Slightly OT question for any HALion experts out there

Dorico
1

Is there any “simple” way to tweak a patch in HALion SSO to extend the playing range?

Specifically, I want to extend the top range of the French horns to cover early classical “high horn” parts, going up to sounding A5 or even Bb5 (one leger line above the staff in the treble clef). Just pitch-shifting the highest existing sample up would be OK - good sound quality is less important than playing the notes at all.

With the Garritan libraries the patch definitions are in SFZ format and it’s easy enough to edit them with a text editor. Is anything similar possible with HALion?

2

I believe this is easily possible in the full HALion workstation plug-in (and possibly also in HALion Sonic, though I don’t think so), but it’s not possible in HALion Sonic SE: no editing functionality is provided. I’ve not poked around inside a .vstsound file and wouldn’t even know how to begin to, but I don’t think they’re easily editable outside of the plug-ins. You could try posting a question in the HALion forum perhaps.

3

Thanks Daniel. Actually I discovered there’s an easy short term fix: use the General Midi horn sound, which covers the full MIDI range.

That’s good enough for now, given the other playback limitations.

4

I have the same problem with the clarinet. Unfortunately the GM clarinet has a horrible vibrato. Can I get rid of that? Any way to turn the vibrato of?

5

The GM Clarinet in Halion Sonic SE 2 has zero vibrato by default. Make sure there’s nothing triggering modulation.

6

The reason for this excessive vibrato is that there is currently no way of telling Dorico whether the patch you loaded uses note velocity or mod wheel for dynamics. The default HSO clarinet uses mod wheel for dynamics, but if you switch it to the GM clarinet then that uses velocity. Dorico doesn’t know that and plays it using mod wheel, hence the vibrato. This is something that we’re looking at currently and we hope that in the next update you will have greater control over this by being able to tell Dorico whether each loaded patch uses mod wheel or note velocity to control dynamics.