I have searched the forum and not found the answer I’m looking for.
Steinberg is having a half-price sale on the full Halion 7 and the Halion Sonic 7 Collection.
What does this offer that’s not in the Halion collection which installs with Dorico?
I know the difference between the full Halion 7 and the Halion Sonic 7 Collection lies with being able to more fully edit the sounds in the full version as well as build our own samples, but otherwise the included sound libraries are the same (as I interpret the comparison chart).
What does this sound library offer which the version included with Dorico doesn’t include?
Thanks for any insights any of you have on this question.
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You get a lot of additional sounds and super powerful sampler and synth engines.
For example, you get two pianos, Eagle and Raven, that are much better than the default one in Dorico from HALion Sonic SE. I prefer Eagle, it’s lovely. Beautifully sounding and very playable. It apparently uses the same samples as NI The Maverick, but I prefer how it plays and sounds in HALion, at least for my style of playing.
You also get an open tuned guitar instrument called Tales which is simply fantastic. An endless source of inspiration.
Studio Strings that come with HALion are possibly better suited for certain popular genres than the Iconica Sketch.
FMLab is like having every Yamaha’s FM synth and much more. It’s incredibly good sounding.
Skylab and the new X-Stream are granular/spectral synths respectively which are very useful for getting atmospheric and cinematic sounds. For example, you can experiment with replacing or augmenting Olympus Micro sounds with some processed choir sounds from Skylab and the new X-Stream. Or you can sample Olympus Micro sounds into these synths and process them to get some very interesting effects. Or you can even sample your own voice and process it to sound kind of like Gregorian chant, or whatever, really. Possibilities are endless.
Something that may be interesting for Dorico users is that you can add/record audio to Halion’s sampler and trigger it with MIDI trigger regions. A possible workaround for missing audio tracks in Dorico, at least for some use cases? I need to experiment more with this…
In a nutshell, HALion is kind of like having a hardware workstation (Yamaha, Korg, Roland…) on steroids in a VSTi form. If you are a pianist/keyboardist, I think you will love it and enjoy it.
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Thank you! I’ve gone ahead and purchased it since I didn’t want to miss the sale and I will be out of town for the coming week.
Thanks for the heads-up on the sale. Just went ahead and upgraded. Took me a while to find my dongle with my HALion 6 license on it, but got HALion 7 converted over to the Steinberg Activation Manager now.
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I’m glad I could help!
Isn’t it great when we can work through the Activation Manager instead of needing to keep the dongle safe and protected?
I’m having fun exploring H7 – It is easy to get just the right sound from the thousands to choose from.
I’m glad I made the purchase, although I feel that I’ve also made my life a bit more complicated. No matter, I’ve still got NotePerformer to fall back on for quick and efficient playback when I don’t have the time for delving into the richer sounds of Halion.
It’s an all around good instrument. It includes a good General MIDI layout. It’s quite good with stuff that still uses the General MIDI protocols to call up instruments (like Band in a Box). You can also build your own MIDI ‘program table’ (replace the default GM instruments with whatever you like).
It really shines for live performing (Much of it sounds like a Yamaha MOTIF keyboard). It can support huge multi-output audio interfaces, so you can run multiple mixes at the same time (I.E. Something different for stage monitors than what is sent to the House Mains, and maybe even other mixes for recording, live streaming, etc). Scads of easy to dial in and play sounds that most keyboardists would want at their fingertips ‘on stage’.
Pianos, Organs, and Synths galore! Box full of ethnic/world/folk instruments. Fun guitars with amp modeling. Punchy brass and solo/section winds for pop/jazz/funk. Seems like there are even some nice things like brass section falls/doits/kisses/etc.
Typically, when playing live you want simple and clean sounds more on the dry side that the mixing engineers can predict and manage easily. The base HALion content is perfect for live stage settings. It also includes plenty of tools and effects to ‘shape and color’ the sound and the ‘virtual room’, for the studio, and/or gigs where you might need to be your own ‘mixing engineer’ for both the stage monitors and the house mix. There aren’t very many software for PC/Mac instrument platforms that are as powerful and flexible in live situations as HALion/Sonic.
The extra Drum Kits that come with Full H7 are excellent in my opinion. With Band in a Box, doing general ‘song sketching/writing’, I find that I keep falling back to several of the HALion Drum Kits over and over again. They have some ride cymbals in there that to my ears are easy to place in a mix, and sound amazing. For that stage of production, I just find that the kits groove nicely and translate well when I wish to ‘communicate about’ or ‘demo’ a groove concept. Still among my very first go-to drum kits…despite having quite a lot of third-party drum plugins and rack modules to choose from (Full Groove Agent, lots of stuff from East West, Roland XR units in the rack, and more).
If you went for the full HALion 7 setup, you can go deep into editing most of the sounds. You get unlimited ‘layers per channel’ (where Sonic limits you to 4 per channel). You get several synth engines, and high end sampling tools.
Full H7 allows you to build sounds with many different synth engines, and comes with a healthy stash of instruments to start out with and learn from. You get the standard additive synth modules, wave table, granular, spectral, FM, and more. You also get full sampling (with the tools to loop/trim/edit/library/tag). Virtually unlimited envelopes/filters/LFO/ARP engines, etc. A LUA based scripting engine allow you to build scripts to control/manipulate nearly every parameter in the plugin. You can go as simple, or as elaborate as you like when designing your own ‘user interface’ for your sounds. You can mix and match it all together to create uber rich sounds.
Full H7 also provides all the tools you might need to pack and publish your own libraries, including the ability to build optional macro editor screens (what you usually see in the Sonic UI after loading an instrument). The Macro editors are optional with full H7. If you don’t want to mess with building a custom UI…you can just leave the Macro screen blank and use the H7 standard interface, along with the base sets of quick controls (each layer/node has a fresh set of QC knobs), CCs and or VST parameters to manipulate the sound.
Full H7 can export sounds that will work in the free version of Sonic 7.
When it comes to integration with stuff like Dorico (And your tracking DAW too), there is unlimited ‘potential’. Just be aware that the default programs for most of the HALion libraries tend to be ‘zeroed’ out (Iconica is an exception with a different library design concept). They’ll often start out loud, often are dry (little or no reverb), dead center panning, and usually use a 1:1 velocity curve.
The samples that come with HALion are often very dry, and loud (normalized). They were made in a very dead room, with uber sensitive microphones, so they are pretty PURE waveforms of the instrument/voice being sampled, including all the harish and strident harmonics that distance micing in a livelier room would typically hide or diffuse. Why? It’s easy to have a true/pure sample and shave away or roll down frequencies you don’t like from the mix, but it’s impossible to add them if they aren’t there! So…you start with a rich/loud/busy sample, and ‘roll back or filter out’ the frequencies that are too loud or in the way. Often timber is controlled by having filters that clamp down or open up various frequency ranges of the sample depending on things like key-velocity, note frequency, or continuous controllers. Hence a single trumpet sample can be manipulated to be bright, strident, or dark, warm, and mellow. Quite a few HALion instruments also include multiple sets of samples for various dynamic ranges of the instrument.
So…with alot of the HALion content (HALion Symphonic Orchestra too), you WILL need to give the ‘mix’ and ‘dynamic ratios’ some personal attention. Over time you’ll probably do a lot of ‘gain staging’ for your favorite HALion sounds and saving copies with different kinds of Dorico scores in mind. You’ll probably want some filters and EQ in place and ready to go. With HALion 7, you do get all sorts of tools to shape the sound and put it exactly where you want it in the mix. You get plenty of tools to put your sound the appropriate ‘virtual space’ for your mix. I.E. If a viola sounds a bit scratchy and harish…pop in a filter or EQ and roll off some frequencies. You’ll want to get the panning and stereo spread in order for the type of mix you like. These are concepts that the default patches that Dorico will call up in HALion/Sonic ‘out of the box’ will not always cover for you.
Example…out of the box, HALion Symphonic Orchestra (HSO: comes with Dorico Pro) can sound pretty bad in Dorico; however, if you gain stage it so it’s not so HOT/LOUD across the different dynamic layers of samples (out of the box, Dorico can favor those fff dynamic sample layers too often, when you might much prefer the medium or softer samples. Too aggressive! So tweak it to back off the volume, and use less of the fff sample layer, and it’s much better). Pan/spread it out properly, set up an extra EQ (possibly some notch filters too) to get more control over the ‘air/body’ frequency ranges, and pipe it through the right reverb, it can sound quite nice.
Full H7 provides even more ability to go deep into HSO and shape up more articulations. Over the year’s I’ve used HALion to gradually reinvent my own HSO strings into something more like this:
Added legato pedaling and portamento support.
Different gain staging and some default panning.
Different dynamic response.
Added a more powerful/versatile EQ (remote controlled via CC).
Added more articulations (dynamic and filter envelopes applied to existing HSO samples).
Added the ability to crossfade between Tutti and Solo on a single stave (using a CC).
HSO was designed back when the concept in library design was power user style flexibility: Throw up a pure sample, as loud and flat as possible. Roll off the parts that are ‘too much’, and shave away what you do not want. Place the sound exactly where you want it in the mix/virtual room.
The good news is that with each new version, Dorico provides more and more abilities and tools to lock in a nice instrument staging for different plugins/instruments and virtual rooms, save it, and reuse it in future projects.
Iconica is a bit different. You should find that it sounds pretty nice in Dorico right out of the box. Libraries like that were better designed to simulate realistic instrument staging and rooms out of the box. So some libraries do exist for HALion that are much closer to being ‘plug and play’ for a host like Dorico. In fact, Orchestra libraries like this have the opposite problem from the old HSO design concept, in that while their instruments sound pretty nice together out of the box, they are more difficult to personalize and get fine control over. It’s not as easy to ‘mix and match’ them with stuff from ‘other libraries/plugins’. You’re not just getting a pure instrument sample from a close mic. Instead you are getting wetter samples of an entire room, from various mic positions within that room. While the full Iconica version provides some of the more pure ‘close miced’ samples that’d allow you to use the library in a wider variety of ‘mixing scenarios’, the Iconica Sketch version is more of a plug and play, single context library. With Sketch (comes with Dorico Pro, Cubase Pro, and full versions of HALion and Sonic Collections), you’ll get a decent bog standard orchestra stage (samples probably made from mics near where the conductor would stand).
For what it’s worth, the Iconica library program layers are locked against deep user edits. So even with full HALion 7, you are more limited in what you can edit. If it’s not part of the UI the Iconica designers gave us up front, we can’t manipulate it. For the most part Iconinca gives plenty of control to play the library, but we can’t make small tweaks to it like say, extending the range of a horn a few partials higher and lower in the zone editor.
The full HALion 7 release does come with some nice section strings with key-switched articulations that were released specifically for HALion a long time ago. These are much older releases than ‘Studio Strings’, but they’re still quite nice! It’s also possible to go back even further and grab the old HALion 2/3 strings and import them (might still need the dongle plugged in?). Some of those are pretty iconic/interesting.
The Studio Strings library is ‘fully unlocked’, so you can go in and make your own stuff out of this base content. In fact, the unlocked macro with this library (Pretty much all of the libraries that shipped new with HALion 6) are good ones to examine to see how macro editors are made. You can even copy elements from those macros and use them in fresh instruments.
HSO is ‘mostly’ unlocked as well. I don’t think it’s possible to export it for Sonic and keep the original Macro if you need to take it out of 'Sonic Compatibility" mode to edit something (Hence why I made an entirely new one as seen earlier in this post), but you can still make your own tweaks and export stuff that works in Sonic (either leave off the Macro, or build a new one).
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P.S.
I forgot to mention this. It’s not something people ask about as much these days, but it was once a major selling point for products like HALion…
It CAN still import a pretty wide variety of older third party content.
I.E. I have some old sample disks for Roland S series samplers, and some old AKAI samplers too. I’m able to make an ISO image of those disks and HALion can go in and use a good bit of the content from them. In some cases it gets almost everything, and it sounds pretty close to how the real machine did back in nineteen ninety weird (filters/dynamics/lfo/etc). There are also cases where all it can get from the patches are the base sample zones (info like filters/dynamics/lfo are lost). In some cases all you can get to are the individual samples, and have to rebuild your own zones/layers/etc.
Still, it’s nice to know that even though it’s just a side note (if documented at all anymore) that HALion can still access quite a bit of content out there.
I think it’s also possible to ‘export’ in a couple of formats that stuff like Chicken Systems can use to get it into ‘yet more formats’.
No sfz support in HALion yet. SFZ import/export remains on my feature wish-list 
Maybe they’ll add it someday.
If you’re curious about this sort of stuff, go all the way back to the HALion 5 manual. It goes into more detail on how this stuff works than the newest manuals. As far as I know, it’s all still working in the latest HALion 7.1 release.
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Something else I forgot about; yet use pretty often.
With full HALion, you can get into custom tuning fairly easily. It can support the old MTS standard, a few of the old General MIDI RPN events, VST tuning, and also individual VST Note Expression parameters.
You can invent new scales: custom tune all 128 notes individually, or do it by ‘repeating octaves’.
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Wow, Brian, THANK YOU! That is a ton of information. I’ve printed it all out since I am so new to Halion and all the depth of editing and richness of content that it offers.
It’s great to have a veteran user like you so willing to step up and help us newbies out!
The fact that you took the time to write all this is very much appreciated!
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It’s really amazing what you can do with it.
Two things I personally miss is MIDI-out port and more third-party realistic acoustic sample libraries. For example it would be great to have something like Session Strings Pro, Session Horns Pro, electric guitar equivalents of MGuitar and TGuitar, acoustic bass equivalent of the Electric Bass etc… Bundled content is amazing for live playing and sketching, but more high quality libraries are needed to completely replace Kontakt with HALion.
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I don’t have the full Halion 7 yet, only the free version Halion Sonic. I do have 3 or 4 other soft synths. I have yet to find a standard way for notating electronic music, given each instrument may have dozens or hundreds of options for LFO modulation, polyrhythmic sequencers, analog and wavetable audio engines, filters, FX patches, etc. etc. Notating music for modular synthesizers must be even more challenging.
For the synth experts using Dorico, is there an accepted practice for creating sheet music for synths as an historical record, or is piano-like notation sufficient and the synth’s settings are left to the musician’s discretion? Do you create instructions in the front material, or use text boxes in the score? Since this Dorico thread has revealed deep synth expertise, I’m genuinely curious if anyone has developed templates or notation conventions that are aligned with playing a particular synth and its myriad controls.
I haven’t seen any ‘standard’, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
If a composer wants approximate performances general synth characteristics might be listed in a similar way that stops are done for organ. General MIDI provides a few basic synth categories that people have been using for decades to at least describe a category for the synth sound. It uses terms like Square, Saw, Caliope, Chiff, Charang, Vox/Voice, Halo, Sweep, etc. Since those protocols were written there are obviously more categories these days that most seasoned keyboardists will understand well enough to pick sonic pallets in the right ball park (granular/spectral sounds more common in big film and/or video games scores).
Some scores might have more notes about specific instruments/patch-program information/etc that the composer has in mind. One can use foot notes, addendums, and custom systems if more detail needs to go on the performer’s part.
It’s possible that some composers ‘invent’ their own systems (shapes/colors/symbols/etc) and include an appendix/key with their score to explain it all.
If an ‘exact’ recreation of electronic music is in order, the best way to get a perfect recreation is to share a full sequence with precise routing/patching information for performers to load and study.
The piano scroll with all the controller lanes is as precise as it gets for preserving every single ‘performance detail’ supplied by the players hands/feet/breath/etc in real time.
As you’ve suggested, a key element in a lot of synth parts rests in manipulating ‘knobs/faders’ in real time. Just share a reference recording and possibly the complete performance sequence.
Subsequent performances of a piece…well, half the fun is in trying ‘new sounds/mixes’ on the same ole grooves/melodies/harmonies 
Thank you Brian. As usual with your forum posts, I and many others benefit from your expertise and your willingness to share knowledge.