Cubase 13: HALion Sonic’s Spectral Synth

X‑Stream’s spectral engine may offer an unconventional control set but it is very easy to experiment with. The settings shown here reflect the finished DIY example discussed within the main text.

Create a complete musical cue from just a single sample with HALion Sonic’s spectral synth engine.

Steinberg recently improved the spectral synth engine in their HALion 7 soft sampler, and all Cubase users can get a taste of it through X‑Stream, a new, free‑to‑download (using Steinberg’s Download Assistant) HALion Sonic instrument. While X‑Stream is monophonic only, it is bound to appeal to those with a liking for ambient soundscapes and textures. It offers plenty of DIY sound‑design possibilities, including the ability to drop your own samples into the engine. To explore just what this makes possible, I decided to don my experimental media composer hat, and see how close X‑Stream could get me to composing a complete musical cue using just a single sample.

Blank & Drop

Once you’ve managed to stop playing with X‑Stream’s excellent collection of presets (it might take a while), it’s a good idea to wipe the slate clean by loading in the Init X‑Stream Layer, which is easy to find if you pick Layers as the Preset Type in HS’s MediaBay panel. This includes a default sample but, usefully, it resets the synth engine parameters to a generic starting point. With the engine thus ‘blanked’, you can drag and drop (from the Project window or your file browser) your sample of choice directly into X‑Stream’s spectral display panel. Almost any sample can be a contender, but I deliberately started with something very simple: a single note played on a synth. I’ll come back to some more colourful sample choices later. By the way, you can hear some audio examples on the SOS website, at https://sosm.ag/cubase-1024.

Need For Speed

It’s worth noting that if you click on the Spectral panel header, you toggle between compact and expanded control displays. The latter provides access to the full control set, including the full pitch, spectral filter, standard filter and amplitude envelope controls. Other panels can also be expanded into focus in the same way. I couldn’t hope to cover all of X‑Stream’s many controls here, though, so I’ll focus on some highlights that will provide a solid base for experimentation.

In its expanded view, the Spectral panel offers five sub‑pages accessed via the top‑left buttons. These include the amp envelope shown here, with suitably long attack and decay times.

The Speed control sets the speed at which the spectral engine scans across the underlying sample to create sound (100 percent is the same playback speed as the original). Changing the speed doesn’t change the pitch, but X‑Stream’s underlying time‑ and pitch‑stretching algorithms are very impressive, and it’s remarkable just how extreme you can get with the Speed...