Is there a good, clean, warm Fender Rhodes sound in HALion?
I am surprised how hard it is to find such a standard, common sound.
The “early 70’s organ” seems to be close. But the attack parameters are so strange and I can’t figure how to get it to just sound like a Fender Rhodes.
I really wish HALion was LESS complicated most of the time.
Almost every sound is so “tricked out” and layered with 15 parameters and weird effects, that it is hard to just find really solid standard sounds… or you have to hunt for them so long and waste so much time - navigating all of the goofy names, etc.
So, OK, rant over … is there a good Fender Rhodes sound in the standard HALion,… or do I have buy add on sets for that?
why must it be Halion? couldn’t you just find a Rhodes that work with the free Kontakt player or something else?
I use the Scarabee “Mark I” in the free Kontakt player, as Glenn mentioned. It has had good reviews and I really like the sounds; the way it responds to midi keyboards feels quite realistic. I also have the Addictive Keys “Mark One”, and do use it sometimes, however I find that the sounds and response are not quite as good (IMHO).
The Kontakt “Vintage Organs” are also quite good; Kontakt has become my goto VST for vintage keyboard sounds. However, I do find that the Addictive Keys Upright, Grand and Electric Pianos are quite good as well.
Suggestion: It is a good idea to become familiar with the MIDI Modifiers section of the Inspector because of the different responses of VSTs to midi keyboard input.
Cheers,
Ricardo
Do you mean “early 70’s E Piano”? I’m looking through Halion’s electric pianos at the moment: there’s a few instruments that are more usable with the Tremolo down.
thanks for the suggestins guys. I was asking about HALion, because it is the included instrument / Software synth supposed to work best with Cubase Steinbberg, etc… and I also see the full Steinberg HALion sets are available. (Absolute Collection, etc) So I was starting there.
Anyone use those tools?
Frankly I never use the included sounds in Halion. In Logic, Studio One, Ableton and even Pro Tools I find a lot of stock sounds that I can use. In Cubase I don’t even bother and go straight for Kontakt, Keyscape or something else.
Halion does not offer ANY Rhodes sound worth using. The Halion EPs are really heavily substandard!
To my ears, “Scarbee Classic EP 88s”
is the actual sampled Rhodes sound gold standard (I love several original Rhodes variations and also use a vintage Rhodes MkI 73 Stage in my home studio).
Other very well done Rhodes EPs:
Canterbury Suitcase, or Rhodes variations including a very well done Dyno-Rhodes in the Spectrasonics Keyscape Suite. There’s also some other quite well useable ones out there.
my favorite choice for rhodes is
Keyscape - STEVIE WONDER plays KEYSCAPE!! - YouTube
Also for Kontakt I like The Canterbury Suitcase.
but I am no big keyboard player so I won’t really say anything about feel and response, but I like them for how they sound
You guys are great… Yeah, I am really surprised at how HAlion and a lot of the Steinberg plug-ins is almost useless - or endlessly complicated, etc. Even the standard keyboards and guitar / Bass amp modelers in Garage Band are far superior.
I am just getting back into building up my project studio after almost 20 years of not doing much. And then I just go to look for a Fender Rhodes sound and get nowhere!
I got Kontakt… great. I should have remembered Native Instruments… they were the boss 2 years ago too.
Anyway. Again, I really appreciate everyone’s help.
To put it clear: Halion does NOT generally only have inferior sounds.
There are MANY useful sounds in Halion, which are up to nowadays standards. The problem is, that scrolling through all the sound content from different periods and in VERY different sampling quality, to mark actually useable ones, takes just too much tedious scrolling and pre-listening time, as it is now.
Steinberg never bothered to really clean up their Halion act, neither by separating older and less relevant stuff of minor quality from stuff fit for actual production, nor by making urgent updates to nowadays standards in some very relevant categories widely used today. Apple has done a MUCH better job in handpicking what goes into their Logic package and what not. The result of this missing care from Steinberg is, that by scrolling through all the old (and some newer) miserable low quality samples in Halion, you get the wrong impression, that the whole package is just a bag of garbage, which it is not at a closer look. So Steinberg should really clean up Halion, reduce the basic soundset to nowadays often used sound categories in adequate quality, and put the rest (about two thirds or three quarters of the actual content) into a separate “rest of what’s got together through the years” package, only useable or installable from a separate pool (for those who really want to scroll through that garbage), to keep things useable in good oversight in the basic Halion library. The mess the library is right now, is nothing people really like to scroll through, so most users I know just don’t touch it and leave it alone.
From my view it doesn’t make any sense to offer Halion’s actual factory library in that completely messed up form, with MUCH too much inferior, useless content in it.
"Steinberg never bothered to really clean up their Halion act, neither by separating older and less relevant stuff of minor quality from stuff fit for actual production, nor by making urgent updates to nowadays standards in some very relevant categories widely used today. "
YEs, that is what I also feel, and the reason I asked the question this way in the first place,… I origianlly said:
“it is hard to just find really solid standard sounds… or you have to hunt for them so long and waste so much time - navigating all of the goofy names, etc … is there a good Fender Rhodes sound in the standard HALion,… or do I have buy add on sets for that?”
The update is I wound up getting Kontakt and a few sythns from Native Instruments and every sound is bang-on and modern and useful.
Thanks again for everyone’s help.
This thread points out some important issues regarding the usefulness of Halion that have affected many of us. It may be a good VST, with some great sounds, but for the reasons stated above it is not the go-to instruments. I’m going to post a thread in the Halion Forum to see what Halion sounds others are using. It might save me a bit of money in the long run. The new thread is here: What are your Favourite Halion sounds? - HALion - Steinberg Forums
Cheers,
Ricardo79
Thank you!
I wish some of this would get to Steinberg engineers as well, so they could clean up the library and just have a “Legacy Bank”,… or something.
But yeah, I did not even RANT about the mind-numbingly confusing and awful “indexing” of sounds in HALion.
It would be good business for Steinberg as well, as I was looking at getting their “Absolute Collection”,… but just lost confidence in them and if those new sounds are mixed with all of the junk, I do not want it.
I would rather urge Steinberg to stop doing sound libraries all together and focus 100% on their DAW. There are plenty of people making content, putting out sample collections. Steinberg should use their energy on what they do best: program the tools to use the content.
It would be so much better for us as Cubase users to get faster development and updates onthings like better sampler track, bmore advanced VST connect, fixing simple bugs like “import multiple audio tracks to current project” and the list goes on and on.
IMO the best Rhodes Piano and piano is Keyscape by Spectrasonics. I have Addictvie Keys too but Keyscape is killing with sound and expression.
Thanks. We put a lot of effort and passion into Keyscape.
As a Rhodes addict I can only repeat, that nothing out there is nailing the very best, a sampled vintage Rhodes from the golden era can deliver, as much as this one from Scarbee, to my ears:
The Spectrasonics library shines mainly with their sparkling Dyno-Rhodes sound IMHO (the perfect Tom Canning/Al Jarreau sound), and it also does a very good job with many other absolutely top sounding Piano (one of my favorite go to piano sounds) and EPiano sounds, even adding some rare electro-mechanical instruments. I say that as a big Eric Persing and Spectrasonics fan who bought most of their products.
Still, my favorite vintage Rhodes sound, my go-to-Rhodes for most purposes, whenever I want a Rhodes sound from the Hanc ock / Corea / Zawinul / Wonder etc. era, is clearly the Scarbee 88.
The Canterbury Rhodes is also fine: it has more noises and earthyness of an older Rhodes with some sonic edges, for people who like that.
The Moddart does not convince me at all: it has too much clumsy attack and too little sustain, as if they didn’t even service the Rhodes they sampled well before sampling. But always: to each their own, and tastes differ! 
I see what you mean jimknopf, that is indeed rather excellent. Thanks for the heads up.
Well I tried it and Scarbee ep 88 is very good indeed. Even though I am a guitarist I have always loved the 70s Jazz era of electric piano. Luckily I have an excellent keyboard play to do it justice. Thanks for the advice, even though this is not my thread. You are right jimknopf, the Modart ep sounds flat in comparison.