phrases. Then it writes the comp, or plays one take whole, and tells you why it chose each part. Ask "how did take 3 go?" for a short report on one take.

The comp is the same as one you would drag in the Takes editor: the joins crossfade, a track in an edit group comps its group with it, and one press of Undo (⌘Z) takes the whole comp back. Claude only works with takes you have already recorded.

Ask Claude from the Help menu

Help ▸ Ask Claude… puts a question on the clipboard, ready to paste into Claude. It already says where you are: the song, the playhead, the cycle, the chosen track and regions, and the control you last pointed at with Quick Help. Paste it into Claude and finish the question.

What Claude never does

  • Claude never arms a track, never presses Record and never turns on input monitoring. Recording is always yours. When the Record area allows it, Claude can keep what you just played on your armed tracks (Capture as Recording), and nothing more.
  • Claude's undo only takes back Claude's own changes, never yours.
  • Claude only does what your settings allow; an area set to Ask waits for you.