I was extremely surprised to see how flexible the slice player is in Halion 4. Playing with it this morning almost has me thinking it could possibly replace Stylus RMX for ease of use and functionality. I love how you can see the actual waveform and edit start and end points of each slice, something you cannot do in Stylus RMX.
I also love the randomize feature, very nice to be able to come up new arrangements you would probably never think of. Being able to quickly drag and drop these new arrangements in real time is a HUGE bonus. Stylus can do something similar, but not nearly as good and is limited to only a handful of variations where Halion 4 seems to have hundreds, if not thousands of different variants.
This brings me to my below question based on my disappointment despite the praises listed above.
The MIDI MOD tab allows one to randomize arrangements, store these into 8 presets and drag and drop them to your sequencer for playback. Very cool.
The MIDI MOD tab also allows you to do other great changes such as change the swing, quantize and gate scale all in realtime. Again, very cool, however, one cannot drag and drop these changes like you can the randomized notes found on the same page. I was really looking forward to adding a bit of swing and having the midi file apply this swing when I dragged it over. Same with quantize, I would love to change the quantize and drag this over for a completely new feel. Cooler yet, I was really liking the gate scale for a choppy staccato style drum loop, again however, this cannot be applied by dragging over the midi notes from within the same page. This has things very limited as the only way one can actually use the gate, quantize and swing is by playing on the midi notes below the range the actual slices are mapped to meaning the original stock loop is played with the changes made, what if you want to program in a custom arrangement, or use one of the randomized ones H4 made with a big of swing, gate and quantize adjustment? It can’t be done. I don’t want to play the boring stock loop just to get these functions working, I hoped they would be included in the midi file dragging and dropping but they aren’t. I even tried assigning the knobs to the quick controls and automating them, but again they won’t do anything on playback of a custom arranged midi part in Cubase.
Am I missing something here? The manual only gives descriptions of each function, but not how they are used in functioning projects. Please sort me out if I am missing something. If I am not and this truly is a limitation, can anything be done to remedy this in a future update? I am sure the quantize value and swing can be applied to a drag and dropped midi file as Cubase does this exact thing elsewhere in the program. The gate is simply a shortening of the midi notes being played which can also be done via legato changes in the piano roll, so why can’t they be done to the midi file itself while being dragged and dropped allowing the user quick control over what they are doing without having to jump between multiple editors outside of H4 to do this in their sequencer?