Steinberg releases FREE HALion Sonic 7 sample player – professional sound libraries, free of charge
Steinberg has released an updated version of the free HALion Sonic 7 sample player.
The new sample player comes after the official launch of HALion 7 – Steinberg’s flagship sampler. The latest update of Steinberg’s HALion 7 sample player offers many new tools for manipulating your sounds in addition to brand new FM & wavetable synthesis engines.
HALion Sonic is essentially like the Player version of Kontakt. It’s a slimmed-down version of the bigger virtual instrument and only provides access to HALion presets. All of HALion 7’s audio enhancements are included, of course, but users cannot make changes to any of the presets.
HALion Sonic 7
HALion Sonic 7 is here, and it gives you a handful of free libraries with new presets and sounds made with the bigger HALion 7 sampler.
Though the controls on HALion Sonic 7 are very limited, the sounds available in the software are worth awning over. The Guitar Harmonics Essential instrument, for example, gives you a warm sound and texture perfect for creating many a chilled tune, so HALion Sonic 7 does give you a special bit of content.
Furthermore, its warm tones are well suited to nice melodies and even some interesting sound effects with a bit of post-processing. And when you throw in some post-processing you’ll be able to make these sounds more your own.
Additionally, the Alto Glockenspiel Essential instrument comes to life when used with the Sonic 7 LoFi Piano instrument. Used together (with some LoFi processing on the glockenspiel instrument) they create a luscious blend of warm tones.
Whether you layer them or write some counter melodies, these two instruments are not to be looked over! Meanwhile, LoFi Piano lives up to its name. Its user interface has a dated aesthetic, the piano offers a dirty sound, and it even, and comes with chord pads and a number of onboard effects!
The final free HALion instrument I’ll talk about is Novel Piano. Here, you have an instrument that doesn’t try to be anything more than a clean-sounding piano – and that’s perfect for film scores, classical compositions, and so on. Its soft sound doesn’t need much in the way of editing to sound organic like you’re really playing a luscious piano. And its onboard effects give you a few ways of making the sound bigger, brighter, and bolder.
Availability
HALion 7 is available now for $349, and HALion 7 Sonic is provided free of charge – but it does require a Steinberg account in order to register. HALion and Sonic are available in VST3 and AAX with AU plugin formats and are compatible with both Windows & macOS systems.