• FM Zone - developed with Yamaha: Freely combine up to eight operators, use them as carriers or send them to feedback loops. Including an Algorithm Finder, an Algorithm Designer and SYX file import.
• Spectral Zone: the new spectral oscillator features a new in-house developed time-stretch and resynthesis algorithm. It allows to change playback speed in real time without affecting the pitch, but it can also transform samples into completely new sounds.
• FM Lab: A full-blown eight operator FM synthesizer with hundreds of cutting-edge presets.
• Tales: A beautifully sampled guitar. Guitar strings were individually sampled as open notes and thentuned to a different pitch, giving each one a very pure and intimate sound additionally layered with acoustic and synthesized textures.
• Modulation reimagined: Shape, tweak and animate your sounds more easily than ever with HALion’s new modulation concept.
• New Shaper Envelope: The User Envelope now has brush, pen and eraser tools for intuitively drawing and customizing envelopes.
• A fresh new look and feel: Updated interface, a redesigned MediaBay and search plus tons of workflow improvements.
• Advanced wavetable synthesis for multichannel files with up to 5.1 surround and spectral filters
• Additional new features: 10 new effects, Decompose, X-LFO, Chord export from Trigger Pads, impulse response import and the new Oscilloscope
• New tools for designing instruments like SVG resources which can be animated by Lua, color options
and more…
Together with the launch of HALion 7, Steinberg will also launch Absolute 6. This includes:
• HALion 7
• Backbone
• Groove Agent 5 (including Prime Cuts,Future Past Perfect, Rock Essentials)
• Retrologue 2 (including Sounds of Soul)
• Padshop 2 (including Polarities, Zero Gravity and Granular Guitars)
• The Grand 3
I read that as it can be used in HALion, but is also available as a VST, AAX, and AU plugin in.
Alas, no. FM Lab only runs inside HALion, and HALion is available as a a VST, AAX, and AU plugin.
Not a huge deal. HALion Sonic is free and does everything you need to run FM Lab just fine. It’s just I was hoping for something as streamlined as FM8, and am annoyed at having to deal with all the extra clunky HALion bits of the UI.
Still, sounds great! Just not as “stand alone” as I had hoped.
I bought it. Haven’t used Halion for a long time, but use Falcon and Kontakt a lot so here is my take.
Firstly the bad- GUI is still horrible, its flexible in terms of layout but no scaling (very small if you are 4K) and some strange design decisions like dark grey text and small buttons against black and tiny little arrows hiding important menus- style over function in my opinion.
Other than that, its pretty impressive, lots of engines (zones) and the new FM zone is a bit of a star (and has a bigger, better GUI as a player). Any sound designer is going to have a lot of fun here! No cross modulation between engines, but there is a lot of other modulation options that area easy to apply and very customisable (shaper etc).
Some of the effects are a bit vanilla (like the delay and chorus) compared to Falcon, but overall with all the layers, arps, modulators and engines you could pretty much do anything. learning curve is about the same as Falcon in my opinion, could be easier (even some basic stuff is a bit cryptic) but then I guess you loose some flexibility if you make the work only flow one way.
The sample based contact outside of the synth engines is OK not as good as Kontakt stuff in my opinion, but the new guitar instrument is pretty good (Kontakt standard) but the old stuff has tiny low res GUIs and are pretty basic.
Lots of pre-sets but I found the ‘pack’ system a bit confusing, lots of legacy packs and I didn’t really know what they were for as a new user, I just wanted the good (new) stuff- they could use a ‘best of’ (unless I have missed that)
I paid the cross grade price (180 GBP + VAT) and happy I will get value from it…this gives me a taste of most of the Steinberg VSTs in one plugin so as its good to have.
