#Halion library series#

With its new Sample Recorder, though, HALion 6 aims to bring back real sampling, enabling multisampled instruments to be created from scratch almost effortlessly. With DAWs making recording and transfer of audio so easy, sampling - ie, the recording of samples - is something that hardly any soft samplers actually feel the need to do. The Wavetable Zone would be impressive enough as an instrument in its own right, but as a sub-component of a broader instrument, it’s a remarkable achievement. The addition of wavetables to the HALion mix is a very big deal, and Steinberg’s implementation is admirably straightforward and unintimidating. Of course, a new macro instrument, Anima, is included to show all this off in readily digestible form, dressing the Zone’s three oscillators, two LFOs and three envelopes up in a ‘proper’ GUI, and adding a superb arpeggiator and a ton of well-designed presets. With your wavetable set up, the playhead progression through it is controlled by the Position, Speed and Direction knobs, and visualised in a 2D oscilloscope or 3D topographical map.

Waveforms can be duplicated, moved, copied and replaced by new samples, and you can even get hands-on with the amplitude and phase of the harmonics of each waveform in the Spectrum tab. The wavetable envelope is shaped by dragging the boundary markers between waves to stretch and compress them, and general playback speed, crossfades between waves, looping behaviour and more are all adjustable. On a more electronic tip, the Anima wavetable synth is covered in the main text, and SkyLab uses the Granular engine to come up with a huge library of gorgeous textures, soundscapes, ambiences and FX - it’s definitely our favourite of the bunch.

It’s not about to replace your high-end string library in terms of flexibility and range of articulations, but it sounds great in its comfort zone. Studio Strings delivers quick and easy ensemble and solo orchestral strings for modern productions of all kinds. A decent array of matrix-assigned modulation sources and an arpeggiator make it more interesting than it looks. Hot Brass is a brass and saxophone ensemble instrument geared up for punchy, energetic riffs and stabs. Raven is more obviously appropriate for pop and other contemporary styles, while Eagle suits jazz, classical and solo work. Both share the same interface - including controls for adjusting the Sustain Resonance, velocity curve, and release layer volume - and sound lovely. Raven and Eagle sample classical Italian and German concert grand pianos respectively, the first with six velocity layers, the second 12.

HALion 6 adds more than 25GB of new sample content in the shape of six scripted instruments.

#Halion library series#

Importing a sample as a wavetable is done by dragging it into the interface and selecting a Marker Creation Mode to split it into a series of contiguous waves - Equal Distance (all markers are evenly spaced), Exponential (the spacing gets wider through the length of the sample), Spectral (markers are placed according to spectral changes) or Spectral Voiced (spectral and pitch changes). It comprises two wavetable oscillators (each with up to eight unison voices in Multi-Oscillator mode) and a sub oscillator, with each wavetable holding up to 256 waveforms. This adds to the existing Synth (analogue-style synthesis), Sample, Grain (granular synthesis) and Organ (tonewheel emulation) Zones with a remarkably capable wavetable and resynthesis engine. Making wavetablesįor sound designers, the biggest new feature in HALion 6 is the Wavetable Zone. HALion 6 (VST/AU/AAX – yay, AAX at last!) sees the integration of yet another flavour of synthesis, as well as real honest-to-goodness sampling, the ability to build your own custom instruments, and a boatload of new sampled content. With multiple synthesis engines added over the last three versions, though, it now does so much more than just play back audio that it’s better described as a ‘sound design workstation’.