Extend instrument range

Virtual instruments
1

Hi,
how can I extend the range of an instrument in HaLion SE (used with Dorico)? i.e. the Bass Clarinet should be able to play much higher. I’m playing myself about an octave higher. Just transposing the highest given sample would be fine.

thanks

frank

2

It’s not ‘ideal’, but you could use Two instrument slots to ‘stack’ a Bass Clarinet with a regular Clarinet inside the same Halion SE instance. Just set them to the same channel and filter out the unwanted range of the regular Clarinet (Both are done from the “MIDI” tab in Halion SE).

If you need this often just do it in a separate instance and save the ‘multi setup’ for future use. Once you load a Dorico Score or Template and it’s done with its ‘automatic’ instrument set-up, you can pull up a fresh Halion SE instance (From Playback Mode), load in the Halion “Multi” that applies this ‘fix’, and redirect the Bass Clarinet part to use this new instance and channel.

Steps:

  1. On the Options Tab, you’ll need to make sure the Halion SE instance is NOT in General MIDI mode for this to work:

  2. Load two slots, one with Bass Clarinet and one with a regular Clarinet.

  3. With the MIDI tab in Halion SE, set both instruments to use the same ‘MIDI Channel’.

  4. On the regular Clarinet slot, use the MIDI tab keyboard split feature to filter out the lower range.

  5. If you’ve set this up in an isolated instance for future use, you can save a Halion “Multi Preset”.

It extends the range and sounds pretty good here.

3

Thanks for the answer.
There is no way to extend the clarinet sound though? My regular clarinet music goes higher than the range too. In Finales Aria Player is a possibility to change it in a text file ( .sfz) so the highest sample gets transposed further. No way to do something similar in Halion? Right now I’m therefore limited to the GM clarinet.

4

With Halion SE, aside from using the same technique above to stack some other Clarinet patch that comes with SE other than the HSO Clarinet patch I’m not aware of any. You could stack the GM Clarinet with your HSO clarinet in a second slot, match channels, and filter unwanted ranges as described above for the really high stuff.

As far as I know it’s not possible to edit the actual patches/programs/layers/samples/zones/etc. in Halion SE.
If you have the full versions of Halion (4 or 5) you get the ability to really dig into the HSO library programs and extend/tweak/layer/manipulate samples, etc.

If you have a full version of Halion Sonic 2, then you get quite a few other woodwind programs that aren’t included in the ‘Basic SE’ or ‘Halion Symphonic Orchestra’ content set, but again, like SE you can’t tweak the actual programs in depth as you can with Halion 5.

Another option, if you have the latest 64bit Finale sounds (GIFF) installed (or, if you have an older 32bit version of Finale, you can still do this, but you’ll need to get the 64bit plugin for ARIA if you do not already have it…log into your Make Music account and get the latest ARIA installer, you might have to search the update area to get it if it’s not listed in your product list), is to add ARIA to the Dorico vst2 whitelist. You could then use your Garritan/Finale sounds (and other Garritan Libraries) in Dorico. You’ll need to let Dorico assign them to Halion SE first as it normally would, but then you can load new plugins and assign instruments to them in the Playback tab.

Not sure about Macs, but for windows if you look in:
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Steinberg\Dorico\VSTAudioEngine\Components
There is a file called whitelist.txt

You can add ARIA Player to the list like so:

Kontakt 5 16out
5653544E694F376B6F6E74616B742035
ARIA Player VST_x64
565354474152416172696120706C6179
ARIA Player Multi VST_x64
565354474152616172696120706C6179

Dorico scans the directory “%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Common Files\VST2” for plugins, so you’ll need to put the ARIA plugin there for Dorico to find it.

I’m not familiar with where things get installed on a Mac, but if you can find the whitelist.txt file the ARIA codes posted over at the Plogue Forum for Mac should be:

ARIA Player VST
565354474152416172696120706C6179
ARIA Player VST Multi
565354474152616172696120706C6179

If you’ve got any other VST2 plugins you’d like to try here is a thread listing some codes, as well as information on how to attempt to generate codes for any plugins you don’t find there: