Steinberg Tales

Endless New Stories To Be Told

Tell all your Tales with a very special handmade, open tuned guitar for HALion. Each string was tuned and sampled using only open strings, resulting in a very warm and intimate sound, with long natural sustain. Play this guitar the way you would play a piano, blending the astonishingly articulated sounds with amazingly crafted textures. Musical storytelling has again become intuitive and a lot of fun.

FEATURES

• A modern composer tool designed for storytelling

• Rare, classical nylon-strung concert guitar, sampled with open tuning

• Four beautiful articulations: soft, hard, mute and harmonics

• More than 60 textures for fantasy, sci-fi, drama and big emotions

The Guitar page
Choose one of the four concert guitar articulations, blend between close and room microphones, adjust the brightness and the level of plucking noises: The guitar layer allows you to tailor the instrument to perfectly suit your composition and inspire new ideas.

The Texture page
Select one of the 66 handcrafted textures to perfectly complement the guitar. You can create carefully plotted compositions, full of granular details derived from beautifully crafted synthesis or deeply sampled instruments. It all comes with maximum control, including the ability to adjust the brightness, set the key range and modulation wheel, as well as drastically changing the color and liveliness of the texture with variation and contour.

The FX page
Tales comes with two carefully selected FX to put the spotlight on the interplay of the guitar and its textures. You can add delay to either the guitar, the texture or both and customize the sound to your needs. The additional reverb shines with rooms ranging from studios of all sizes to cloudy, larger than life ambiences.

Fast and intuitive
With Tales easy-to-use interface, you can create new sounds by blending the guitar articulations with additional textures, ranging from FM synthesis plucks to granular pads and deeply sampled instruments.

One knob compression
One knob, endless possibilities. The “one knob” compression comes in handy to make the guitar sound either tighter and more compressed or a little looser. It’s totally up to you.

The idea behind Tales
The essence of this instrument is the intimate sound of a classical guitar, sampled with a very special technique. By recording only open strings which were tuned to different pitches, it was possible to capture the guitar with the purest quality and all its subtle emotions. It is complemented by a curated palette of custom-made textures, ranging from FM to granular and sampled instruments, all designed to spark instant inspiration while composing.

The Guitar
The Tales guitar was the last recording session in Hamburg’s legendary Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Studios before the building was destroyed by a gas explosion. The studio was perfect for the intimate sound of this handpicked guitar and resulted in an instrument with a very pronounced attack, different for every articulation, and the beautiful naturalistic decay of the now lost studio. The guitar was sampled with open tuned strings at different pitches, to obtain a particular long sustain for each note. This approach also made it possible to record the guitar with an extended range of pitches, providing plenty of flexibility for finding new musical ideas.

The Textures
The textures make perfect use of HALion’s powerful features like granular, FM and wavetable synthesis or the sample engine. The sample-based textures include specially designed and recorded sounds from instruments, orchestral elements, and rare hardware units, including physical modeled sounds that complement the guitar particularly well.

System Requirements

Compatible with: HALion 7, HALion Sonic 7
Operating systems (Windows): Windows 10 (64-bit), Windows 11 (64-bit)
Operating systems (Mac): macOS Big Sur, macOS Monterey, macOS Ventura
Apple silicon–based Mac: Rosetta 2 App, Native App
PlugIn format (Win): VST 3, AAX
PlugIn format (Mac): VST 3, AAX, AU
Internet connection for: license activation, installer download, account sign up and product registration