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By the way, that patch has Channel Volume set pretty low to match my mandolin and acoustic guitar patches. You might need to adjust for your setup.

JazzInc, thanks for the very nice and interesting patch. After giving it a listen, I noticed some interesting ideas in the patch that I thought might be useful to write down. I started just capturing these in my own notes (Evernote) but then decided to share at Analyzing JazzInc's SRV Little Wing Patch. I hope you don't mind. Feel free to correct anything I got wrong or missed. And again, thanks for your great contributions.

Is the clipping coming through the XLR outs too? Where is the headphone volume set? Try a factory clean patch and make sure its not something wrong with the gain staging in the patch you're using. Disable all blocks in the patch and see if that's still distorting. If its only through the headphone output, then there's likely something wrong with the headphone amplifier. If its coming out of everything, try a different input.

The stock Cab models are IRs, but have additional processing including mic choice, distance, low cut, high cut and early reflections. Its likely some of those choices are implemented using different impulse responses for the same speaker, possibly by merging IRs as the parameters are changed. Probably not the low cut, high cut though, but I'm just guessing. With IR blocks, these choices have to be included in the Impulse Response itself, and cannot be changed without using a different IR block. To some extent, 3rd party IRs are just different. They may have different speakers, more speaker model choices, different cabinets, more or different mics, more placement choices, different room, different IR capture process, etc. That's not better or worse, just different. Sometimes those little differences can make a big difference in tone. Its also possible to use IR utilities on a Mac or PC to blend different speaker, cabinet, mic, mic positions, EQ curves, impedance curves and room mic IRs into a single blended IR that can be loaded into Helix. That is how the JOOSTALNICO-G12M-R121-U67 IR JazzInc provided, and that I used in the blog post patch, was created. In my case, I was looking for a warmer tone for my Strat to better fit with our bands overall sound. The use of ribbon and condenser mics, positioned close to the speaker to emphasize proximity effect that JazzInc used created just what I was looking for. I really appreciate the effort he put into exploring all those speaker and mic combinations to come up with such a nice IR.

See blog post Creating a Helix Electric Guitar Patch for an in depth look at approaches to designing patches and the details of my goto electric guitar patch. The patch and the IR are attached The patch ends in .txt to get it to upload/download. Remove this extension before attempting to import into Helix. This patch may not be that useful for you. But the thought process for how the patch was designed, the effects chosen, their configuration, and their order in the signal chain might be useful in helping you design your own patches. There's also an explanation of the Mod/Chorus Echo Scale and Spread parameters which are not documented in the Helix manual. At least this is how I think they work. Electric Guitar.hlx.txt

Me too! My Variax Acoustic 700 would be great with Helix if I could turn off its models and use IR body images as IRs in Helix. I sent in a support request to Line 6 to see if this was possible. The answer was predictably no for these discontinued products. I suggested the open source the software for discontinued products like the Variax 700 Acoustic so we can make these modifications ourselves. Let's see what happens.

What I mean is that setting a patch at 85 dB will scale up or down in volume in a live situation without changing tone too drastically. I should have said that's the level at which I finalize the patch.

HonestOpinion, you didn't say what guitar or pickup you are using. Some acoustic guitars that have Fishman pickups already have body images for that guitar in the electronics. That might be the case for your guitar, and would explain 1) why it sounds good right off the pickup and 2) why adding a second body sounds a lot worse. You wouldn't want the sound of the guitar body (say off a mic) going into another guitar body. Same with a speaker IR going into another speaker IR.

All those failed updates are likely leaving Helix in a bad state. I don't know how the updates are done, but I would guess that there is no writing to Helix memory until the whole image has been downloaded from USB since that would be the most unreliable link in the update chain. You would think there would also be some checksum at least to verify that the image was downloaded without error. But if something was causing Helix to crash while updating its internal memory, say a faulty unit or turning the power off, then this might cause Helix to be unable to boot. I'd guess Line 6 has a way of restoring such units, but there may be nothing us users can do if a unit gets in this state. So far I've had no problems updating - done it 3 times now.

You could use a iPhone or iPad with the AudioTools app and a Send block in Helix to add metering and wave form analysis anywhere in the Helix signal chain. That wouldn't provide metering for compressors though that would show how many db of compression you're getting.

I bought this amp when I was a Freshman in college, 1968 I think. Earlier this yer I dug it out of the attic and tried to use my POD HD500X to create a digital pedal board into this amp. It sounded awful and I quickly gave up. There were a few problems in the amp - needed new power tubes, the filter capacitors in the power supply needed to be replaced, and the pots needed cleaning. But the worst problem was the Fender CTS 137 speakers in an old 2x12 Bassman cabinet. These speakers just don't sound good, too much bass, flabby sounding, no articulation and an odd color. I got them out of an old Fender Pro that I replace with Celestion Greenbacks. Well, I had the parts ordered to fix this amp a couple of years ago, thinking it would be a labor of love, and bring it back to life. I did the repairs, and replace the CTS 137 speakers with Celestion G12-65s. Now that old amp was sounding pretty good. So I created a traditional front-of-the-amp pedalboard in Helix including: Fassel Wah Deluxe Comp Compressor Low and High Cut EQ to use a high-pass filter to reduce bass into the gain/drive stages Vermin Dist - for Drive: just the edge of distortion as that Showman is super clean. Vermin Dist cleans up well with Drive about 1.9, Filter at 8.0 and Level at 8.3. Turn it on and the amp just starts to get gritty and cleans up nicely by rolling back the guitar volume control Valve Driver - for Overdrive: gives a bit more control on the bass and treble cut for a somewhat more overdrive sound Compulsive Drive - for Distortion: this is a very smooth, musical distortion. I'm really glad Line 6 included this model Script Mod Phase Ubiquitous Vibe Gray Flanger 60s Bias Trem Chorus - sounds great, even in mono Simple Delay - slap-back 125 milliseconds, no repeats Transistor Tape - for 500 millisecond delay '63 Spring 145 Rotary Looper This setup sounds fantastic and has breathed new live into a old amp that means a lot to me. Helix makes a great pedalboard.

Certainly different body images can make a huge difference. See if you can borrow a Fishman Aura, plug it into the Helix effects loop and experiment with different cabinet models. If you find one you really like, I'll capture it for you.

What computer are you using? Maybe that's your problem since is it is common between the two Helix units. Maybe try a different USB port or cable. Updating back to 1.04.2 shouldn't be any different than updating to 1.04.3, so it sounds like there's something unreliable between you computer and Helix.

I use Mac OS X AU Utility to set the Helix output levels of different patches. AU Utility just provides the missing output meters. It's also helpful in gain staging while designing a patch to make sure no block is in danger of clipping. For actual volum levels, I use a DB meter to at least understand what volume level is being output. I try to keep things around 85 DB from my own amp. That provides some consistency in the actual production environment.

Is that the same guitar, amp and speaker model in both versions?

Do you have an amp or speaker model in your signal chain? If so, try bypassing them. A guitar amp generally doesn't work well with acoustic instruments, the tone control voicings for electric guitar aren't really that suitable for acoustic guitar. Electric guitar speakers are even worse since they are very colored, and don't have much high frequency response. If not, then maybe its your guitar pickup. The Fishman Aura body images are created by (more or less) subtracting the impulse response of a under the saddle piece pickup from the body impulse response. Then when you play through the pickup and this modified body, you get the sound of the guitar through just the body. If your guitar doesn't use an under the saddle pickup, then maybe the extracted body image won't fit with your guitar. What are you connecting the Helix output to? It needs to be headphones or a FRFR amp. Finally, different guitars sound better or worse with different body images. The body image created specifically for a guitar might not be the one that sounds best. It takes some experimenting, just like with speaker IRs.

I couldn't find anything like Bodilizer for Mac. I suppose it would be posslble to capture IRs through Bodilizer, even running on Windows from a Mac, but doing it with the Fishman Aura was simpler and possibly has better body images. it might also be possible to extract an IR out of a Bodilizer file if we knew the file format. Perhaps the developers will where.

Creating an Acoustic Guitar Impulse Response for Line6 Helix

See blog post: Creating an Acoustic Guitar Impulse Response for Line6 Helix for how to extract a body image from a Fishman Aura Spectrum into an IR that can be used in Helix acoustic guitar patches. More to come.

Here's a few links: How to make an acoustic guitar impulse response Recording Impulse Responses Making Impulse Responses with Logic's IR Utility Bodilizer How to Make Your Guitar Sound Like a Banjo The IR project: acoustic guitar processing and cabinet simulation

That use to be a problem, but recent Helix and El Capitan updates seem to have solved it.

The Line6 Audio/MIDI drivers just released are not for Helix, but for HD500X and earlier products. Helix is USB Class Compliant and does not require any driver - which is why it sort of works with iOS. There must be some timing issues as setting the I/O buffers to a high number seems to clean up the digital noise, but at the expense of high latency. I use Firewire for my main computer interface and it works fine with El Capitan. But there does some to be some issues with USB audio.

I'd bet its the global settings being reset that's the problem. For example, changing the 1/4" or XLR outputs from Line to Instrument could make a big difference in overall tone.

There are threads on how to create acoustic guitar body impulse responses - Google and you'll find them, including a nice YouTube video. However, you'll need something to process the body and piezo pick response to do anything useful. Bodilizer on Windows might be useful, but it doesn't have any means of exporting an IR that can be loaded into Helix. What I did is get a Fishman Aura Spectrum, then use Logic Pro X's Impulse Response Utility to create impulse responses from the Fishman Aura body images that worked well with my acoustic guitar. I then loaded these IRs into Helix and created some nice acoustic guitar patches (mandolin too). Its a bit of a complicated process and not something that would fit into a forum post. I'll try to create a blog post that walks through the process in a few ways. Ultimately Line6 needs to get into the IR business and provide some acoustic guitar and other body IRs that would really expand the usefulness of Helix. Its great that we have this flexibility.

El Capitan 10.11.2 works fine for me with the Helix app. There's still some clicks and pops from the USB audio, but I don't use Helix for that anyway (Focusrite Saffire Pro 40). What issues are you having?