Steinberg Tales

What the Classical Nylon Guitar Virtual Instrument for HALion Is For

Designed for composers, producers, and sound designers, this sampled virtual instrument allows you to integrate a credible classical nylon guitar at the heart of your sessions, while transforming it into contemporary sound material thanks to a secondary layer of textures. It is suitable for both acoustic arrangements (pop, song, film music) and more atmospheric creations, where nuanced playing, detailed harmonics, controlled attacks, and pads ready to blend into the mix are sought.

Its "guitar + textures" approach facilitates the creation of rich layers: you can stay close to a natural take or, on the contrary, build a wide and evocative sound for intros, underscore, ambient beds, soft trailers, or organic electronic productions.

Main Features

Articulations and recording: a credible acoustic foundation

The instrument offers 4 essential articulations for a nylon guitar: Soft for delicate attacks, Hard for a more pronounced presence, Mute for muted and rhythmic notes, and Harmonics for bright and airy colors. Each note was recorded individually, resulting in greater stability and precision while preserving the musicality of a real instrument.

The open-tuning recording aims for a longer, more resonant sound, particularly suited to sustained parts, broad arpeggios, and melodic lines where note tails play an expressive role.

Main Page: balance, mic distance, and high-frequency definition

The Main page centralizes the settings that make a difference in production: control of the balance between guitar and textures, mixing the distance between close microphones and ambient microphones to place the instrument in space, and a contour filter dedicated to boosting or attenuating high frequencies. A variation parameter completes the set to refine character and improve integration in the mix, from intimate sound to a broader rendering.

Guitar Page: shaping timbre, dynamics, and articulation

To sculpt the guitar without multiplying plugins, the Guitar page groups color controls, a compression section focused on transient shaping, a transient level adjustment, and saturation to thicken the signal or add grain. You also have a reverb send and articulation selection to adapt the playing to the musical passage, from soft picking to more pronounced attacks.

Texture Page: 66 presets, modulation, and range control

The Texture page provides access to 66 selectable presets to build a secondary sound source. You can assign the modulation wheel to animate the textures, limit the range to reserve the texture to a keyboard zone, and adjust the envelope with attack and release. Parameters for color, contour, variation, and a reverb send allow you to go from a subtle halo to a more present pad, while maintaining coherence with the main guitar.

Effects Page: separate delay and reverb for guitar and textures

The Effects page offers a delay and a reverb adjustable separately for the guitar and textures, useful for keeping the guitar clear while expanding the background. The delay includes preset selection, host tempo synchronization, duration adjustment in ms or note value, as well as feedback and mix. The reverb offers presets, pre-delay, reverb time, and mix to shift from an intimate room to a wider ambiance.

Technical specifications