I have used HALion 6 but had no real joy there so I am wondering about the latest version, to upgrade that is at the special price.
I installed the plug-in but there are no presets, for the synthesizers at least so I am thinking they will be on the .iso file that is downloading.
So, does the factory content have any decent sounds, or variety?
I recall with earlier versions I tried out, even the “sonic” versions, there were isloated sounds, e.g., an electric bass guitar but no acoustic bass guitar, or does Steinberg leave this to 3rd parties?
When you mount the iso you have to copy the contents to a regular drive, whether it be a HDD, SSD, M2, wherever you want to store your vstsound files.
EG, mine are on a 2 terabyte M2 drive, S:\Steinberg with sub folders for HALion, GrooveAgent and “Other”.
Then double-click any vstsound file and select “Install In Place” when the install dialogue pops up.
Then, if you want, you can delete the iso or back it up to an external drive or even a USB stick.
I cheated in the screenshot I posted - there are 8, I think, libraries that don’t come with HALion. (Electric Baas, Dark Planet, Hypnotic Dance, Triebwerk, HSO, a couple of others. They’re all in the current sale.)
If you downloaded the iso file, then it’s your job to install it properly. Which isn’t hard. However…
If you use the Steinberg Download Assistant, then it will download and install the files, where you tell it to install them (in the SDA and Library Manager settings).
I always use the Steinberg Download Assistant, which is usually trouble free and ensures everything shows correctly in the media bay. It makes installing any add-ons you buy easy as well. A lot of great sounds to explore.
I haven’t actually installed anything as yet, so I am wondering how simple or easy it may be to program sounds from scratch.
I have used digital emulations of analog gear, but I have not programmed sounds, so it is possible to make a sound, without having to base it on a preset?
Full HALion 7 is quite powerful at making sounds from scratch.
You can sample and build sample based sounds with it of course. It has several synth engines (Additive, Subtractive, wavetable, Granular, FM, and probably more, plus a B3 style organ tone wheel generator) and you can mix/match any of this in the same presets. It supports LUA scripting, and it has all sorts of built in modules and gui interfaces to meet most demands (without needing to script).
Optionally, you can use full HALion to pack libraries for the free Sonic Player. H7 includes everything you need to build “Macro Editors” (Your own custom front end UI) for the free player. When using full HALion, Macro editor screens are totally optional. If you want to make it more compatible for the free Sonic player and give users a visually based access to parameters in your sound or library of sounds, all the tools are there to build up your custom interface piece by piece, and link it all to whatever parameter(s) you want users to be able to ‘tweak’ in the free player. Presets made for Sonic do have more ‘limits’ than a full H7 preset (A limit of 4 parent level layers, and some rules on how to set up effect buses for these 4 layers), and there are a few simple rules to follow to keep a sound Sonic compatible. Meanwhile, in full H7, you are only limited in the number of parent layers by the power of your machine, and messing with building a fancy GUI is totally optional. You can also build much ‘larger or smaller’ custom macro screens in full H7.
It’s a very deep instrument that allows you to fully develop sounds from the ground up, all from inside the same plugin (no need to launch separate apps to build and test sounds).
In addition to the libraries shown on the Steinberg products page, it comes with tons of MOTIF (Yamaha) like presets to enjoy. You end up with access to a substantial portion of waveforms that are very similar if not identical to the stuff that’s shipped with several Yamaha flagship romplers over the years . You can mix and match the programs and layers of all this factory content. Some of the factory content is fully unlocked, so you can dive into working sounds to see how they were built, and borrow elements from them for your own sounds.
HALion 7 is pretty good at ‘importing’ different formats as well. I’m not up to date on every format it can import, but it’s a decent list. I.E. Older HALion stuff, sound fonts (sf2), different Roland and Akai sample disks (Must rip an ISO image of the disks first, then HALion can mount them), maybe some of the older unencrypted formats from NI (and probably more). I believe someone on the forums has also provided some support for converting SFZ opcodes into a HALion preset as well.
Sounds are subjective. It’s my goto choice for live settings, or quick song crafting. You also get a nice arp engine built into the player that can be set up to your likes and needs. The stuff sounds great on stages, and it’s easy to get it set up in a way all I have to do is hand the sound guy my patch cord(s) and I’m off to the races.
I usually want and expect different things for the stage than I do when song crafting, and even something else in the recording studio, and the content that ships with HALion is good for all three (tweak it to fit in whatever kind of mix you need).
The base content that comes with full HALion 7 is similar to having a Yamaha MOTIF workstation. You’ll get a solid ‘bread and butter’ content set. Some of it is set up pretty loud, flat (recorded in a perfectly dry lab, then normalized so all the strident harmonics are included), and dry for added ‘flexibility’ in live settings, and there is a decent tool box full of ‘filters and effects’ built into HALion to dial those back and shape them up for your needs. Personally I find HALion sounds easy to put into any mix (the trick is to dial them back in volume then eq/filter/reverb/compress the ‘overall presence’ you need for a given mix). I.E. When you first load a HALion preset, it’ll be dialed in full blown, like a massive solo instrument that’s meant to stand out on its own. Unless you’re just handing a sound guy some patch cords for him to deal with, you’ll almost always need to dial it back in multiple ways (mainly start with lower volume than you think is appropriate at first, and build up or take away from there) to settle it into a mix properly.
Most if not all Steinberg hosts unlock at least one library (Sonic Selection). So, if you have any version of Nuendo, Cubase, Live, or Dorico, have a look at them in the Steinberg Download Manager to see what libraries your version unlocks. Such libraries will work with the free HALion Sonic plugin, or with a registered full HALion instance (Provided your host keys are active in SAM/eLicenser and/or on your dongle if you still have and those older versions [yes, you can upgrade HALion and keep using it with older versions 64bit versions of Cubase/Nuendo/Etc that support VST3).
If you don’t have any Steinberg Host…
You can get some free content for the free HALion Sonic player by grabbing a free Dorico SE Key. A Dorico SE key will unlock the “Sonic Selection”, and “Indian Drums” libraries. So, install it all and take Dorico SE for a drive. If you don’t like or use Dorico SE, you can remove that but keep Sonic and the two libraries (But keep your Dorico SE key active in Steinberg Activation Manager).
The Sonic Selection library provides a base General MIDI set of sounds plus a good bit extra.
For what it’s worth, Sonic can be put into a General MIDI mode and turned into a decent GM SMF player. While it doesn’t support things like GM2/XG/GS extensions, it’s still a great sounding player of which you can tweak out the effects or swap out sounds manually easily enough. It does support the GM RPN commands. I’m not sure about support for the sysex based MIDI tuning standards…never tested that…it might?
As for the ‘acoustic bass guitar’. There are several upright basses to choose from. If you want a horizontal acoustic bass like some of the unplugged bands have, there are quite a few regular ‘acoustic guitars’ that have plenty of bottom range as per the old general MIDI standards (5 to 6 octaves or more in total), so just find a nice steel or nylon guitar and use it as a bass. You do get full ‘amp modeling’ and scores of internal effects included with full HALion to shape up those sounds.
I’ve just looked at the sale prices and Halion 7 is a real bargain at this price, effectively around £34 for the synth engine when compared with the Sonic Collection price.
I browsed through a few regular Acoustic Guitars and found a few with enough low range to cover it (The one in Channel 3 is used in this example). I Put this together real quick using these three presets.
I did render it to MP3, straight from HALion 7’s bus in Cubase 15. I did not apply dithering or anything, so expect it to sound even better at full resolution without lossy compression.
These are the raw patches with no extra effects applied and no work at mixing (all playing velocities and a simple CC11 in on the banjo). I did draw in some pitch bends. The Rhythm part is via an Arp engine in HALion.
Excellent post! Halion is such a “sleeper” - I’m not sure how many realize just what a powerhouse Halion 7 is… And the price now - $139?!? It’s a remarkable bargain. Seriously - you could just have this and do anything. Anything. And the mention of the MOTIF-like presets being included really is amazing - I had MOTIFs for years, and it’s practically like having my old Motif back, but much more powerful, and in my laptop. The sound is almost identical on many, many sounds.
The fact that the Montage M ESP software is unavailable to all except registered owners of the hardware is disappointing, but Halion solves much of the pain.
