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He's worried about protecting his equipment from direct outputs? Wouldn't potential feedback from microphones be a more common concern and bigger problem?

I tried Helix into the Normal channel of my old Fender Showman amp and then into my FRFR cabinet. I had modified that Normal channel years ago to have Hi-Fi tone controls instead of the Fender all-boost controls. It did sound great, but not that different than using the Haffler power amp I normally use. And the Haffler and FRFR are stereo. I think the larger difference between Helix/Modeler+PA vs Modeler+4CM vs Modeler+Guitar amp's power amp and speakers is the stage setup. Having a 100W tube amp and 2-4 x 12" cabinet behind you is going to sound and feel wonderful, loud full and powerful. Helix into a 1 x 10" monitor in front of you or IEMs is just never going to be the same. I prefer using a backing amp if I can, and use the Haffler and FRFR with Helix driven from the headphone output (so I get two controls, one for FOH and one for stage amp). My FRFR is a Fender Tremolux style cabinet with 2 x 10" coaxial speakers. So its not that big. But we're a 5 piece band and the clubs we play in are often space and volume challenged. So I don't get to use it that often. In the summer we play outside a lot - 6 gigs in a row last summer. I use it all the time in those situations. All that said, I use -10dB ear plugs all the time. Unfortunately that takes away some of that stage amp feeling. But my ears would ring for days without them.

MIDI output from a Variax, possibly through Helix USB MIDI or HD500 would be a big plus. I have a Fishman TriplePlay on my Variax Standard. That would make this redundant and unnecessary. MIDI is no way to get modeled guitar sounds. But its pretty useful for lots of other things.

I have found that some VDI cables work better than others, especially in my Variax 700 Acoustic. I have an old one from Line6 that works great, perfect every time. I have another new one I just bought that doesn't fit quite the same and is intermittent. I have to wiggle it to make it work in that guitar. Its fine in my other two Variaxes. Looks like the connections are a bit fussy.

The reason is that you get different acoustic coupling from four speakers and their cabinet than you will with two. You'd think that would be overwhelmed by positioning the mic so close to an individual speaker, but there could be some reasons it doesn't: Individual speakers interact as a whole inside a cabinet rather than isolated individuals Acoustic coupling based on surface area of the speakers and room volume could impact the tone of an individual speaker They're simply different speakers - different models of the same speaker will often sound different. When recording a cabinet, recording engineers will often explore mic'ing different speakers in the same cabinet to see which one sounds best This article is pretty interesting: http://www.badmuckingfastard.com/sound/slipperman.html.

Freeze ups could occur if you didn't reset globals and restore presets (FS 9-10) after the last update. Then re-import your patches and let them get rebuilt too. Freezes can occur when there's data in a patch that is inconsistent with the version of Helix. If this happens with a particular patch, try rebuilding the patch from scratch.

Try Tycoctavia Fuzz

Perhaps because it uses DC for the tube heaters? Fender amps didn't.

I suspect that a lot of the issue with jazz tones is the monitoring system and the level. If you're playing through a Twin Reverb with 2x12"s and even a bit of volume level, its going to be pretty loud and full. If you use the same amp model in Helix through headphones or a small FRFR at low volume its never going to sound or feel the same. If you move the air at the same loudness level, then you might have a better chance of reproducing the tone and feel.

Updated and refreshed models. The 1.x models in some cases sounded better than the 2.x models, especially the acoustic guitar models. I'd like to see Line6 refresh these models, and provide optional models for installation to replace the ones we rarely use.

Also check the date time stamp on those files and make sure the ones your are importing are the ones you think you exported.

My father told me that the best way to be sure you've tightened a bolt as much as you can is to tighten it until it just strips the threads, then back it off a quarter of a turn. I take no responsibility for anyone who follows this advice.

Whether you use global or preset depends on how you approach and use your Variax. If you think of the models as essentially capturing a guitar that you would use on any patch, they you'd use global. That is, you treat the different models as if they represented a more or less fixed guitar that you select, and then use for multiple patches, just changing the pickups, volume and tone like you would any other guitar. This is convenient because when you change patches, you know what guitar you're going to get and it doesn't change with the patch. If on the other hand, you treat your Variax as just another parameter you have available to get tones for a specific song, then you'd maybe want to use preset mode so that the tone of the amp and guitar are set by the preset I do something that's somewhat halfway between. I tend to use one Helix patch the whole gig. This patch has the effects I generally use and I have 10 footswitches to change the effects. Three are used just for gain staging with different levels of distortion. These are complicated patches because the gain stage buttons control multiple parameters in multiple blocks in order to re-voice the different distortion levels. Then I use snapshots within that patch to do typical Variax changes, in particular open tunings and the guitar models I want to use on them. Snapshot 1 is always magnetics only. Other snapshots might use different variax models and tunings as needed for different songs. I like this approach because I can setup the amp for my own tone - I don't try to copy the tone of the original recording, I just try to get close to the spirit while applying my own interpretation. Then different snapshots shift the guitar for very different tones and open tunings in the same patch. I simple, makes for an easy, reliable work flow, and isn't impacted by changes in the song list.

Fremen you are an absolute genius on the guitar! I love what you do and how you approach the guitar. You're on my list of people I'd like to meet. I really hope you are well.

Summarizing, alternate tunings on the variax are only useful for the models, don't try to use them blended with the magnetic pickups. Then make sure you've got your FRFR or headphones turned up enough so that you can't hear the physical strings on the guitar. But horrible, screechy, octave, feedback sounds like something else. One way that can happen is with magnetic pickups, really high gain, and high power so that you get electrical/noise feedback from the magnetic pickups. If that's not your case, then it sounds like an odd problem with the instrument. Maybe some kind of feedback loop.

I spent a lot more time tinkering with my HD500 than I am with Helix. The reason is that the HD500 always seemed like a tweak away from a great tone. But you never quite get their. Helix is the opposite. Its easy to create a patch that sounds good. Tweaks in many cases makes it sound different, not necessarily better. That is, you can get a useful tone from Helix quickly, then evolve it over time to meet your specific needs. The tweaks aren't chasing a useful tone, they're just providing different useful tones.

It may take a monstrous FRFR to keep up with a 100W tube amp into 2 or 4x12" speakers. There's a number of reasons. First that tube amp is likely distorting quite a bit. A 100W amp will actually put out 200W of power if the power amp is heavily distorted. This is why little Fender Blues Junior 15W amps still sound pretty loud. Power is the area under the curve, and a distorted square wave has twice the area as a clean sine wave at the same amplitude in the same load. The second reason is the amount of air that you can move. That is in theory controlled by the power. A cabinet with 2x12's can in move the same amount of air as a cabinet with 4x12's if the speakers have twice the throw. In practice that's not the case, so 4 12's will move more air than 2. But a FRFR has other advantages. It can produce lots of different tones and support multiple instruments while a 2x12" cabinet will mostly do one thing very well. That's a big plus for me as I play multiple instruments. But you should perhaps think about how to reduce stage volume. That not only protects your ears, but gives the FOH mix a better change of controlling what your audience hears. Drummers are the gate, especially in clubs.

I've been using Deluxe models as my goto amp models since POD was first introduced. Litigator replace it this weekend for our last gig of the year. I find Litigator doesn't have the gain and distortion compromises I had to go through with the Deluxe. I had to for example use a tube preamp in front of the Deluxe and add gain and low cut along with increased drive into the amp for my Drive footswitch. I didn't need the tube preamp with Litigator because it has more drive and varies the voicing with increased drive eliminating the need to do it in another block. Now if only Litigator 1) had a bit more range in the gain control for cleaner tones, and 2) had a bright switch. It would completely replace the Deluxe.

There's a lot more going on in a power amp than the impedance changes due to the speaker interaction with the tube amp and the impact of the negative feedback loop. Certainly there's the inverter and power tube distortion, sag, and power supply ripple. So it might make sense to use Helix amp models with the T IR models. This won't capture the interaction between the amp and the speaker as that needs to be modeled between them. But it might be useful.

You can get the best of both with Helix using a compromise. All Helix guitar amp models are mono, and therefor all the effects before the amp should be mono (to save DSP since they'll be summed to mono anyway going into the amp block). All of the effects after the amp (delay, reverb, chorus, etc) could be stereo. If your FOH supports stereo, you can use the Helix left and right outputs into the PA panned hard left and right. Your guitar will still be centered since the amp was mono. So the audience will still hear your guitar no matter where they are sitting. But your after the amp effects will be in stereo and give you a bit more ambience and stereo width.

I like the idea of having the guitar modeling separate from the amp modeling so each can evolve independently. They could still be connected wirelessly though Wifi. Might be some latency issues. I also like a combination of magnetic pickups and modeled instruments. Its not just that (at least currently) the magnetic pickups sound better, its also a no-power option for when batteries run out. Virtual tremolo would be great, but it would need to track really well. I like to use the tremolo very slightly and slowly, kind of simulating a Leslie speaker on slow speed. Its pretty subtle. MIDI would be nice too. I have a Fishman TriplePlay on my Variax Standard. I don't use it much, but its nice to play with sometimes. Extensibility would be a good new feature - the ability to load instrument IRs into the guitar to extend its models. There's lots of IR development going on now, and its moving beyond just speaker IRs. This is partly because we can essentially use sampling techniques to create difference IRs between the samples and the instrument's piezo pickups. This might open up a lot of possibilities for modeling instruments.

Unfortunately the interaction between a speaker and tube power amp is very non-linear and would be hard to do more than approximate with an EQ between the amp and speaker/IR models. The interaction depends on the speaker, how hard it is driven (i.e., the elasticity of the cone edge and spider, cone flexing, changes in impedance due to different positions of the voice coil in the magnetic field), transformer saturation and most importantly negative feedback. A simple IR produced from a sine sweep probably won't capture this too accurately either, since it will change depending on how loud the sweep is. This may all matter, but I'm not sure how much. Accurate modeling of existing physical devices that we love is certainly a good goal. But we shouldn't let that get in the way of innovation that helps produce new, different, and possibly better sounds. In the old days, amp designers would have loved to be free of some of the engineering compromises they had to make. We don't necessarily need to make those same compromises in the digital domain. There is certainly magic in the results they produced with those amps, speakers and cabinets. But maybe there's a new world out there waiting for us to explore.

It could be that you are low on DSP resources, and larger amp models that won't fit are skipped over. See if they are grayed out in the list. That would explain it.

I did the v2.11 update this afternoon. I can verify that some of the Variax problems are still there. Some of my patches have snapshots that change Variax models and tunings. One of these patches imported fine, but none of the others. What seemed to be common is that the Variax model chosen by snapshot 1 would be wrong, just the wrong model. Changing the model and saving would be ok until I switched from snapshot 1 to some other snapshot and then back to snapshot 1. It would always choose whatever variax model it got incorrect, not matter what I saved. Other snapshots seemed to be fine, just snapshot 1 was bad and couldn't be fixed. To fix this I had to change the input to something that didn't include the Variax, then switch back to either Variax or Multi - depending on the patch. This would loose all my Variax settings, controllers, model setting and tunings, for all snapshots. I could then recreate all these settings and it seemed to work fine after that. So I'm guessing that like some of the other issues in 2.10, there is some version migration problem with the variax data in a patch. It might be possible to figure out what that is by comparing the Helix files that I imported with the ones I updated to get it working. Also I still have the problem with footswitches that control multiple blocks showing the state of the wrong block. That's easy to fix, but is a pain to do with a lot of patches.

Anyone using a Variax done the 2.11 update yet? I had a lot of problems with Variax patches in 2.10 that I don't really want to re-experience. One was not seeing Variax settings on the input block in the editor. Another was getting the alternate tunings to work properly in snapshots. I didn't see anything in the release notes addressing Variax issues, so I'm wondering if these issues are still there.