Hi,
I’m using Cubase Pro 15 with HALion Sonic 7.
I loaded the Latin Percussion program and I’m specifically having an issue with the maracas: when I play them, they are audible in both ears, but they are noticeably louder on one side, they sound like it’s a mono instrument
Other instruments in the project sound balanced/normal in my headphones, so this appears to be specific to the maracas. Ho do I fix it ? Thank you
I checked the kit out in full HALion 7. The layer is factory locked for this particular percussion kit, so even with full H7 there’s no way to directly edit the panning and level of individual kit pieces in this case.
The good news is that you can still isolate individual instruments in a locked layer like this in the Sonic 7 player like so:
First load the kit into an instrument slot.
Click the Program Tab.
Right Click the first Latin Percussion Layer and choose “Copy Layer”.
Click the Layer 2 area to select it, right click, and choose paste. Now you should have two layers of the same kit loaded. For now triggering any instrument produces a ‘doubled sound’, but we’ll fix that in the next steps.
In the lower half of the PROGAM TAB, select the “RANGES” tab.
Set layer one to filter out all trigger notes preceding the kit piece you wish to isolate.
Set layer two so it covers the rest of the kit.
If I want to isolate just the maracas, I can paste in another copy of the layer and set filters accordingly.
At this point I have maracas isolated to Layer 2, which is filtered to only trigger by keys D3 and D#3. I can pull up Layer 2 and do gain staging and panning as desired.
You can save a copy of your Program from here so it’s at your disposal for future projects.
Note, it is also possible to send any of the layers to an independent bus in your DAW’s mixer. You could run external effect plugins and such from there if you like.
In a DAW like Cubase, you’ll need to activate any extra VSTi audio busses you intend to use, as it defaults to a Stereo state to prevent spamming your mixing console with stuff you might not intend to use.
You can do it from the top right area of the VSTi rack:
Or by right clicking the box near the top right of a multi-bus capable plugin’s UI.
So what if you wish to break down a kit in way that requires more than 4 layers?
In the MIDI tab, you get a more global method to set program channels and ranges.
So it’s possible to set multiple instrument slots to receive on the same MIDI channel,
and then filter which range of keys can trigger an instrument slot.
So, with an instance of Sonic, one could theoretically isolate a single kit into as many as 64 different layers, which could each be tweaked and mixed independently. They can be run through Sonic’s own internal effect matrix (you get 4 Aux sends, plus the ability to push in your own inserts), or channel it through up to 32 audio outputs (16 stereo) for processing by your DAW with whatever DAW level Mixer Insert plugins you like.
If you build some complicated layered instruments that involve several program slots, you can save and load complete Multi presets (preserves the state of the entire plugin). In the top right of the left-most column.
If you use Cubase, you can also take advantage of Cubase Drum Maps. These will allow you to direct any MIDI note on a track set to use a Drum Map to any instrument/channel you like. So it’s no problem to simply have the same kit loaded over many slots, or even plugin instances all with different gain staging, panning, etc. I.E. Load the same kit many times over many different MIDI channels and plugin instances, but use one slot for kick, another for snare, another for overhead, another for toms, etc.
