In my opinion, the need for multi-timbral instruments has decreased lately. So I’m concerned about HALion’s future.
If HALion was reduced to a mono-timbral (is that the right word?) instrument it would still be awesome. After all, it is more than a synth.
And what about Kontakt?
In my opinion, the need for multi-timbral instruments has increased lately.
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That’s right🤣
What I meant was that, nowadays, it’s becoming more common for various sample developers to create their own custom players, so the need for samplers like HALion and Kontakt might be declining.
Dedicated virtual instruments are now cheap, powerful, and easy to integrate into one’s setup.
That said, I really love HALion.
Halion 7 is so much more than a multi-timbral instrument.
It’s a sound design monster, I never use it in multi timbral mode but open a new instance for each sound / instrument.
I’m sure with the amount of work Steinberg have put into Halion it’s quite safe for a good while yet.
Many instruments out there are thinking about tracking DAW users and don’t put much if any thought into the demands of live performers.
HALion better fits the needs of both…
I chose HALion to make my own sounds, and had a mind to use it in live performing situations as much or more than in studio/rehearsal scenarios.
I got on board with HALion 5, and there wasn’t much of interest for me in terms of ‘extra’ off the shelf libraries for it. It was at a similar price range to the base Kontakt Starter Kit, and that one didn’t even come with a complete General MIDI slate of sounds. I couldn’t find a way to ‘try’ the bigger packages that come with ‘more sounds’ (Standard, Komplete, Etc), and wasn’t all that impressed with that ‘first entry level kit’. It was also annoying that I couldn’t hard tweak anything in a program/patch without going into some weird secondary creator tool, and scripting up macros and stuff (and if you pour money into a NI library, it’s likely to be locked down jelly tight from deep user edits through the creator tool). Back in those days, both required a dongle investment of some kind (I already had both dongles, getting a ‘full trial’ of HALion was simple).
What I liked most about HALion, was how it came with a lot of staples in the included content/libraries for shaping up and inventing my own sounds; while also making it easy to add my own, or even import a lot of legacy stuff that was out there at the time (I.E. Roland and AKAI sample disks). As of HALion 7, it’s kind of like getting a sound bank that’s close to a full MOTIF and nearly half of a Montage all wrapped into one for a heck of a lot less money.
It’s about the last product on the planet in its class that can simply play an old General MIDI file right out of the box. That’s worth something right there!
I don’t waste a lot of time trying to make an instrument that can be crammed into any project imaginable. Instead, I take a few minutes to build ‘exactly’ what I need when I need it. No more, and no less. It’s a one off that I ‘might’ reuse as a template in some future project, but chances are higher that I’d rather start from scratch and build what I need as I go again.
Sure, it’d be nice if I could afford to load up several terabytes of instruments in a server somewhere and have instant access to every standard sound an orchestra has ever made, but I’m lucky to have 64gig of RAM and a 5 year old processor. I come out better to make my own stuff as I need it.
HALion is pretty amazing in that respect. I don’t need to go ‘shopping’ for content all that often. It’s got plenty of goodies to build anything I’d ever ‘need’ for a ‘gig’ that stage and main mixing engineers have the equipment, time, and skill/ears to work into a quick and dirty real time mix.
The goals of a live setup are pretty different. We want to be able to hand a techie 2 to 4 cable leads, and send them signals through those leads that the mixing engineer(s) can manage and make sound decent in some of the most god awful acoustical situations imaginable. As the player on stage, I can’t hear a fraction of what the mixing guy can. I can’t predict what issues he’ll be facing well before I even ‘plug in’.
Sometimes we play with a band that’s already crowding the mid range with umpteen guitars, punchy snares, and the bass player will chop your left hand off if you play below a middle C. Next song might be a ballad where half the band walks off stage to grab a beer, and you carry the full range for much of the song and get the freedom to ‘boogie woogie’ all night in the left hand. Next song might be about blistering leads, lush pads, and grungy bass all in the same mix. HALion gives all the tools to quickly find base pallet sounds and tune them for the different scenarios. It also gives us the tools to provide the console separate outputs so the engineer can get it all under control.
HALion is well equipped to build a set-list of instrument combos for such situations and call it up via remote.
All the ‘fancy’ only goes so far when the engineer sitting at the console is going to have to filter/compress/eq out most of it to end up with no less than two bearable mixes for the audience and stage anyway. Nobody will notice or care if that piano has 64 velocity layers with hammer release samples. The details get lost in the crowd noise anyway! An over compressed 4 layer piano gets the job done, with a cleaner easier mix anyway. The boss don’t want me over saturating it with reverbs and mess either…if I do that, he can’t clean up the mix for the venue.
As a ‘performers’ instrument that’s sold as a software based solution, HALion blows the others out of the water for live performing, as well as having a rather complete base pallet of sounds/instruments to work with right out of the box.
Arturia’s Analogue Lab (next best performer’s software/plugin concept to me for the stage) has some interesting approaches for a live performer’s plugin host/ecosystem, but then again, it’s different (focuses on emulating lots of legacy synths), and a real PITA to build your own sample based stuff. Add Pigments to get at more modern granular/streaming stuff and it quickly gets more expensive than HALion, no ‘easier’ to design for and play. If you need more traditional bread and butter instruments than ‘synths’, and some straight up MIDI controlled acoustical Drum Kits, Analogue Lab still can’t touch HALion quite yet in my opinion (No basic/complete GM pallet of instruments, and a single instance certainly can’t play a typical general MIDI file). They are working on filling out the collection, but in my opinion it’s not quite there yet, and a little more pricey). I don’t think Analogue Lab is quite as flexible on running multiple outputs from a single instance yet either. It’s just way cool to control in real time if emulating old synths, organs, and classic EPs are in order. It has nice modeled acoustic pianos analogue organs, and lots of options to build phat pads and leads intuitively without having to touch a ‘mouse’. I like it alot and find it inspirational, but for my needs, if I had to choose only one, “HALion vs Analogue Lab”, I’d still lean over to HALion (scads of nuts and bolts, including up to 64 MIDI channels over 4 ports for playing sequences and stuff…I can even run several MIDI keyboards, some full featured drum pads, wind controllers, and more off the same HALion instance and manage it all in one go).
A little bit of ‘planning’ and ‘personalization’ with HALion, and I think it’s as easy/powerful in real time as Arturia’s Analogue Lab for the average bread and butter live performer’s workstation. More so if you need to layer up more than 2 channels/instruments.
HALion is unparalleled when it comes to easily layering sounds up. We’re only limited by the power of our hardware! You can drag layers into a single parent node all day…mixing and matching all the different synth and sample engines. The only limit is how much your computer can handle. Easy peasy.
If one needs custom tuning and such (weird scales that can be warped and changed in real time), again, there’s nothing else out there in its class that can touch it (It even still supports RPNs for such things). The arp/step/groove engines and such are solid, and universal in nature (every module or library doesn’t give you an entirely different UI and concept to learn/manage, and every ‘layer’ can have its own modules working independently!).
HALion is also really hard to beat in terms of raw access to every element and parameter of a sound; all from the same GUI (of which you can customize what and how much shows, and how, at any given moment) and, messing with the macro and scripting engines are totally ‘optional’ with full HALion.
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