amsdenj

I think there may have been a problem with the USB connectors on some HX Stomps - mine broke within days and never left the house. I found the black plastic piece on the floor and glued it back in. Seems to be working fine for some time now. But I should get it repaired.

On MacOS Catalina, Helix Native(AU64) shows up in the Minishost Modular plugins list, but attempting to add the plugin doesn't do anything. Other AU64 plugins work, just not Helix Native.

That’s one way to look at it. In the absence of any other evidence, this is a good approach. Another explanation might be that evolution has two sides, a push and a pull, or a challenges and opportunities. These can create a feedback loop where one contributes to the other, accelerating the process - like guitar feedback. For humans, it might have been the evolution provided an opportunity through our upright posture and hands allowing us to farm, producing more food than we needed for our own survival. This abundance of food might have allowed the development of the human brain, which requires a lot of fuel. Organisms trend to be as smart as they can fuel their hungry brains. This excess wealth may have opened an opportunity for tribes, societies, religions, governments, etc. to exist which in turn provide an environment that supports raising our expensive young, with their primitive, but highly adaptable brains. Or it could have been the size of the whites of our eyes allowed us to communicate visually (you can tell where someone else is looking) and that give us an edge through cooperative hunting. Or... The world is a rich place to explore. Anyway, interesting discussion to keep us distracted. Note however, that this process of evolution rooted in challenge/opportunity apples pretty well to Helix upgrades!

A good set of studio monitors will reproduce Helix well in an appropriately sized room. And they can be used for lots of other things. I wouldn’t use a Powercab 212 as a studio monitor though. Although its a FRFR, any FRFR is optimized for a set of usage scenarios, and Powercab is optimized for guitar. I wouldn’t hesitate to use it for a keyboard amp, or for solo acoustic gigs. But I’d probably never use it for a stereo speaker or mixing.

Maybe this is overly simplistic, but it seems to me faith is the belief that what you know now will help you survive the chaotic uncertainty of the future. That's it's source of peace. I don't have a problem with that, what else can we do after all? However, I think its important to subject faith to constant scrutiny, that's how we learn, adapt, and improve our chances of survival. Exposure to diversity is a great way to accelerate learning. However, faith can also have another dimension, that of tribal identity ensuring access to shared resources and a common gene pool, another means of increasing the chances of survival. These two dimensions, and perhaps others can sometimes collide. 2.9 had better get here soon or we're going to start going off the rails!

I have not personally used my HX Stomp for gigging - it was intended as my backup and portable rig for rehearsals. However, the band has decided to go ampless the last few gigs to try to get better control of our stage volume and reduce our footprint. Just when I just got my Powercab 212 too! Anyway, the other guitar player in the band, and our bass player are both using HX Stomp the last three gigs. Its working great. I'd suggest not worrying too much about a lot of patch switching with HX Stomp. Keep things minimal. I created a patch for him that has three stop switches: distortion, phaser, chorus, delay and reverb are on all the time. This is all he needs for 95% of the songs. And it keeps it simple enough that the HX Stomp doesn't become a distraction.

Everything is empty from its own side. Things are how we perceive them and that is our unique experience of life. Best enjoyed because it is temporal in order to make room for other life. It is its own meaning, a tautology. Making it complicated is almost always to someone else's benefit. Interesting conversation, and a nice way to find distraction while waiting for 2.9.

Think of it as three levels of control: presets for individual songs, snapshots for specific sections within a song and stomp footswitches for controlling effects in a song section. Presets have the advantage that they can have completely different signal paths, blocks and parameters, as well as a set of snapshots. They have the disadvantage of having to maintain a lot of them, a brief pause in sound while the preset loads (so switch them between songs) and no ability to have reverb or delay tails across presets. Snapshots have the advantage of being able to instantly change up to 64 parameters in a patch with a single footswitch, no pause in sound and reverb and delay tails are preserved. Snapshots have the disadvantage of not being able to combine things from two different snapshots live (you can't have two snapshots on at the same time), and you can't change the signal path or blocks. Stomp footswitches have the advantage that you can as many as 8 things (bypass, parameter min/max values) on a single footswitch and any combination of up to 10 switches - controlling the stacking of effects - within a single patch or snapshot. This gives a tremendous amount of flexibility and combinations of tones on 10 switches, just like a traditional pedalboard. Use presets if you like to create a different sound for each song. Use snapshots if you like to control your tones in different sections of a song. Use stomp footswitches if you have your own sound, and want complete control of the combination of effects you want on at any time, for any song, or any section of a song. I pretty much use one preset for a whole gig. I have a few presets that are song specific because they require something odd that wouldn't be in by typical setup. I use snapshots in my goto preset for changing variax open tunings. And I use a combination of Helix and HX Effects together to give me the footswitches I need to control the effects I use most of the time. The beauty of Helix is that all these different operational setups are easily supported, allowing each of us to optimize our setup for our individual needs.

Maybe it's a matter of realistic expectations. Do the Variax models sound as good as their real counterparts? No, they don't. And there's some variability in different guitars that result from variability in the piezo pickups, how well the neck is attached to the body, quality of the setup, etc. So I'd never claim that I love to listen to the Variax models when playing by myself while practicing. Nor would I be too motivated to record with them. But gigging in a live band situation - nothing beats Variax, nothing. The flexibility of the models, tunings and MIDI control is just fantastic. And in that context, with a full band, playing in anger for an audience, I really doubt if anyone could tell the difference between a Variax model and the real thing. If you're Matt Schofield, you're not going to use a Variax. But if you're playing in club bands semi professionally, you can't beat a Variax. I have a 60 year old Les Paul, a very nice Strat Deluxe, a Tele and a Epi Sheraton Pro - all really fantastic guitars. For gigging, I always bring my JTV-69S as my main guitar, and rotate the others just because I love them and want to play them. The JTV really does all I need for gigs and always gets the most playing time. But that Tele... It's new to me, and I'm really loving it. That Tele quack really seems to speak to me. I haven't gigged with it yet, but will soon. I get that its always the new guitar that gets the attention. But this feels different to me.

What would work is block links instead of copy. In a patch, you would add a link to a block in another patch, not a copy. Then any changes to the target block would be see in all the blocks that like to it automatically. Helix doesn't support block links yet. Hopefully it will someday. In the absence of that, you have to redo the copy paste to propagate changes. That's a pain, but not that difficult with Helix Native and HX Edit open at the same time.

Rumor has it that 2.9 HX Stomp will have 8 blocks! This will really increase the utility of HX Stomp for me and make it a more viable option or backup for gigging. 8 blocks will allow me to add an always on compressor and Wah to my existing patches. Very wonderful news.

My HX Stomp got stomped on at rehearsal the other night and the top encoder knob shaft got bent. This caused the encoder to turn hard. I just bent it back with no problem, at least so far. It appears that these encoders are well attached to the chassis and can stand to be stepped on and bent a few times. I don't recommend it of course, but was happy that HX Stomp could withstand this potentially common issue.

You could also create template patches and "global block" sets in Helix Native, and use these with simple copy/paste to Helix, HX Effects and/or HX Stomp patches using HX Edit. This is just another way of saving the block parameters.

Excellent analysis. @codamedia, your contributions are always great, thanks. One more consideration might be pickup height. If all the guitars are setup the same, its possible pickup height is the issue. Try lowering the pickups to improve responsiveness and tone.

Testing a lot of IRs can be very tedious and unrewarding. A lot of them will sound pretty similar and you can go nuts trying to figure out which one you like best. What you need is some way of filtering things down to smaller sets of things that have discernible differences. Start with thinking about the tone you want based on your experience, preferences, song styles, type of guitar, preferred pickup, etc. All tone starts with the source. Then see what other players whose tone you like are using. Watch live concerts and see what mic they are using and where its placed. Next pick the kind of speaker you want, one that is generally known to be able to produce the kinds of tones you want. This can take some research to read about different speakers and how they sound, as well as look up speaker comparisons, especially those with audio so you can get familiar with how different speakers sound. Next pick the kind of mic you want based on what you're trying to get out of the speaker. If its loud rock, an SM-57 will work fine. If you want something warmer, go with an R121 or some other ribbon mic. If its clean jazz, probably any condenser mic will work. All the mics will sound different, even mics of the same type (dynamic, condenser, ribbon). But these three will have the biggest differences and will help zero in on what you're looking for. Finally consider mic placement. This has a big impact on tone and can give a lot of different tones even with the same speaker and mic. Closer mic'd will have more boomy low end because of proximity effect. Closer to the center will be brighter. Start with 1" and cap-edge and move from there. This approach should narrow down 1000s of IRs to 10 or so. Load these up and play through them at gig level. Pick one and stick with it for a while. Playing is much more fun that worrying about the perfect IR you might be missing.

I add an IR or Cab block to the patch. If I have a patch that uses the powercab speaker models, I bypass the IR or Cab block. If I need to go directly to the PA (no Powercab), I turn the IR or Cab block on. I don't like copying patches because its too hard to keep them all updated. I wish Helix allowed block links to blocks shared across patches.

Check the impedance setting for the patch. Guitar pickups are very sensitive to impedance. Low Z settings can result in a very dull tone. I leave mine at 1M all the time.

When mine broke, I found the center piece on the floor and glued it back in with super glue. Its been OK for over a year now. Next time it breaks, I'll send it in for repair.

Try using Heir Apparent very early in your signal chain as a tone shaper for you guitar. Use low drive, unity gain, and tone/presence to tailor the overall tone of your guitar. Leave this block on all the time.

I think you can use controller assignments to send PC messages from Helix Floor to Helix Native. See https://jimamsden.wordpress.com/2017/12/28/creating-logic-pro-x-controller-assignments/ for details. Logic's controller assignments are powerful, but complex, and user, not project based.

I wouldn't recommend it. The speaker models in Powercab are designed to work with the stock speaker. Using a different speaker might not necessarily sound bad, but it probably wouldn't sound like the speakers that were modeled.

It's quiet when powered through VDI, but makes a lot of noise when turned if powered by the internal battery or through the 1/4" jack using the old Variax power supply. Any ideas what might cause that? Sounds to me like there's DC getting on the pot, but that shouldn't happen unless there's a short somewhere.

In theory, it doesn't matter where the IR is as long as everything after it in the signal chain is linear. Any block in the signal chain that introduces distortion should be before the IR.

See https://www.ampbooks.com/mobile/classic-circuits/class-AB-ripple, hum and ripple can contribute a lot to good tone. Essentially the interaction between the hum and ripple frequencies create additional overtones.

There are three primary parameters to overdrive - saturation (drive), tone and output level (volume). There are many approaches to controlling these parameters to get different tones for different purposes. But let's explore three broad approaches and their advantages and disadvantages. The simplest and perhaps most traditional approach is to use the amp for distortion. For traditional Fender, Vox and Marshall amps, that often means turning up the volume until the power amp distorts. Depending on the power rating of the amp and the number of speakers, this is going to be pretty loud and aggressive sounding, with a lot of odd order harmonics from symmetric clipping of the power output stage. This isn't very flexible because all the tone controls are in front of the distortion except presence or the treble cut in the Vox amp. So most of the tone control of the distorted tone comes from the speaker choice. What you loose in flexibility though you gain in feel since louder generally sounds and feels better, provides more interaction with the guitar for better sustain, and introduces sag for additional dynamics. The biggest issue though is that you have to set the amp for the dirty tone, then use the volume control on your guitar to get a clean tone. This often results in a pretty dark clean tone. If you amp has channel switching, then this wouldn't be a problem. To work around these disadvantages, you can use distortion pedals into a clean amp. Now you can get distortion tones at controllable volume levels with tone controls after distortion to tame the fizz/icepick, warming up the distortion. Pedals aren't that expensive, so you can have different ones for different purposes. This works so well that there is an explosion of fantastic distortion pedals on the market to choose from. The drawback is that it can be difficult to get a wide range of tone/saturation options out of a single pedal. To work around that shortcoming, you can use multiple pedals to create flexible gain staging in your signal path. With multiple pedals, you can set different pedals for different tone/saturation combinations for different purposes. The big question is, how should these different gain stages be ordered, and how should they be used together? I think a simple general rule (but one meant to be broken) is to put sustain before tone in the signal path. That is, you want the things that establish the drive tone to be after the things that create the distortion and harmonics, so you have more control of how those sound. For example, working backwards from the clean amp to the guitar: 1. Set the amp for you cleanest tone and overall volume. Use the neck pickup on your guitar with the guitar volume and tone all the way up to create your base tone. Tame an overly bright bridge pickup with the guitar tone control. Do this at typical playing level to get an accurate idea of the tone. 2. In front of this, place your first gain stage. This one should introduce a little breakup and with the tone set to keep the level of warmth you want. I use Teemah! for this as its tone controls work very well for sculpting early distortion tone. Teemah! also provide an option for asymmetric clipping for more even order harmonics that can sound less aggressive. This will often be left on all the time. It establishes early breakup tone without having to turn the amp up so its too loud. 3. In front of this, place your 2nd gain stage. This gain stage plays two roles. By itself, it creates a different tonal structure, often with a significant mid hump with a bit more saturation for a more aggressive distortion that cuts through the mix for solos. Stacked with the first gain stage gives increased saturation for typical leads. Use the volume and tone control on your guitar to easily adjust the amount of saturation and tonal color. I use Minotaur for this, with the gain set relatively low and volume/level set higher to drive the first stage into more saturation. 4. In front of this, place your 3rd gain stage. This one is for over the top sustain when you need it. I use two mutually exclusive options for this stage (I don't ever use them together): hard clipping distortion (OCD) or fuzz (Facial Fuzz). These will often be used with either or both of the first and second gain stages depending on the song. Fuzz especially seems to benefit from having another overdrive after it to provide more control of the fuzz tone. 5. (optional) In front of this, you can add another distortion block that helps establish the fundamental tone of your guitar. I use Heir Apparent for this because it has a lot of flexibility in setting saturation and tone. This one also stays on all the time, and isn't even assigned to a footswitch. It doesn't do that much, but you do notice it when its turned off. I use it mostly to just fatten up single coil pickup tones. I find it is better to get increased saturation by gain staging multiple pedals then it is to get all the saturation from one pedal. This keeps each pedal working in its sweet spot while also giving a lot of flexibility in distortion voicing. Another good rule of thumb is to use the minimum amount of saturation for the song. This maintains articulation and keeps your guitar from turning into an indistinct buzz that disappears in the mix. The gain staging above applies to traditional pedalboards and of course works great with Helix. But Helix has an additional level of flexibility that is generally not possible with traditional amps (unless you use reactive loads). Helix amp models have a level control and cab blocks with low and high cut. So it is possible to leverage the distortion capabilities of the amp models and cab block low and high cut to control distortion saturation and voicing. I use this in HX Stomp to get various distortion tones using a couple of footswitches to control amp drive, treble, bass, presence, and cab high/low cut to get the tones I need without using any distortion blocks. This is sort of like going back to the traditional approach, getting all the distortion from the amp, but using studio controls after the amp to tailor the tone and volume level.