Expanded with updated information about version 7 down the page.
I have written about sampling, and the horror of owning hardware in a seething pit of wires. That leads to a discussion about whether hardware is really worth it, (for which I have flame-proof pants from eBay). Here I need to test an assumption I made about Kontakt being the sampler of choice.
Good Olde Kontakt
Kontakt is still the default software sampler. If you buy samples it’ll come as Kontakt for sure, occasionally with a dog bone for the Reason and Logic people. In a way it’s good that there’s some kind of standard, but it’s not an open or versatile one. Kontakt is a good sampler, that’s about it. No great innovation has taken place in a while and others are trying ideas that NI seems to have abandoned as they market pre-cooked ‘solutions’.
Due to secret men’s business I get the opportunity to review Steinberg products. Today I want to look at the strangely capitalised HALion. We will see it’s not just a sampler, but more akin to a workstation such as the Yamaha Montage.
Bear with me
Rather than provide various ‘zooms’ of interface (such as Alchemy) there are three different versions of the software:
- Daddy Bear – the full HALion, which makes new programs. If you’re a big tough electronic dude like me, you get this one.
- Mummy Bear – HALion Sonic which can play back programs from a rather large library of Yamaha sounds and synthesisers. It would probably sell better if people if it was called Motif.
- Baby Bear – HALion SE which is free, comes with no libraries at all, but can still play programs, some of which you can get for free.
Programs, layers and zones
Straight away I must try to explain some terminology.
A program is a virtual instrument based on the HALion engine, which may have a macro GUI, and up to 4 layers in which multiple zones can be placed. Try as I might I still get layers and zones muddled. The easy way to think about it is a layer is a split on the keyboard – bass down the bottom, piano up top. Or different articulations of a single instrument. A zone is like a single sample spread across pitches, but each zone can be an entirely different synthesis type. Middle C could be a virtual synthesiser, A# a wavetable.
A simple program might be a layer with sampled piano. A complex program might have a GUI resembling a Blofeld, combining two layers of wavetable synthesis with a layer of virtual analogue synthesis, all passed through effects. You may have 32 programs running through the mixer in stereo or 5.1. There is a complex system for natural musical phrases and arpeggios, but a host sequencer is still needed.
The price of great flexibility is great complexity. You have to move back and forward between multiple windows which show the program at different magnifications – a sample waveform here, a stack of layers there. It’s rarely skeuomorphic, sometimes tending to the look of a database. Never quite as confounding as Reaktor but not for the Average Enthusiast.
Most of the time you drag and drop a sample onto a layer, creating a sample zone, and get to work. Unusually, you can also sample sounds directly into HALion. Otherwise you can create new zones – a 3 oscillator virtual analogue, drawbar organ, wavetable, granular, etc.. You can convert a sample over to a wavetable or granular sample. I didn’t find the wavetable conversion to work especially well for anything but simple waveforms.
An Achilles file format
A HALion owner can sell their work to HALion SE owners without royalties to Steinberg. A program provides all aspects of the HALion engine to any version – loading samples, wavetables, virtual analogue etc. It’s a bit like Reaktor or SynthEdit but based around the paradigm of sampling.
Here’s the problem – I have difficulty in explaining the way HALion saves files. Like most samplers, it saves a pointer to existing audio files unless told otherwise. It can also be asked to collect samples into a new folder structure. But the equivalent to a monolith is a complex business – a VST sound container is something that bundles everything from the macro GUI to the samples, that must be registered with Steinberg’s MediaBay and located in a library which can only be moved about by a library manager – and that’s daunting to the new user. You could argue that it’s good shared studio practice, especially so that users of the smaller HALion Sonic can load up sounds. But it’s not an inviting part of music composition. Given the problem of accessing sounds from multiple hosts most people will just keep the samples where they are and pray that none go missing.
One thing I like about Kontakt is that it can be made to save monolith files – all the samples, compressed with all the settings bundled into one. That’s a killer advantage when you have multiple drives, 1000’s of samples and only hell knows where that one disappeared. But a monolith file takes your sounds behind a proprietary wall, locked away from any other software.
Updates in Version 7
The most interesting part of the update is the spectral oscillator, apparently a cousin to PadShop2. There’s slight differences, for example a loop might click in Halion, but not in PadShop which I think means Halion keeps the audio waveform as the source. The spectral filter is also a complex frequency graph which sounds very sweet – combs and sharp peaks – but only one filter so no Z-Planes.
The new 8 op FM synthesis includes Ops and Algorithms from the DX7, TX81z and Montage – and unusually the SY77 -but- not including the sampled waveforms that the real SY77 can mutate. It remains FM only and doesn’t go near the flexibility of the Korg OpSix. There’s now also wavetables in stereo – or 5.1 which is cool – but none of the wave manipulations you get in Vital.
I can understand how it would be great to stack Spectral with FM and samples … but I can do this in a DAW. HALion is simply too deep and murky and full of spreadsheets for me to use daily. If you were able to focus your energy on this one workspace you’d be thrilled – but I think I need things that do one job at a time so that I can just use the DAW as a studio,
The Verdict
The less meticulous probably should stick with Kontakt and Padshop2 etc., which do one thing well at a time. If you admire the extensive Yamaha library or the Montage, you can go for HALion Sonic. But if you have dreams of being a paid sound designer, and given that HALion SE is free to all, you could master the full HALion and come up with some impressive synthesisers that others may buy.