Something for the beginner's please.

Virtual instruments HALion
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#1

Please remember that those of us who are new to Halion will be depending on a good, easy to understand manual- probably more so than the experienced user.

I’ve been programming synths since the early 1980’s but have been struggling to understand some of the teminology, particularly in the Macro Page Designer.
At times it seems to assume we are all familiar with the structures, concepts and scripting of Halion 6
It would be great if there were more graphics in the manual (and maybe a bit bigger)
I’m a practical/creative kinda guy and find graphics are a great way of explaining things, rather than pages of dull text.

I really, really want to UNDERSTAND How the Page Designer works, but it’s not that intuitive and my background is in programming synths, not scripting. When i read some of the forum posts i feel totally left behind.
How about a seperate Beginner’s Guide to the Macro Page Designer ? (I’d offer to help write it but I don’t understand it well enough) .

I’ve done a few videos on how to programme the Cheetah MS800 synth and was planning to do some for the macro page designer, but I think there is a lot I still have to learn.

#2

I feel your pain, and would also like to see more obvious and easy to find documentation and examples/tutorials on building macros, and doing scripting for HALion; but, I’ve also found that one can achieve a great deal without using scripts.

If the sound you are making simply needs a macro to adjust existing parameters from the sound and zone tabs, it’s pretty simple to link objects to any of these parameters and never have to make a single line of script code. Open a “Parameter list” editor in HALion as a new undocked window. Click the layer or zone you wish to link an object in your macro to modulate, and simply drag the relevant parameter onto the object. From there it’s usually just a matter of changing the scope if you want a single control to manipulate the same parameter multiple zones at the same time.

When you do hit a brick wall where something you need to achieve can’t be done by simply linking and scoping things to parameters listed in the “Parameter List”, then hit these forums to get specific scripting help. These tend to be pretty complicated tasks, such as the ability to drag and drop samples onto a Macro UI, snooping the current tempo or transport location of the host, and various types of mass batch style tweaks, elaborate multi-page macros, etc. You might also check out some of the unlocked macros that came with H6 for libraries that came with HALion to see working examples.

#3

While building macro’s is nice and great to have in 6 the documentation needs work. For example I just needed to script turning on/off Glide and needed to declare a Boolean parameter. I had to guess at how to do that as the documentation doesn’t have an example in defineParameter for a Boolean. Little stuff like that makes doing scripting painful in Halion.

Another frustration is that the documentation is all over the place. I have to keep open the Halion manual (pdf version is best), the Halion Guidelines, the Halion macro pages document, and Halion script document. That’s to many places and we have to piece together info from all of those to build an instrument.


It would also help to have a somewhat modern scripting editor vs what we have now. It feels like I’m writing code in notepad vs a modern tool.


The documentation could also be more complete. For example some simple things like also showing an example of defining a boolean in defineParameter would be a plus, for some of us these things are not always obvious especially it we have not worked through building several instruments.

#4

If you find Halion too complex I highly suggest using Halion Sonic. It is much more for musical things instead of the development focused Halion 6.