Steinberg Halion 7 Virtual Instrument

General

Finally, Halion 7 has landed! This Steinberg-developed package features a mass of options for building and scripting your own custom libraries from scratch - basically raising the creative potential through the roof.

Steinberg Halion 7: Features

This is a virtual sampler but also includes a pretty extensive synth engine, so if you start with a sawtooth wave that you want to stick through a filter, there's no need to make a sample of the sawtooth before you start, since that's exactly what the engine provides. Better yet, with Halion 7, you also get a just-as-extensive FM engine: FM-LAB, which was co-developed with Yamaha. This fat engine doesn't just come with a stack of pre-configured algorithms but the opportunity to design your own algorithms - which is by far the best route to understanding how FM synthesis actually works. Add that to the eight operators, the small mountain of modulation options, the effects and the filters, and you're really bringing things to life.

Extra Perks

The exclusive Spectral Zone grants access to time-stretching and resynthesis functions, formant-shifting and more, and comes complete with a stunningly smooth viewer. The user-envelope has been given a hefty expansion and now comes loaded with an array of tools for designing the most complex envelopes before linking them to the BPM of your DAW. There are a mass of further small and big fixes, and for those less familiar with the earlier incarnations of Halion, LUA is also supported: a scripting language you can use to give your own instruments some form. And since LUA is a generic language, you can do things with it that could prove trickier using other scripts. In short, Halion 7 is a fat package that offers more than enough for tinkering sound designers to sink their teeth into.