I don’t remember if Cubase 7 supported side chain in VSTi plugins?
Personally, when resampling a big instrument, I’d rather do the sampling in a DAW first anyway. I find it a more powerful and efficient work flow than bothering with the H6 built in sampler. Personally, I’d rather sample in a full featured DAW anyway…What little I’ve used the built in H6 sampler has been stand alone mode (it’s nice, but to me, not as easy and powerful as sampling directly in Cubase and just dragging stuff into HALion).
You can sample right onto audio tracks in Cubase itself, and do sample editing and/or processing with Cubase before bothering with HALion. You can then drag and drop events from the Cubase project view right into HALion’s Zone Mapping editor.
When I resample an external synth, my favorite work flow skips the HALion built in sampler all together. It’s also great for resampling VSTi plugins (instant render from a MIDI track rather than real time sampling…even better).
- In a fresh Cubase project dedicated to creating my new HALion instrument, make a MIDI track template that plays everything I wish to sample from the instrument in one pass.
Example: 4 seconds (whole note at a tempo of 60bpm) of every 4th interval at 4 different velocities each. If the instrument I am resampling includes reverb tails, I’ll be sure to have rests in my MIDI template. I usually just default to a whole rest of 4 beats between each note in my MIDI track just to be sure I catch the reverb tails isolated. Of course, if I want to do shorter notes with a variety of attacks/releases, I’ll also build those into my MIDI template as I want them sampled.
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Plug the external instrument into inputs on the PC’s audio interface. Establish them as inputs in Cubase.
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Assign the instrument to a fresh audio track in Cubase. Arm it for recording.
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Play the project in Cubase, so the MIDI track mentioned in step 1 plays the synth, while the audio tracks mentioned in step 3 records.
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Use the scissor tool in Cubase to chop up the Cubase audio track accordingly. Also in the Cubase project view, I’ll name the new track elements I’ve created with all this slicing accordingly as I go.
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Now I can drag the track elements representing the waveforms from the Cubase audio track(s) directly into the zone mapping editor of HALion.
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I’ll rough in the sample mapping for the entire instrument this way. Note, given that I resampled the entire instrument on a single pass…it will all be living in a single audio file inside the Cubase project’s audio folder throughout most of my instrument building process. Once I get it roughed in, I’ll later have HALion export his own individual samples all labeled, optimized/normalized/trimmed, with unused stuff discarded. At that point, the instrument is no longer reliant on the Cubase project audio file(s). Of course in the very last stages, I’ll pack it all into a vstsound archive of its own and install it with the Library Manager.