Steinberg Tales

Open tuned guitar for HALion

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.

• 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 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.