Halion 6 & Absolute 3

[Googly Smythe]

Maybe the problem with the gui is that it is too flexible?
You can hide the bits you don't want, show the bits you do, save layouts as presets for recall later...
I'm one of the lucky ones - the gui works for me.

[EvilDragon]

I don't find HALion's GUI one least bit confusing, really. Workspaces are a genius thing.

[Touch The Universe]

Hey guys, I've been reading nearly every recent Halion thread and thought I'd chime in here since I've spent quite a bit of time with her. I would definitely say I fall well within the L O V E category here; its a sound designers playground for sure

I just released a sound library for Halion 6 and all I can say is its the most fun I've ever had sound designing. The gui takes a bit to get used, but after a few days, I was flying with it. I think they did a good job with it layout. The program tree is brilliant. You can add or remove busses on each layer and can add, copy, past entire fx chains between layers, without ever opening up the fx mixer. I also love how the zone layout has icons at the top to bring up whatever section you need quickly. Once I got the hang of that, and memorizing which icons does what, I really started to get the hang of halion.

Halion 6 is definitely closer to Omnisphere in comparison, than to say other samplers, like kontakt. I've yet to try falcon, so I can only limit my comparison to these. I would go so far to say Halion 6 is an Omnisphere but with a full blown multi-sample engine, better granular and wavetable engines, but with slightly worse filters and sound sources (less of them anyway). That said, the fact that it is such a powerful sampler A N D combines many awesome ways to do synthesis is by itself amazing. It's the best of both worlds, each having there pluses and minuses. You can't go wavetable and granular without first going the sample route. That said, I would always pick a sampler that can do synthesis as well, any day. It creates a much more interesting sound library imo.

Pluses:

An Intricate but extremely E A S Y to use key map! There is no doubt about it, Halion 6 is an extremely powerful sampler.

It samples. It's very easy to sample Hardware. It automatically records each note and maps it to the right pitch after the key is release and begins again on the next note.

Best Granular Engine I've used

Best Wavetable Engine I've used, and easiest to create new ones.

Has many good synth engines: Trium, Voltage, Skylab, A N I M A, auron

The Granular and wavetable engine can be used on entire multi-sample level.The only one I know of.

Some A M A Z I N G FX, and a lot of them. It has the best delay I've ever used period. Simple to use, doesn't have all those nifty rez, pitch feedback paths, but for regular delay uses, I absolutely love it. Also REVerence is extremely good too. Has the best sound REVerse reverbs I've ever heard. Amazing on keys or some bass sound fx. Also, not to mention the frequency shifter... List goes on and on. Also forgot the resonant filter, absolutely killer! I wish they would make this a vst!

The envelopes are good. With some envelopes, I have to struggle to find the sweet spots, even it is an mseg envelope. Here, I can dial it the ideal settings within seconds, under 30 for longer attack/release sounds.

A very cool quantize legato section. Sounds awesome, reminds me of a few legato methods in gforce imposcar, which has the best legatos' and most types I ever seen in a synth. Hard to explain but I'll post and audio example.

Arpeggiator: Amazing, just amazing. I think a large part is the presets that come with it. Right on target and the best I've heard to get nice results almost instantly. Way, way, better than omnisphere for example.

Cons :

Filters: I would love to see more creative filters. I was elated when I found a waldorf comb filter in the list. I was expecting to hear some dearly brilliant sounds similar to the comb in largo, for instance, but this. I really don't understand it. Sound N O T H I N G alike. Barely comb-esque sounding.

Matrix. I would say no right click to assign to matrix falls in this category. Lots of missing, extremely useful parameters. But this does not make or break a synth. Take sylenth for example, and Halion has many times the parameters availabe than it.
Some things aren't clear from the manual or videos. A few aspects of the library creator and recording hardware. Very minor things I figured out on my own after about 20 minutes.

Lastly, the VA engines. Anima knocks it out of the park as a wavetable engine in a nice gui. Skylab and Auron do the same in the granular arena. But the va side.... Don't get me wrong, Trium is rock solid, but compare to say there synth expansion hypnotic planet... no contest. The later, the results are much better, and quicker to dial in. Trium takes a bit longer to dial in and lacks a bit of sheen, imo. It does have awesome unison though, but for high resonance bp leads, it could use a bit of work. Voltage, on the other hand, doesn't lack this sheen, though it is primarily a bass synth, but I found myself using it for leads quite often.

[Touch The Universe]

Here's an example of that quantized legato I mentioned.

Here's an example of what Halion 6 can do with sound design, fusing multi-samples, granular and wavetable, with live synthesis. All patches made from scratch using original sound sources and init.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5bsJDi ... e=youtu.be

[tripleflows]

Lastly, the VA engines. Anima knocks it out of the park as a wavetable engine in a nice gui. Skylab and Auron do the same in the granular arena. But the va side.... Don't get me wrong, Trium is rock solid, but compare to say there synth expansion hypnotic planet... no contest. The later, the results are much better, and quicker to dial in. Trium takes a bit longer to dial in and lacks a bit of sheen, imo. It does have awesome unison though, but for high resonance bp leads, it could use a bit of work. Voltage, on the other hand, doesn't lack this sheen, though it is primarily a bass synth, but I found myself using it for leads quite often.

I found the VA engine (the Synth Zone) of HALion powerful and good sounding. One Synth Zone can use multiple osc, sub osc, noise, cross mods, sync, superb unison modes. Trium, Voltage, Hypnotic Planet and even Retrologue 2 etc. are all based on the HALion Synth Zone architecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W_PMaW ... e=youtu.be

[Touch The Universe]

Lastly, the VA engines. Anima knocks it out of the park as a wavetable engine in a nice gui. Skylab and Auron do the same in the granular arena. But the va side.... Don't get me wrong, Trium is rock solid, but compare to say there synth expansion hypnotic planet... no contest. The later, the results are much better, and quicker to dial in. Trium takes a bit longer to dial in and lacks a bit of sheen, imo. It does have awesome unison though, but for high resonance bp leads, it could use a bit of work. Voltage, on the other hand, doesn't lack this sheen, though it is primarily a bass synth, but I found myself using it for leads quite often.

I found the VA engine (the Synth Zone) of HALion powerful and good sounding. One Synth Zone can use multiple osc, sub osc, noise, cross mods, sync, superb unison modes. Trium, Voltage, Hypnotic Planet and even Retrologue 2 etc. are all based on the HALion Synth Zone architecture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W_PMaW ... e=youtu.be

Yes, I agree the synth zone itself sounds really good, they all do, and i like how even the synth macros themselves can be expanded and edited. My main gripe I guess would be with trium. The kind of sound I am after is a pretty specific kind of band pass or high pass lead with very high resonance and I found it much, much easier to achieve in there synth expansions. When sweeping with these settings the highs sound much more 'wide' and don't drop so much in volume. I'll make a short video showing what I mean.

[jobinho]

Computer Music review is up: http://www.musicradar.com/reviews/steinberg-halion-6

[Echoes in the Attic]

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to modulate parameters somehow by cc74? (Per voice).

I'm trying to figure out how one might modulate parameters with the y axis of an mpe device like linnstrument or a seaboard. I've tried asking Roli but they don't know, tried Roger Lynn forum and Strindberg but no answers there.

Cheers

[marmess]

https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=112817

[aMUSEd]

I find it really hard to find everything in H6, compared to Falcon which is much easier as you just drag and drop in modules from the sidebar. In Halion these seem to be all over the place and hidden under various menus.

[Touch The Universe]

It took a few days to have everything sink in with Halion's layout for me to. Afterwards I realized how well laid out everything actually is and am able to fly through it quickly to do what I need to do. When in the zone editor, try to familiarize yourself with the icons on top. Once I got the hang of that, the rest was pretty much smooth sailing. Don't let the initial intimidation put you off, Halion is really fantastic

[samplerbanker]

When in the zone editor, try to familiarize yourself with the icons on top. Once I got the hang of that, the rest was pretty much smooth sailing. Don't let the initial intimidation put you off, Halion is really fantastic

Yes, zone icons (and especially the single filter states, so all you see is only e.g. oscillators or filters) makes the workflow very fast... plus the screensets are awesome...but the learning curve is like a DAW once you know it, HALion is an awesome tool.

[SJ_Digriz]

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to modulate parameters somehow by cc74? (Per voice).

Cheers

hmm.. per voice? I'm not sure if Halion can do that on it's own or if you have to do it in conjunction with a host (Cubase) Note Expression implementation. I have a few minutes, I'll see if I can figure it out quickly.

[SJ_Digriz]

It looks like Halion relies on the host implementation of Note Expression to do per voice in this manner. I'm trying to think if there is a multi-channel way to do this or not.
EDIT: Just for completeness, Halion can assign incoming CC messages to modulation destinations. It's the "per voice" part that is in question. If you are inside Cubase, the answer is yes. Standalone or in a non-NoteExpression host, it doesn't look like it.

[martinjuenke]

Is a dongle needed for Halion?