Syphonic orchestra

Hi greetings from India
I just downloaded the steinberg syphonic orchestra on a trial mode. I want to know what are the squares on the very left side of the GUI and is this orchestra fully functional? The effects do not seem to cancel after pressing the button FX

Trigger Pads. see page 13 of the HSO manual, which you can access by clicking the “?” button/symbol next to the word “Options” in the upper left corner of the brown region of the interface. They are tied to any pad buttons on your keyboard controller.

I don’t know about the FX at all. There seems to be some reverb, but I guess it came in when the samples were recorded.

Hi Colin thanks . It says it removes the effects by pressing FX button but nothing happenes it seems after pressing that button.

Nothing happens here either. Both HSO and Dark Planet can be bought separately. Both can be loaded from inside HALion Sonic 2. One can investigate the FX button using either package.

Now using the Dark Planet preset “Dark Energy”, in the “stand alone” instrument (i.e. loaded directly as a VSTi into a Cubase instrument track), I can hit that FX button and there’s a change. I can’t tell what effects are being bypassed, but there’s something there. Switching to the version loaded into HALion Sonic 2, no such button exists. However, there’s the “Switch off All Insert Effects” button in the HALion framework, which looks like --, and does the same thing. Within HALion, I can also hit the Insert button and see effects on a Layer called Soundsphr05. If I had HALion 5, I might be able to look deeper. At least I can see something significant that’s being bypassed.

Switching to HSO, the patch Violoncello Solo Combi also has insert effects. The 1st is Studio EQ, but it’s set to flat. The other is Stereo Pan, but it’s set to dead center and full width. So these effects do nothing and should probably be bypassed. Which will have no effect on the resulting sound. Looking at half a dozen other HSO patches reveals the exact same inserts with the same meaningless settings. I guess it’s a recurring pattern, so we should bypass the FX in hopes of saving processing power.