HALion 7

[IvyBirds]

I doubt you have better FM options than Halion. Some of the best FM synthesis I've come across is in Halion and given the pedigree of the people behind it that's not surprising.

No, I really have (and cost a bit less). I can think of things that Opsix does that FM lab just does not do, with a more intuitive GUI, though actually Halion FM is better than some of the other Halion GUIs. They seem to have made more effort with that one. I suspect they took quite a few cues from Korg when they designed it. For straight down the middle classic FM, I'm sure Halion is more than adequate. It seems to have a reasonable amount of modulation etc and user algos, so definitely capable. I didn't see much that Halion does that things like F'em doesn't, as another example.

As a proud FM synth nerd who has been into FM since the 1980s and as someone who owns pretty much every FM synth plugin ever made and every Yamaha hardware synth ever made you seem to be confused

FM-X which is what's inside of HALion7 (and the new Montage) is the same FM synth engine that Yamaha had inside of the FS1R module. It has the same 8op FM, with the same waveforms and the same tools like the spectral Skirt

FS1R also has Formant Synthesis but that isn't really FM.

Steinberg took this even further and added the FM waveforms from the TX81Z and SY77/SY99

This engine was around long before Korg made OpSix which is based on Yamaha's DX7

From an FM Syntheses standpoint FM-X inside of HALion7 and Montage simply blows away OpSix and F'em. I know I have both of them

OpSix is great if you can't be bothered to understand how FM works and want to pretend that FM is some kind of analog Subtractive synth and want/need to have training wheels on the FM Synthesis parts and add in some VA subtractive tools

And that I think is the main issue people have with HALion7

They want everything to be dumbed down and fit into a Subtractive Synthesis paradigm

While some of the engines inside of HALion7 allow for this, many of them are not really subtractive at all so it just doesn't work

If people approach HALion as some kind of thing that you can just sit down out and randomly tweak some knobs and make cool sounds by accident you are going to be disappointed. While you must certainly can do that, or randomly tweak settings on the thousands of presets, to get into the sound design aspect takes a little bit of effort and a little bit of time to understand how they work and understand and learn how to control and shape them

When it comes to FM, Yamaha and their subsidiary Steinberg are never going to dumb down the John Chowing/DX FM engine like Korg did with OpSix. The goal with FS1R and Montage was to make the most advanced FM synth Yamaha has ever made, and when they ported that into software in HALion7 the goal was to make the most advanced FM synth plugin they possibly could make

In that I think they have largely succeeded.

[Liero]

I welcome the feature that allows the user to rearrange sections of the UI to do custom screensets (+ a macro editor), but like others have pointed out that still does almost nothing if you don't get along with how the UI operates on its basic level. bmanic shouldn't have used escalating language in his defense, but telling someone to "quit whining" is nonsensical - 90% of KVR is people expressing negative feelings or problems with the tools they are using, and there's nothing wrong with that. I know that the more I've gone into audio work professionally, the more these annoyances actually affect me and I get bouts of anger towards UI's in particular because they make my work that much harder.

I bought Halion on the sale and hoped it would fill the slot of "super versatile sampler/synth sound design environment", of which in my opinion no passably intuitive and serviceable product exists yet.

Glad that some people are finding Halion great for them, I'll just be relying on simpler tools until a new contender arrives on the scene. For the moment the closest thing to it I'm sometimes using is actually the Reason Rack plugin, which has a very good UI (but other problems).

[kritikon]

A load of shite just for the sake of arguing

I've been around since the 80s also and you just spouted quite a lot of shite there. If you own those plug-ins, you must have missed what's in them or more likely just like the sound of your own argument. Seems to be a common theme there. TBH I can't be bothered when you quite patently aren't the expert on FM that you assume. If Opsix is pretending to be VA, why is Halion not? When it also has the filters, the envelopes etc etc. FX operators? Assume you won If it makes you feel so superior, I'm out. Arguing with a brick wall is not fun.

[wintoid]

As a proud FM synth nerd who has been into FM since the 1980s and as someone who owns pretty much every FM synth plugin ever made and every Yamaha hardware synth ever made you seem to be confused

If you have the Yamaha Montage FM plugin, I'd be interested to hear how it compares to Halion's implementation of FM-X. Hopefully that's "on topic" for this discussion.

[Gam456]

FM-X which is what's inside of HALion7 (and the new Montage) is the same FM synth engine that

If you own a Montage and FM Lab. You know FM Lab will never sound as a Montage

[IvyBirds]

A load of shite just for the sake of arguing

I've been around since the 80s also and you just spouted quite a lot of shite there. If you own those plug-ins, you must have missed what's in them or more likely just like the sound of your own argument. Seems to be a common theme there. TBH I can't be bothered when you quite patently aren't the expert on FM that you assume. If Opsix is pretending to be VA, why is Halion not? When it also has the filters, the envelopes etc etc. FX operators? Assume you won If it makes you feel so superior, I'm out. Arguing with a brick wall is not fun.

You are misrepresenting what I said

[IvyBirds]

If you have the Yamaha Montage FM plugin, I'd be interested to hear how it compares to Halion's implementation of FM-X. Hopefully that's "on topic" for this discussion.

I have a Montage 8m, the Montage Plugin, and HALion7 of course

The FM-X engine inside of Montage and the Montage plugin are the same, and the version inside of HALion7 has some differences

The Montage Plugin is really designed to look and feel like you are using the hardware and the hardware when connected to your computer via USB really makes for a good controller for it.

It's hard to explain without writing a book, but beyond the GUI there are differences between FM-X in Montage and HALion7. A lot of that has to do with the over all structures of synth engines inside of each product

At its core both HALion7 and Montage are designed to be multi timbral layered synths. That I think is the underlying difference between the two as the effects are different and some of the ways and means you do some modulations are different. Those two things have an impact on the sound of both

The actual synth engines for FM-X between Montage and HALion7 are very similar. HALion7 gives you more waveforms because you have the TX81Z and the SY99 waves. One of the disappointments for me is that they don't exist in the Montage hardware

If however you stay away from effects, more esoteric modulations and those extra waveforms they sound really similar

When designing FM on the computer I actually vastly prefer using HALion7 over the Montage Plugin

Again hard to explain without writing a book or making a video, but I will try to explain it this way

FM-X in Montage and HALion7 is very very heavily based on the 8op FM engine inside of the FS1R rack mount synth Yamaha made in the late 1990s.

Yamaha Engineers worked on both products. With Montage they took it and needed it to work inside of the Montage hardware frame work where you don't have a mouse and have a much smaller screen. On the hardware you make very heavy use of the main large "super knob" and then the 8 regular knobs and 8 regular faders. For example the operator controls for Frequency, Form, Skirt, Resonance, Feedback, EG Level, OP1 Decay, OP2 Decay are assigned to them and the screen will display relevant information regarding them

The plugin mimics that and you have those same controls on your computer screen and the menus and pages of the GUI mirror those on the hardware. You can tell great care was taken not to break this paradigm
.
While in HALion7 there was no paradigm to break and they had a clean slate to do whatever. So they made a GUI that is centered around using a mouse and physical controllers via MIDI learn and then screens reflect that, and of course those screens are customizable inside of HALion7 as well

For me programming FM-X is far more fun when using the actual hardware rather than the Montage plugin. So I do just that. It's so easy to swap patches between them if I want to use those sounds in the plugin I would just do that, but It's also super easy to just hook the Montage up via USB and run those patches on the hardware as Cubase and the Montage Hardware unsurprisingly work really well together and that way my CPU can offload everything to the hardware and MIDI and digital audio for everything travels over USB and works just like the plugin

But most of the time I prefer the version inside of HALion7

[wintoid]

Thanks, lots of useful information there, particularly this:

When designing FM on the computer I actually vastly prefer using HALion7 over the Montage Plugin

I've been playing with Halion a bit more lately, using it to sample multisamples from my hardware synths for example, but the FM is a big attraction. I find it unwieldy, and always wondered whether the Montage was the solution for me. So I'm glad to read what you wrote. I'm just going to have to find a way to love Halion I think.

[IvyBirds]

Thanks, lots of useful information there, particularly this:

When designing FM on the computer I actually vastly prefer using HALion7 over the Montage Plugin

I've been playing with Halion a bit more lately, using it to sample multisamples from my hardware synths for example, but the FM is a big attraction. I find it unwieldy, and always wondered whether the Montage was the solution for me. So I'm glad to read what you wrote. I'm just going to have to find a way to love Halion I think.

Yeah I would find a way to love HALion7 unless you want to invest in Montage Hardware.

Having said that, as a total unashamedly proud FM nerd who has spent the bulk of his life going back to the 1980s programming FM Synths especially Yamaha DX style FM Synths, and who feels really confident with FM-X, let me offer the following suggestion(s) as well

FM-X is amazing, it can do a lot of incredible things. At its core however it's just a Yamaha DX7

FM-X has two additional operators, and the operators in FM-X are more advanced and can generate a lot more waveforms than simple sine waves, but it's still basically just a DX7 with more options

I think for a lot of things FM-X and the options it has are somewhat overkill which can make for a frustrating experience, kind of like how driving a Formula 1 race car would be overkill to drive to work everyday while sitting in traffic

As such I use OPS7 from Plogue quite a bit as my weapon of choice for FM Sound Design and programming. While that was created to accurately emulate the DX7 they added a bunch of features as well including adding extra wave forms to the operators. With reduced options it's a much more simpler interface and well worth checking out for your FM explorations if you haven't already. It however somewhat spartan in it's appearance.

Screenshot_20250106-160744.jpg

I could spend the rest of my life with just the DX7 or OPS7 using just basic sine waves and still not exhaust it's capabilities. For $50 it's pretty incredible

Any patch you create in OPS7 using the "Classic" mode of just sine waves can then be exported as DX7 sysex, which means it could then be imported into HALion7 since that can read DX7 sysex, for further development and exploration if you so desire

[bmanic]

This is a wonderful tutorial on Halion 7 by Anthony. He's a gem in the space for tutorials, especially Steinberg products. In Tutorial 2 he describes a fantastic way to setup the user interface. Halion is tough, but if you approach it a little by little it starts to make sense; although I barely know much of it. I can play with wavetables and the spectral synth, analog but nothing too complex. I think people are mistaking what "customizable" and "changing the UI" means. You can custom the interface and select parts to integrate into said interface to suit what you are doing like IvyBirds mentioned, and then you can create a skin from scratch called a Macro to command what you engineered under the hood utilizing the corrosponding Layers in the Program Tree. I think I explained it pretty right here. Check out the video:

EDIT: bjm4tt posted the same video above. Check it out.

Hope this what people were trying to figure out...

Good points and even beyond that, you can create your own unique instruments using the HALion engines including having custom menus

Yes but if you go down the "creating unique instruments" route you end up having to use the LUA scripting and we are right back at where I originally had my gripes with Halion. The LUA script implementation for Halion is quite lacking in targets to pull from (see my earlier gripes with FlexPhrasor not exposing it's MIDI note generation as a target).

For instance in Kontakt or UVI Falcon, their scripting languages go a lot deeper and you have almost complete freedom to do truly unique things and pull pretty much any parameter or feature from the whole software through the script.. including completely changing the UI, and I truly mean User Interface, not just the graphics, but the actual way things work. Heck you could make a cutoff knob of a synth only move if you write "suck my balls" with the mouse.

So yeah, I stand by my opinion. As far as I can tell with my limited time with Halion, it is not at all as flexible as one might think, at least not from a "power users" perspective. And "changing the UI" is either just moving a bunch of pre-made windows around or creating a glorified knob to target interface with very limited additional things via the LUA script.


Now, to balance out the negative parts:

The actual "built in parts" in sheer amount of control and especially sound quality, are truly great! The sample editor is such a joy to use compared to ALL of the competition. It's super quick and easy to setup complex looping points, including a secondary release loop!

Mapping zones is well done and easy to use.

The FM synth module is spectacularly good sounding and in my opinion worth the price of admission alone!

So in short, I really REALLY do like it a lot! Even with the negative aspects. In the grand scheme of things they are quite minor. In pure usability, this absolutely stomps on UVI Falcon.

[muzicxs]

Why I dislike about (almost) all Steinberg software is that there's no sense of UX. It's generally a menu inside a menu inside a menu inside a menu. That's not UX design, that's being lazy and going back to the 90s. Why do I say it's lazy? Because it's super easy to just cram as much as you can inside a GUI. Anyone can do that. What separates masters in UX is their ability to make complex domains easy to work with. To re-envision the way we work. Steinberg's software can do tons of things, but great UX is not part of it.

[kraster]

Why I dislike about (almost) all Steinberg software is that there's no sense of UX. It's generally a menu inside a menu inside a menu inside a menu. That's not UX design, that's being lazy and going back to the 90s. Why do I say it's lazy? Because it's super easy to just cram as much as you can inside a GUI. Anyone can do that. What separates masters in UX is their ability to make complex domains easy to work with. To re-envision the way we work. Steinberg's software can do tons of things, but great UX is not part of it.

I'd call things like Halion more open ended and that's the design philosophy.

Cramming a lot into the GUI is not a necessary condition of Halion. It's really misrepresenting how Halion works to state that.

You can get rid of pretty much everything if you want. It's left up to you to decide.

The whole paradigm is based on customisation. You can have menus inside of menus or you can just have a single page. The instant recall of various working environments makes it a lot less unwieldy.

For example, I can have a VA with oscillators, filters and envelopes all on one page with nothing else. I can switch instantly to a different view if I want more control but I can pare it back to the minimum if needs be. That's the essence of making complex domains easier to work with.

Videos like Anthony's above are informative in how you actually go about customising the UI but there is absolutely nothing forcing you to have a huge layout like his with everything on display. The fact that you can switch instantly between various layouts negates any concerns about too much default complexity.

I think it's a problem for most open ended/semi modular platforms. You have massive amounts of parameters, features and functionality so, for me at east, the more you're able to just focus on specific functionality while hiding everything else the better.

If anything I think that Halion is about the best. Falcon is all over the place, Msoundfactory is well... Melda, Phase Plant is too fiddly.

To be clear I'm talking about the more non fixed architecture platforms so the likes of Avenger, Pigments and Current are different.

[bmanic]

.. my God is this thing unbelievably buggy though. Text entry fields are completely bugged here. Can't rename things properly when some keys do something weird. Like if I have a Program Tree window open and try to rename a sound in the Slot Rack, it just starts collapsing Program Tree branches.

Can't use Backspace either.

I tracked down the bug to the Options/Keyboard Commands. Had to delete all the damn letter keys and backspace assigned keyboard commands.. now I can type normally in a text box. So the bug is this: Text entry fields don't take precedence over keyboard commands. Unbelievable..

Great job Steinberg. Great job. Nice piece of code.

[bmanic]

Been working a lot with Halion today and one positive that I've noticed is just how incredible it's sample interpolation is. It just sounds way better than most other samplers I have available. Falcon at it's highest interpolation setting doesn't even come close to what Halion can do at it's 'extreme' setting. Even the 'high' and 'best' settings sound noticeably better in Halion.

Though to be fair, it uses a lot more CPU too. At the 'extreme' setting it uses 6 times more CPU than UVI Falcon. Even at it's 'standard' setting it uses almost twice the amount of CPU compared to Falcon's highest setting but sounds about the same.

Still, if you want to sample harmonically complex or transient heavy material and transpose it even a little bit then Halion is by far the best sounding option out there. It's pretty much on par with the Kurzweil K2500 I have here which directly changes sample rate when pitching up (giving you very limited upwards transposing of samples unless you start out with a really low sample rate).


And now an unfortunate negative:

/begin standard rant about polyphonic EQ (as I've done in the past)

There is absolutely no easy way to add polyphonic effects, unless you clone every single key and create it as it's own keygroup, then add a bus for every key and copy/paste your effects. This is quite unfortunate as I was hoping there was a way to get at least a simple polyphonic EQ somewhere.. but no. Not possible (except for the huge workaround I just mentioned).

In Falcon this is extremely simple to do. Just insert an EQ at the keygroup level and you are done. A simple polyphonic EQ module is such a no-brainer that I can not for the love of god understand how developers don't understand this.

Why? What use could a polyphonic EQ possibly be?

It's THE quick cheat code to tonally editing samples on the fly. Have that one sample that is otherwise perfect but it causes an unnecessary resonant peak at exactly C#5? Simple: Just edit the keytracking so that it cuts the unnecessary resonance when C#5 is hit. Instead you need to duplicate the sample, put it in it's own keygroup (meaning you edit ALL the other keygroups ranges as well!), add a bus to it, then add an EQ module, cut the resonance out. So instead of it taking like 1 minute to do, you are now spending a lot longer.

.. and that's just if the resonance happens at exactly C#5. What if it slowly gets more annoying the closer you get to C#5 and then slowly disappears when you go past C#5? With a polyphonic EQ module this would be absolutely trivial to track.. yet without one, you now end up creating multiple keygroups around C#5 and have to manually edit every ones EQ to fake a slow modulation of the EQ node going towards the "center". A massive time sink.

Analogous to DAW plugin automation vs tape splicing a short area on a tape where you send it through an EQ multiple times then manually splice all the different takes together. Whee! You've just manually automated an EQ with tape splicing.

Sigh.. here's hoping more developers understand the utilitarian power of a keytracked polyphonic EQ. It's so damn useful.

[IvyBirds]

/begin standard rant about polyphonic EQ (as I've done in the past)

There is absolutely no easy way to add polyphonic effects, unless you clone every single key and create it as it's own keygroup, then add a bus for every key and copy/paste your effects. This is quite unfortunate as I was hoping there was a way to get at least a simple polyphonic EQ somewhere.. but no. Not possible (except for the huge workaround I just mentioned).

In Falcon this is extremely simple to do.

Sigh.. here's hoping more developers understand the utilitarian power of a keytracked polyphonic EQ. It's so damn useful.

Then just use Falcon if your sample is doing that and you want a polyphonic eq

Not to be flippant but I have to say in 30+ years of making heavy use of samples I have never experienced the use case you describe. If I did I would either abandon the sample or edit it in a DAW with a different EQ curve

Or I would just use Falcon. In the end there are more esoteric things that Falcon does better than HALion, and there are things that HALion7 does better than Falcon. To me HALion's sample engine just sounds so much better than Falcon's, I can live with that

One idea might be to load the sample into Falcon apply the polyphonic EQ and then use HALion7 to sample Falcon back into HALion

Sure it's a pain, but that's music creation in general