Adding sample libraries to halion upgrade#
Adding sample libraries to halion free#

It's actually performances more than mere arps. The technology for their Flex Phraser comes from Yamaha's Motif and Montage keyboards and is pretty amazing. Arpeggiator - This is where HALion beats not only Falcon but pretty much all arps on the market. I personally keep discovering a lot of really exciting content in HALion, particularly when I layer them up. You can't compare libraries from HALion or Falcon to ones from Kontakt, because they are meant to be used to layer sounds. (Very few third party companies selling HALion instruments so far) While the strings and brass included with HALion, there are a lot of instruments in there that are pretty good-pianos, guitars, ethnic instruments, etc. much more content available for Falcon, if you are willing to pay for it. Falcon sells many more expansions, and all the UVI content works in Falcon. HALion comes with a lot of sampled sounds, while the Falcon presets are more focused on synth sounds. Falcon patches, in my experience, quickly use up a lot of CPU. Falcon is very similar to this, but in my experience I can really pile HALion multis up to the sky without straining my system. You can assemble up to 64 of these programs into a multi. There are 5 possible layers-synth (including typical analog, but also wavetable & granular), sample, sampled instrument, drum, and sliced loops. HALion allows you to combine 4 layers into a 'program' (preset/patch). I wrote about HALion 6 in this thread, but since then I bought Falcon, so I can compare them now. But honestly, it is such a deep instrument you would need to spend a lot of time to demo it properly. I'm not sure whether you need a Steinberg/VSL dongle to do it, though.

Adding sample libraries to halion free#

Steinberg offers a free demo, so you can decide for yourself.

Adding sample libraries to halion upgrade#

Even so, you would be very happy playing with HALion 6 for a long time and waiting for the upgrade price to go on sale. That said, this price is so low that HALion 7 may be coming soon. That price itself was discounted and I felt I got great value for my money. It is a beast and there is no limit to what you can do with it. But Kontakt is certainly no better in that regard.įirst, I paid twice as much as this, and I was and am very happy with that purchase. One gripe about Halion and Steinberg products in general - the dated UI design. To me this is a good thing, because if I'm ever going to try to mimic an acoustic orchestra I would want to focus on doing it with a couple libraries at most - using myriad different third party libs for this and that just feels bloated and messy to me. But if you are looking for a playback engine to load hundreds of different string libraries, this probably isn't it. You can certainly do that with the Iconica libraries, they are up to the task. But I have no interest in using only orchestral and acoustic multi-samples with the objective of sounding 'real' (whatever that means). I much prefer it to Kontakt, which I don't even own now. I could record entire albums using just Halion for the rest of my existence. I use it to craft unique timbres, build strange instruments, mangle found sound, etc. Halion is a deep sampler and synthesis engine, not merely a rompler/playback engine.

But whether you need it is another matter.