I’m not sure if I should bother installing this to a new computer, a lot of the sounds sound like general MIDI to me.
I have Nexus and Native Instruments Komplete, should I just stick to those?
Is Halion Sonic SE 3 just something for people to play with when they first get Cubase?
Hi,
This is nonsense by the definition of General MIDI. But we probably know, what do you mean by this.
I’m using HALino Sonic SE while recording. It doesn’t eat so much of CPU
When you select a random instrument such as a bass, violin, piano or other instrument it never sounds ‘cheap’ to you? Fake? Something from the days of Windows XP?
Martin meant that General MIDI is just a technical specification, not a sound library, therefore, it’s actually a nonsense to say that something “sounds like” General MIDI… But as he wrote, we got you 
Anyway, HALion Sonic SE 3 is now obsolete and was superseded by HALion Sonic 7 which is also free. Consider it as a Steinberg variant of NI Kontakt Player. It sounds as good as the library you load. HALion Sonic 7 can now load also third-party libraries, although the offer is not as wide as for Kontakt Player.
I would say there is a language problem, but you both understood.
I’m not going to bother with this software.
Thank you 
Hi,
There are better sounds and worse sounds even in HALion Sonic SE and the library, which is part of Cubase Pro library. Of course you cannot compare with a huge library, which costs more than Cubase.
As I said, I’m using for recording to lower the CPU usage on the “live” (real time) track.
it’s based on Yamaha Motif but doesn’t sound anything like any of the Yamaha Motifs
I think originally it was based on the Yamaha XG stuff
You guys just don’t know how to use it when you leayer sounds you get awesome insturment FX in Halion Sonic, combine that with some instrument plugin on the channel and it is as good as anything else out there!
HALion Sonic 7 replaces HALion 3 SE these days.
Think of Sonic as the ‘free player’ for all content developed for “HALion”. It’s like the free Kontakt player for NI instruments. Like Opus for East West, and so on.
You’ll find cheesy sounds for HALion, but you’ll also find really deep and truly amazing sounds for it as well.
The player itself is very small. No point in removing it, ever. Just keep it around to avoid breaking projects!
You can still have ‘both’ HALion Sonic 7 and HALion 3 SE installed, but do you need both on your system?
If you are on Windows, still run some VST2 only hosts (I.E. Finale and Sibelius), and would like to use HALion sounds in them, then keep a copy of SE 3 around. You’ll want the latest one (v3.5.10) that can deal with content for both the old eLicencer/dongles, and the newer Steinberg activation system.
If you’re on a non Intel Mac, it’s probably best to ditch Sonic 3 SE for good and move on to HALion 7 Use the AU version in stuff like Finale and Sibelius. Use VST3 or AU in your tracking DAW.
As for the sounds…
HALion 3 SE, and HALion 7 do not come with any sounds! If you have any they either came with your ‘host’, or you have purchased some libraries along the way.
Both Sonic 7 and Sonic 3 SE can be used in other hosts (yes, not Steinberg hosts as well), but it’s important to have the proper keys in place on the system to unlock the ‘sound libraries’ you wish to use.
I.E. If you want to use HALion sounds that came with Cubase Pro in Sibelius, then you’ll need to make sure Cubase is activated on the system.
Most Stienberg hosts (I.E. Cubase Artist/Pro, Dorico, Live, Etc.) come with a minimum of a basic General MIDI HALion library that gets installed by default along with the host, plus a bit extra depending upon the host and its version.
I.E. Cubase Pro comes with Common, Artist, Hybrid, Trip, and Flux libraries, plus some optional HALion content like Verve libraries that can be installed. Dorico Pro doesn’t have the synthy stuff like Hybrid/Trip/Flux, but instead comes with HALion Symphonic Orchestra and Olympus Choir Micro.
At this time people who do not yet own a Steinberg host like Cubase or Dorico can get a basic set of content for HALion by grabbing the free version of Dorico SE. A Dorico SE key grants access to a solid set of GM compliant instruments, and Sonic can also be set to work as a kind of General MIDI player (make it accept GM program changes, MTS, and RPN events for setting pitch bend range, course/fine tuning, and creating tuning tables).
As for the quality of the sounds…
The stuff in the ‘Common/Basic’ libraries are mostly simple rompler stuff. The waveforms are fine, and the instruments are generally quite responsive. It starts out pretty ‘dry and simple’ but it doesn’t take much to set up effect chains and mixes that really bring tracks to life.
The Sonic Player supports up to 4 program layers per program slot. You get 4 AUX sends for effects. You can have loads of audio outputs for times when you’d like to isolate an instrument to run independent insert effects in the host.
It’s an amazing player. Under the hood it supports several synth engines (wave table, fm, granular, and more), an organ tone generator, sampling, and more. It’s packed with features like arp engines, chord maps, etc. It’s a heck of a nice platform to build sounds for (use full HALion 7 to get access to everything to ‘build with’…then pack libraries that’ll ultimately work in the free HALion Sonic player).
Hi,
This is just a standard XG = Extended General MIDI, not a specific instrument.
Hi Martin
I meant about the XG chip that we had in our sound cards and the DX. 7.
I think Halion 7 is fine. I bought Halion 7 and the sounds are great. I think people need to think what they want to hear and then search the Halion library
I think the ‘Basic GM’ set of waveforms are pretty different. Maybe later I can put up samples to show differences between the sound of S-YXG50, S-XYG2006SE, and HALion Sonic. To my ears they ‘all three’ sound pretty different from each other. Waveforms are different. Effects are different.
S-YXG are software XG players that Yamaha did a long time ago. I think they cherry picked waveforms from various tone generators that existed back in the 90s to build these?
S-YXG is long discontinued, but it’s possible to find official copies still for sell on Ebay. It’s also possible to find different ‘unofficial’ kits on the web that attempt to emulate the official Yamaha versions. Entire web sites exist that are dedicated to understanding and building XG compliant MIDI files, and they often have links to different XG emulators out there.
As for the actual hardware tone modules, there were/are many models from different manufactures (in addition to Yamaha) that understand XG banks and events. Some were baked into computer sound cards and quite popular for gaming systems.
Many digital pianos/keyboards, samplers, and synths have XG modes. They all sound a bit different…
HALion/Sonic does not support XG or GS ‘bank change’ calls, nor does it accept the Yamaha XG/Roland GS/GM2 ‘SYSEX’ events for ‘setting up’ effects.
XG in particular could use quite a lot of sysex events to fine tune all sorts of things about a sound in real time. To get similar effects with HALion/Sonic, you’d ‘learn’ regular MIDI CC events in the UI and automate things that way. Alternatively, in a fully VST compliant DAW, it’s possible to bind and automate a lot of controls directly via VST automation lanes (several things are standard for most instruments, but creators can reveal way more when designing sounds for the player with full HALion).
You can customize the default GM program/instrument table, but there is only a single bank of 128 programs.
A quick walkthrough to make Sonic GM compliant works like this: Go to the OPTIONS tab of a Sonic instance and set Program Changes to GM Mode.
Now Sonic is a GM 1 compliant MIDI player. Drum kits are locked into channel 10 as per GM1 standards (possible to change which kit is used in an instance as described below).
To change the sound a program change (PC) event will call up in Sonic you’d first turn off GM Mode, then browse to the preset in the Sonic Media Bay, give it the program number you like in the GM Sound field, and rate it with stars. Turn GM Mode back on.
Out of programs with the same PC event assigned, the one with the ‘most stars’ in its rating gets picked. If multiple programs have the same GM Sound assigned and Rating, I believe the first one registered in the database gets picked.
If you don’t see fields for GM Sound in your media bay, you can add them here.
You might need to scroll way to the right to find the GM Sound column…
One can change the order of the columns by dragging them from the column title field. The width of columns can also be changed by dragging things around up here.
So now I have things arranged so it’s easier to see what’s going on with PC assignments…
So, if I wanted to change the default grand piano sound (PC 1) to an Eagle Grand, I’d find it in Media Bay, assign it to PC1, and rate it five stars.
As for setting up reverbs and other effects on the 4 AUX busses. That’s more of a GM2 thing. Sonic doesn’t accept those sysex commands to set up GM2 reverb and chorus, but in GM mode it does have a default hall reverb and gentle width chorus working. You can easily tweak them to taste manually.
Since I’m about to play a rock SMF, I’ll use a preset to establish a small studio reverb so it’s not so ‘boomy’.
In Sonic CC91-CC94 still controls the ‘send amount’ as per GM 1 and 2 specifications. If you need to ‘automate’ these controls it’s also possible to ‘learn’ a CC for them through the Sonic UI.
For big brother HALion 7…bank changes are still not supported, but you can easily create and modify a ‘program table’ that responds to PC events 0-127.
It ships with a GM Multi-Program that gets you started with a GM1 compliant Program Table, and defaults to the same effects setup as Sonic (Hall Reverb on Aux1-CC91 send, Chorus on Aux3-CC93 send).
With both Sonic and HALion, you can modify and save different Multi Program configurations for different styles of SMF files.
