Steinberg picked a fitting way to celebrate a double anniversary. HALion 7.5, released as a free update on August 4, 2026, marks both 30 years of VST and 25 years of HALion, and the headline addition for expressive players is straightforward: HALion's flagship sampler-synthesizer now speaks MPE.

What Changed in 7.5

Until this release, HALion's synthesis engines were built around HALion's own take on advanced sampling and synthesis, but per-note expressive control via MPE wasn't part of the picture. That gap closes with 7.5, meaning HALion's layers, zones, and synthesis engines can now respond to per-note pitch bend, pressure, and timbre/slide data from any MPE controller — the Expressive E Osmose, ROLI Seaboard, LinnStrument, or any of the growing field of MPE-capable keyboards and grids.

MPE isn't the only addition in this update. Steinberg also introduced Real-time Decompose and Spectral Snapshot, two spectral-synthesis tools that let users capture a snapshot of any sample's frequency content and reshape it into evolving textures. Paired with MPE, that opens an interesting workflow: a spectral snapshot pulled from an acoustic instrument or field recording can now be played back with full per-note expressive control, with pressure and slide reshaping the spectral content in real time rather than uniformly across a held chord.

Full details on the update are available directly from Steinberg's HALion product page, and coverage of the release, including screenshots of the new spectral tools, is up at SYNTH ANATOMY.

Part of a Bigger Anniversary Push

The HALion update is one piece of a broader celebration. Steinberg is also bringing back several classic VST instruments for free as part of the "30 years of VST" promotion, and running an anniversary sale with 50–60% discounts across HALion and a range of other VST instruments through August 24, 2026. For anyone who has been sitting on the fence about picking up HALion specifically for MPE work, the discount window makes this a reasonable moment to evaluate it.

It's a notable move for the format itself, too. VST turning 30 means the plugin standard predates MPE by roughly two decades — MPE wasn't formally adopted by the MIDI Manufacturers Association until 2018. Seeing one of the format's original flagship instruments retrofit MPE support this deep into its lifecycle is a small but telling signal about how far expressive MIDI has moved from a niche feature to something plugin developers treat as a baseline expectation.

Why MPE Support in a Sampler Matters

Sample-based instruments have historically been slower than dedicated synths to adopt per-note expression, largely because velocity layers and round-robin sampling already cover a lot of the same expressive ground that pressure and slide address in synthesis. But sampled instruments that respond to continuous, per-note pressure and pitch — rather than just a fixed velocity value captured at note-on — open up genuinely different performance possibilities: a sampled string patch that swells independently under each finger, or a vocal texture that bends pitch on individual notes within a chord without affecting the others.

HALion's engine has always leaned on layering and scripting depth, so MPE support gives sound designers a new axis to build patches around — mapping pressure or slide to sample layer crossfades, filter movement, or spectral morphing via the new Real-time Decompose tool, all on a per-note basis.

Getting the Update

Existing HALion 7 users can download 7.5 free of charge through Steinberg's download portal. HALion runs as a VST3, AU, and AAX plugin on both macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows, and the update applies across all supported platforms. For producers evaluating whether to bring a sampler into an MPE-centric workflow, HALion 7.5 removes what was previously a fairly significant limitation — full per-note expression is now on the table without switching to a different instrument entirely.