DC Breaks Halo is a complete DnB sound design tool, and the sounds it produces are amazing for the genre it is intended for. With only one instrument, you could easily make a full track. Additionally, it is an effective hybrid synth and sampler that could be useful to makers of nearly any electronic genre. To create massive sounding basses, leads, pads, and more, HALO uses a visual and creative approach to blend painstakingly created re-sampled audio with a variety of synth layers, processing, and FX. The vast presets will either seamlessly integrate into your work or act as a creative jumping off point. HALO, in contrast to many Romplers, also enables you to include your own original audio with limitless sound design options.
The drum and bass duo DC Breaks is best recognized for having produced albums, remixes, and headlining performances on some of the largest stages in the globe. They have, however, also made a profession out of producing sample packs, loop packs, and other musical instruments. Their most recent invention is Halo, a hybrid synthesizer, sampler, and ROMpler plug-in. Three distinct distortion modes are available in HALO, including a powerful custom Waveshaper to handle all your distortion demands. With this mode, you may further sculpt or fully mangle your sounds, as well as create one-of-a-kind wave forms and load and save them in a preset browser. Additionally, Halo contains superb built-in FX including Reverb, Delay, Phaser, and Chorus that are simple to use and have a lot of fine-tuning choices.
HALO includes over 360 painstakingly produced presets and 300 Sample Banks, ranging from massive reeses to luscious liquid pads, with a number of purchasable expansions and more to come. Each Sample Bank has been painstakingly designed using a variety of hardware and software synthesisers, FX, and processing, and then layered with HALO’s inbuilt synthesisers, pristine filters, FX, and unique modulators to produce complex, raw, high-quality sounds that are playable yet flexible across a wide range of tonal colors.
Many samples from DC Breaks have been skilfully created to work with the synth part. These are, unsurprisingly, directly targeted at the instrument’s main market. There are some lovely extra touches, though. DC Breaks has incorporated whole banks of kicks and snares in the d’n’b sound. These are offered without additional synth layers, allowing you to process them using the instrument’s full sound-shaping capabilities. Drag-and-drop loading of samples is a simple and easy process. By modifying the course and fine tune parts of the sampler and looping a small portion of the sample, we were able to create a sound that has musical value.
Investigating the presets reveals that Halo is designed for a very specific market. DC Breaks used their drum and bass production expertise to produce each sound. However, among the thousands of presets for various electronic genres, it’s simple to locate the right sounds. With a little tweaking, the fantastic sounds in the Liquid folder, in particular, might be tailored to any purpose you may have.
All the usual suspects are represented among the oscillators: sine, triangle, saw, and square. The three filters low-pass, high-pass, and notch are always available. These are strong filters that each have their own LFOs and dedicated settings for cutoff frequency and bandwidth. These offer a variety of sound design options, and since the LFO is located right there without requiring any routing from the main LFOs, adding some wobble to your sound is quick, simple, and perfect for d’n’b.
Halo is a very potent instrument with a huge variety of sounds at its disposal. It’s not novel to be able to combine samples and synths to build sounds, but Halo makes it quite simple and the results sound great. DC Breaks Halo does seem to use a lot of processing power, but the noises it offers make it worthwhile for any electronic music producer.