Anyone else think the instruments + sounds/loopsets from Steinberg are clinically underrated.
I read countless posts on music forums bashing the sounds and instruments we get.
Personally it makes not sense to me.
The instruments are some of the best I’ve ever used eg Halion kills Kontakt. The loops unique and not overused like apples ones for example. Great loops but used to the point of a saturated market.
It’s almost at the point where I wouldn’t have ever needed to get a plugin or sound pack if I’d just started on cubase.
I wonder why the is such a general under-appreciation for Steinberg
I guess it comes down to who is complaining, and what their expecations are.
I do also need Kontakt (for compatibility with the wider world) but I use very little apart from the stock library. In that respect, HALion is way better for my requirements, and I agree that the HALion instruments are really very good, however if I needed to produce EDM I would no doubt have a different view.
Kontakt I guess is a great example of NI’s advertising powerhouse. Cause I sometimes use Kontakt as you do but after playing with Halion and my recent purchase of UVI falcon 3 I have no idea how Kontakt became the standard as both these instruments walk all over it imo
I rather believe that the problem with Steinberg instruments and sounds/loopsets is linked to the selling price rather than the quality. From a quality point of view, Steinberg has nothing to envy of its competitors. People want to have the best at the lowest price. This is not always the case with Steinberg products.
Personally, I use the vast majority of instruments from Steinberg, GA5, HALion Pro 7, Retrologue and I have many libraries associated with these instruments. These are always my first choices before looking elsewhere.
However, I also like to vary my choices, I have Komplete 13 Ultimate and the synths from ROLI and FXPansion, which gives me a good diversity of timbres and expressiveness. I’m not neglecting some very good free VSTs like Vaporizer2, Dexed and a few others.
Let us not forget that HALion seemed almost abandoned after the release of HALion 3.
Native Instruments simply became the “industry standard” during that time.
HALion 3 was released on the market in 2001, version 4 appeared in 2011, 10 years later. I owned version 3 and if I remember, very few third party companies produced libraries for HALion unlike Kontakt whose first version dates from 2003, I believe. At the time Native Instruments flooded the market with these three samplers: Kontakt, Intakt and Battery and many libraries from East West, Scarbee and many others.
During these ten years, Steinberg had to watch the parade go by and this was probably due to the fact that AVID bought Wizoo, producer of the HALion sound library. Many excellent synthesizers designed by third parties have had to be abandoned by Steinberg over the years and this probably has something to do with the rights. Moreover, we no longer find the HALion 3 library from version 4.
Here is a link for those who still want to use it:
