how far can you push halion ?

hi, everyone.
hmmm, maybe not a serious question
!?, anyway here is a couple of questions.

i just bougt halion 4( upgraded to 5, allso bought wavlab 7, cubase
element 7).
so i was wondering, if it was possible to create
sound like those found in omnisphere with
the same quality ? (i allso bought omnisphere,
huge sound, so big!).
recently i tried to sample my yamaha digital
piano (only 7 key is sampled in key c, like this
c1,c2,c3 etc… then remapped with halion 5), the
quality was awfull, since the pitch get stretched
when the pitch gets higher, i eventually gave up
sampling the piano. i did allso sampled the jv880
(roland jv880 synthesizermodule with the 8mb
sampled orchestra expansioncard). i did get
sucess with creating a clone of the jv880 sampled
violin, strings in halion, now i even sampled the same
sound from jv880 but cromaticly sampled all keys
from c2-c5. i then gave the sampled sound a touch
off magic with filters , envelopes, velocity, warm
reverb. and those sampled string are perfect looped
kn halion with crossfade.
it seem to me, that in order to get perfect results,
one would need to obtain knowledge allmost
like if you’re going to be an studio engineer
and a recording expert. well i know the music software
companies creating virtual instrument. have the best
of the best expert with top knotch tech gear.
i am not expecting to make the next east west virtual
instrument sample library, i was just expecting
to actually make some great sound in halion,
but it is more diffcult than i ever imagened.
i do have some experince with halion, because
before i bought halion, i did learn much from the trial demo
of halion 3-4.

by the way, after downloading the halion 5 upgrade why do i get halion sonic 2 for free ?
i mean, i just bougt halion 4, which i was entitled
to get an free upgrade to 5, which i offcourse
did download the upgrade, every thing works perfect!
(my usb elicenser , after maintance check, downloaded
the halion 5 license).
maybe the halion sonic 2 is just a trial demo ?.

henrik.

Henrik (I’m Enric, Henry in catalan, Spain hehe):

I think Halion Sonic is intended to be a lighter version of Halion, to use it without big stress in your CPU, because is only a sample player (you can’t modify sounds). I think that’s the main reason why Steinberg give it to us along with Halion.

I don’t know if that’s any other reason, and if so, other people can reply.

Cheers.

To be honest H5 is about 1000 times easier to do what you are describing then how it was done 10 years ago. But, the truth is that to build an instrument based sample set is still a lot of work. Obviously you’ve discovered that pitch stretching sucks beyond say a half step. Even then for some instruments that isn’t good enough.

The best approach for instruments is to carefully map out a project in Cubase and record with varying velocities ALL the keys or notes that you possibly can. For an instrument that has MIDI, this isn’t so bad as you just create a MIDI track that plays all the notes, and then copy/paste that and do them for each velocity.

Once you’ve created the audio file, slice it and name the segments with the note name/#/velocity … Then just drag them either all at once, or in layers into Halion.

Starting with Studio Perfect samples is the best first step to awesome library sounds.

Thank you very much for your answer.
Sorry about the time it took for me
to respond back!
I did tried to post a couple of times yesterday on
my iphone, but the post suddenly disappeared !?.
Don’t know what happened!!.
Anyway i took my times, adding some more
sampled string to my newly created halion program ( a whole key range from c2-c3
etc). its sound so much better with the strings.
I allso figured out, when creating synth path’es sound,
a great thing is to add more oscillator, to get
that big sound.
I am not planning to sample my digital piano,
if i really want to that, i’ve need to bloody sample all 88 keys,
thats crazy!. (i might! :smiley:).

I am not familiar with slicing loop either in Halion 5, nor
Cubase element 7.
I’ve do some google search on “slicing loops tutorials”.


Henrik. :slight_smile:

One thing i don’t understand is this,
i mean can you actually just create 1 midi
sequence containing the actually midi notes playing
all notes from c0-c7 (all 88 keys!).
then record and export the midi sequence
as wavefile, then what ?
I guess using the slicing tools would be the next,
naming all the slices segment ( all the segment
will be contained in the same wave file. right ??).
Meaning that Halion only reads one big wavefile
with segmented areas of all sampled 88 keys ??.

In a HALion 4 tutorial : HALion4 in depth ( outdated , because HALion 5 is there ) there is a chapter about sampling
Perhaps you get from this video a better idea what is involved in sampling

Perhaps sampling from a existing sample can deliver a unique sound if you are after this ?

No, not actually!, what i did when i was creating my
own sample library in Halion 5. ( my attempt to
create a clone of the Roland Jv880 sound module,
sampling the “JV-SR04 Orchestra expansion
cartridge card”, which i ofcourse i own).
Was this, my method, turn on the jv880 module,
play each note (all 88!) record each note with 10
second for each note , same velocity
using Wavlab element 8, manually cut each note
at the beggining plus the end of each sample,
then if necessary add some EQ, Stereo expander,
final use normalize to even the volume of all 88 recorded
sample.
This way is painfully hard and takes a lot of
time using this method!.
So i am asking, is’nt there a lot easier way to
do all this ???.

Sorry, when i was posting first time, the subject
was really about, how far can you push Halion 5, make quality
sound, like Omnisphere etc.
As the subject got into sort of dealing with sampling /
creating instrument of your own, the subject is
really not about “how far can you push Halion 5”.
the Title of my post should have been changed to
“How to make great sample instrument in
Halion 5”.