Halion 6 vs Sampletank 4

[GMusic]

Halion 6 is on sale right now for $175.

[damayor]

I got it for $79 with some expansions. Everything but the grand and iconica which I bought now. But it was a stesl and worth the price of admission.

[audiot]

Buy hardware.
...

I'm sure you will make a lot of friends in this forum



BTW ... hardware workstations are overrated, in my opinion. I'm pretty sure you'll find virtual synths and Kontakt libraries that sound as good as your Yamaha modx

I agree I sold off all my hardware long ago and never looked back. I miss the Yamaha motif though and the Korg for their karma arpeggios. However, Halion 6 keeps me content and I just bought iconica pack and the grand 3. Last night I went through my kontakt huge library and started deleting gigs and gigs of useless libraries. I was a hoarder. Some of it was good awful. Sampletank is not even in my thoughts anymore. Now it's Halion 6 vs falcon. That though I think is 100% over lap

I have Halion Sonic SE as part of Cubase, but never use it The quality of the presets varies and the UI is much to small (and i dont even have a 4k screen). And Steinberg has a long tradition of discontinuing products.

But i'm generally not a friend of workstations. For each module in these workstations you will find a specialised plugin that does a better job (or has a better workflow at least). Some sound designers might find it interesting to layer multisamples with different synthesis types, but as presets these type of sounds only target a small audience (in my opinion). Personally i dont want to construct a track around a complex patch from someon else. I use my host to layer different sounds. But no offense here! We all have our special preferences

[Bippo]

Haha, well, eventually you get what you pay for

that's true: you pay for an illusion and this is exactly what you get.

Illusion..? In what way exactly?

[Bippo]

Buy hardware.
...

I'm sure you will make a lot of friends in this forum



BTW ... hardware workstations are overrated, in my opinion. I'm pretty sure you'll find virtual synths and Kontakt libraries that sound as good as your Yamaha modx

Actually, modx slays kontakt in every possible way.
All the core library sounds of kontakt are very dull and weak, you gotta buy 3rd party libraries which costs a lot, takes too much gigabytes in your hard drive and takes too much time to load.

For instance, let's say that I want to use harp, acoustic guitar and saxophone sounds in my track. With kontakt I'm gonna need 3 different libraries, each one cost hundreds of dollars and takes dozens of gigabytes, plus I'm gonna wait until each vst is fully loaded and I'm gonna rape my cpu. Been there, done that.

With modx I can load those sounds in an instant, all ready in one box with no tweaking required, ready to play and record + my cpu doesn't sweat. And personally, all those multi gigabytes libraries doesn't sound better than the modx/montage engine anyway.

And if you take the actual workstation vsts out there (halion, sampletank, xpand etc) that offer you everything you need in one package and compare them with their alternative hardware (modx/montage, kronos, fantom)...you'll be amazed how subpar their presets are in comparison to the big3 hardware workstations.

In software you gotta have a collection of different multi gigabytes sampled libraries for acoustic sounds in order to have a high quality set, but with hardware you got everything you need in one box.

It's all a matter of workflow and personal preference, both ways can work.

[D.K Envelope]

i got sampletank4 max very cheap i bought during a sale.
i tried both Sampletank4 and halion 6

soundwise Sampletank4 wins it sound way better especially the trumpets section
you will hear a big difference in quality compare to halion

when you dont need the synth stuff and just for samples
go for Sampletank4 my opinion

[audiot]

Actually, modx slays kontakt in every possible way.
...

I agree ... but only on Kontakts factory content! There are more versatile libraries with smaller sizes (East West Colossus for example).

But i mainly use Kontakt as a traditonal sampler. I think that many people forgot about the benefits of a traditional sampler Let's say, that i need a shaker sound. Then i load up an instrument that i've created from a folder of shaker samples and try to find the right shaker on my midi keyboard. This is much faster and more intuitive than clicking through a folder of samples (as you often see it Youtube tutorials). And it allows you to play multiple samples at the same time (really useful for claps and other percussive stuff). For such tasks Kontakt slays everything else

As you said ... it's all a matter of workflow and personal preference

[dellboy]

This isn't good advice - referring to it as hardware is misleading. A computer running sampletank is as much hardware as a Yamaha modx is. The yamaha is just a computer running software with a keyboard attached.

That's the theory - but in real life practice something else seems to happen.

Maybe its the way they program workstations - or the DAC's - or something - but a workstation always seems to sound better than the sum of its parts when compared to its computer based software siblings.

[Gamma-UT]

It's polish more than any innate qualities. Unless you're using the built-in DACs on a computer, the soundcard DACs are easily as good as what you will find in a workstation.

But the sounds have been tweaked for the velocity profile of the keyboard and they've probably had a lot more attention paid to small details, plus the little smiley-curve EQ you often get on workstation programs and multis to make them stand out a bit more. It's less true of today's workstations than models from the 90s but the samples have often been compressed in two ways: dynamic range and size, often with one influencing the other to maximise the space of limited ROM or flash. One of the interesting things with that is how different people react to the late-90s Roland and Korg romplers. The Triton is generally "better" in terms of resolution, but the Roland programming often did really well to hide what was on paper a lower specification.

The samples you get with most software packages are in a more raw state but the devs don't have to worry about size - they are more concerned with the time it takes to get a library out, which means less finishing. You need to provide the polishing and they may sound more uneven than the software equivalent before that point.

If you don't like tweaking sounds too much before mixing, the workstation is often going to sound subjectively better.