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Did you use Focusrite Control to set the input to Inst? Is the Inst light lit and pad light off? If not, this could be your problem, your guitar would be seeing the wrong input impedance.

Jason Sadites has a great set of videos explaining the details, myths and facts of gain staging, unity gain and digital clipping: Not only are these videos extremely informative, but they also demonstrate very useful analytics approaches. Jason's main points are: Getting the most out of Helix is gain staging so that the level and dynamic range of your guitar and playing style fits optimally between the noise floor and digital clipping (primarily caused by the analog to digital converters at the Helix input and output). For linear blocks, levels into the blocks don't matter as long as the result at the output block is what you're looking for For non-linear blocks that would typically follow an amp block (e.g., some delays, compressors, etc.) you can use headroom and threshold to control the amount of desired distortion (if any) that these blocks add. If you don't go crazy on winding up all the levels to the max on every block, you're not likely to need to worry about digital clipping in Helix blocks, except for those where digital clipping is part of the design of the block (e.g., Vintage Digital delay). The optional output level is one that turns the Powercab signal light yellow, but rarely red (which would indicate the possibility of digital clipping in Powercab). This corresponds to approximately -3dB peak headroom and -15dB RMS headroom. You can use these numbers and your DAW meters to set patch levels so they match and are providing the optimum output for Powercab or other FRFR options That is, for best results, don't be afraid of turning up the level, say in either the amp block channel volume, or the output level to get your patches in this sweet spot. Don't worry about setting all blocks unity gain, and don't worry too much about digital clipping inside blocks. This is great advice. However, I did a brief experiment today that might indicate unity gain may still be a useful starting point. What I found is that a Les Paul, or probably guitars with similar passive double coil humbucker pickups, on the bridge pickup strummed pretty hard into an empty patch pushes the Helix output to just under 0dB peak, about -17dB RMS, -15db LUFS, and is just enough output to flash the Powercab input signal lights into yellow. That means for this guitar at least, there is no unused headroom that you might be leaving on the table, and all the blocks in the signal chain could be unity gain in order to produce the optimal output. Any guitar with hotter pickups would need to use the input pad switch to avoid digital clipping on the Helix guitar input. My Strat with single coil pickups had an output of about -9dB peak, -28db RMS and about the same for LUFS Integrated. That would indicate there is about say 9dB of headroom that you might want to make up somewhere in the signal chain in order to achieve optimal output. The most likely place might be the amp block channel volume and/or the output block level. But as Jason points out, it probably doesn't matter that much where you add the additional level. Keeping most blocks unity gain however would allow you to save them as favorites, or set your own block user defaults, and be able to use the blocks in other patches without worrying about potential unwanted level changes. So Jason is absolutely right in his analysis of gain staging for optimal signal to noise ratio, not needing unity gain (at least not on all blocks) that leaves headroom on the table, and not worrying too much about digital clipping if you keep the Helix output at a healthy level. However, how much headroom you have depends on the guitar you're using and how hard you typically play. Maybe unity gain in blocks is still a good place to start, especially for higher output guitars. But we shouldn't be afraid of turning up the amp block to get Helix and Powercab into their sweet spot. Thanks Jason for the great videos!

I doubt it. Using the transformer just works better.

I somewhat foolishly updated to MacOS Big Sur after checking at focusrite.com that my old Saffire Pro 40 FireWire audio interfaces would work with Big Sur. I updated, and sure enough, they didn't work. I ended up spending a lot of time and finally purchased a Clarett 8Pre USB so I could move away from FireWire. But a few days ago, I decided to give it another try. What I found is that my computer, which has gone through many OS updates over the years, had accumulated a bunch of old kernel extensions for applications and hardware that I hadn't used in years. I cleaned up these kernel extensions, rebooted and up came the Saffire Pro 40. It works great in Big Sur. That was an expensive lesson. Sometimes its a good idea to start over with a computer upgrade, and re-install your apps from scratch in order to clean up old junk. But I don't mind the studio upgrade of the Clarett 8Pre. All's well that ends well.

Stefan, great questions. Starting from the end and working back - HX Stomp (and Helix) amp+cab models sound like a recording of an amp because that's exactly what's happening. The cab (and IR blocks) are based on impulse responses of guitar speakers in a cabinet mic'd with a microphone, just like you would in a recording studio or live. These won't sound like an amp in the room because they're not. They're more like an amp in a room with a mic played back in another room - you get the room sound twice. You might be able to get a sound more to your liking by moving the mic a little closer to the speaker, and adding a bit more low cut to compensate for the proximate effect (enhanced bass from a mic close to its source). Also try adjusting the early reflections to see if that helps get the tone you're looking for. Early reflections add more room sound. Ultimately the solution is to use speaker models in Powercab as that is an amp in the room. Regarding the position of EQ and compression - these can, and often do go both before and after the amp+cab blocks. Compression before the amp provides more sustain into the distortion and can effect the pick attack/transients. Compression after the amp block, and usually following all effects at the end of the chain can help glue together the guitar and ambient effects. EQ before the amp might be used to establish the tone of the guitar into the amp. EQ after the amp might be used to adjust the voicing of the amp distortion. Its not unusual to cut bass before distortion to reduce mud, and cut treble after distortion to reduce ice pick and fizz. This is how the Teemah! block works. Addressing your first question: in the old days, all the effects had to go into the front of the amp, or between the preamp and power amp in the case of Fender reverb and tremolo. So all effects were essentially pre-distortion if the amp was driven hard enough to cause power amp distortion. This has the effect of "ducking" things like reverb and delays - when the guitar is being played hard, and it's driving the power amp into clipping, so there's no gain left for the reverb and delay. So you don't hear them much while you're playing hard. But as soon as you stop playing, all that backed up gain is now available to amplify the reverb and delay tails and they jump out, often in a pretty extreme way. In some cases, that's just what you want, and you can certainly reproduce that in Helix by putting reverb and delay before the amp model. But that was essentially a compromise that a lot of players wanted to avoid. So reverb and delay was often added in the studio after the guitar amp in order to provide better control and avoid the ducking. So you can do that with Helix too. I generally put anything that adds ambience or modulates frequency (not tone) after distortion in my signal chain. I think these effects sound better adding ambience to the distorted signal rather than distorting the ambience. Its more natural too, more like a guitar amp in a stadium would behave. This also seems to help keep the tone from becoming too complex, indistinct, or muddy so it doesn't cut through the mix well.

I use MIDI Commander with HX Stomp too and love the simplicity and functionality it adds to HX Stomp.

Like using a looper, poly sustain is like playing a different instrument. You have to think differently, make different arrangements, and practice using poly sustain like you would to learn a new instrument. Also like the looper, the position of the block makes a big difference in how you use the poly sustain. If you want to change the guitar tone without impacting the sustained tone, you have to put the poly sustain towards the end of your signal chain, or at least after any effects you want to change after initiating a sustain. If you always want to switch from capturing a sustained chord to lead while sustaining, you can try putting more than one block or parameter min/max toggle on the same foot switch as the poly sustain. I haven't tried that, but I think it would work. You might also practice how you strum what you want sustained, and how long you wait for the transient attack to die out before you press the sustain button in order to capture a nice sustain tone. Long sustains might be easier with the footswitch configured for on/off. Shorter sustains that are changing a lot might be easier with momentary contact. If you have HX Effects of HX Stomp with Helix, then try offloading expensive blocks like poly sustain into an HX device in a Helix effects loop. I use HX Effects integrated with Helix for all my gigging, mostly because I like having the extra foot switches and the signal chain flexibility.

Very nice advice from OmniFace. Basically start simple and with amp/cabinet combinations you are familiar with, and then start adding pedals and other effects. Get your clean tone on the neck pickup of your guitar first, then tailor from there for other pickup settings. Regarding preamp (Drive) vs. power amp (Master) distortion, low Drive, high Master will emphasize power amp distortion which is typically symmetric, has mostly odd order harmonics, and exhibits sag and bias excursion to provide a kind of compression that effects the amp's feel. This is what OmniFace refers to a a looser more dynamic sound. High Drive low Master will emphasize preamp distortion which is typically asymmetric (because of the difference between preamp tube cutoff and saturation when run class A), has a combination of even and odd order harmonics which sound a bit more complex, but has no sag, bias excursion, or intermodulation distortion caused by hum and ripple settings. This makes the preamp distortion sound tighter and responds quicker to fast playing with a lot of low end content. Although there are no rules, an IR or Cab model in Helix into a Speaker or IR in Powercab is likely to sound pretty muddy and not have a lot of high end. Similarly an acoustic guitar into a guitar speaker IR or Cab model in either Helix or Powercab is likely to be pretty muddy and lack high end. Use Powercab in FRFR mode for this. I have however found that guitar speaker and cab IRs do warm up a mandolin with a piezo pickup in a kind of nice way.

I find the volume and tone knobs in the JTV-69S are a little too high and make picking awkward. Has anyone changed the knobs to something a little lower profile?

Probably not the problem, but make sure the Variax model with open tuning doesn't include any mix of the magnetic pickups.

I changed the pickups and neck on my JTV-69S and now its one of my nicest playing guitars. Only other thing I might do is change the volume and tone knobs to something with a slightly lower profile. The volume knob tends to gets in the way when picking.

Here's another video from Jeff McErlain on just fuzz. He's demonstrating a Jasse Davey King Tone silicone Fuzz. There's a bunch of new fuzz options in Helix 3.01. There's also a new global option to have Auto Input impedance to be set to match the first enabled block in the signal chain. So you don't have to live with a lot of tone suck when the fuzz is off anymore. But I still struggle to reproduce what Jeff can do with act Jasse Davey fuzz. I did however have some pretty good success with the Legacy Drive based on . Give that a try and let us know what you think.

Variax of course has many more features than the poly tune blocks including: alternative tunings, different instruments, MIDI controls, and rich integration with Helix. I have found that when comparing Variax with the poly tune blocks, Variax has slightly better tracking, and a little less intermodulation errors. This is probably because Variax has a separate pickup for each string and does not have to try to separate them from a single analog wave. And Variax doesn't have any DSP overhead in Helix. Bottom line, Variax + Helix + Powercab is an incredibly flexible and powerful platform for guitar. I am still thrilled with my investment in Line6 products. I'll be first in line to purchase and updated Variax. Wish I could be playing gigs again!

I have two Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 FireWire audio interfaces. These work perfectly with Big Sur. But to get it to work, I did have to clean up a bunch of old, out of date, unused kernel extensions that were preventing any kernel extensions from loading. HX Edits works fine on Big Sur, as long as its window does not loose focus. If you click on some other window, about 30 sec later, HX Edit will disconnect. You can easily reconnect, but it might not be a good idea to allow disconnects while doing firmware updates.

I never have with Powercab 112+ or Powercab 212.

The simplest way is to dedicate HX Effects for front of the amp effects, and use HX Stomp for the amp and post amp effects (modulation, delay reverb, etc.). This avoids having to use an FX block in HX Stomp and keeps the signal chain simple. One drawback is that HX Effects does not support setting the guitar input impedance. This can impact fuzz blocks that need the input set to Auto so that the fuzz block presents a lower impedance to the guitar. Or you could do the opposite, HX Stomp into HX Effects for post amp effects. Generally you might find that there are more effects blocks that go before rather than after the amp - things like wah, compressor, phasor, flanger, unitive, distortion, etc. - things that impact tone not frequency. Remember that all pedals use to be into the front of the amp as that was the only option.

I have Big Sur installed on a 2017 MacBook Pro. HX Edit works fine as long as the app retains focus. If you click in some other window and HX Edit looses focus, the connect will time out and disconnect in around 30 sec.

I don't necessarily play a song or solo the same way every time, so I'm looking for flexibility and consistency in Helix layout so that it doesn't constrain playing what I feel is best for the moment. I start with a single patch that models the tones I need and use most of the time. I use 10 footswitch mode in order to be able to control lots of different combinations of effects quickly and easily. Complex tone changes are often done by assigning multiple max and min values to the same footswitch to control multiple parameters. Snapshots can do the same thing, but are limited in that you can't combine snapshots, you only get the last snapshot selected. With footswitches, you have control of all possible combinations of effects. I do use snapshots, but for bigger, more unusual changes like open tunings (I use a Variax), acoustic tones, or other specific combinations of effects that might often be used together. Then I use presets for even more unusual needs that might be specific to a song, don't fit in my goto patch, or are effects I wouldn't normally use. A harmonizer effect is a good example since it has to be set for the key and mode of the song. I use the Mode switch to access footswitches, snapshots and patches as needed. It's an extra button press, but usually happens between songs.

I understand your concerns. The VDI does indeed sound somewhat different than the 1/4". There's probably a lot of reasons for that: 1. The A2D converters for the magnet pickups are in the guitar, not Helix 2. The cable capacitance and Helix input impedance are not impacted by the VDI cable 3. There could be some limiting of the magnetic pickups as they go through the A2D on the guitar due to bandwidth, headroom or bit depth issues that aren't present with the Helix 1/4" input. There have been long discussions about using the VDI and 1/4" at the same time. But this is not advised because a normal TS cable will ground the power coming from the VDI which could cause malfunction, overheating, and damage. I suspect if you are careful and use a special TRS cable that leaves the sleeve open this would not be a problem. But Line6 would need to verify before I tried it on my guitar. I have come to live with the VDI "tone suck" and apparent loss of sustain because of the many other advantages. I compensate with a compressor and EQ block.

I did not drill the neck mounting holes myself. Not that I couldn’t, but there were other considerations. The necks from Warmoth do not have the frets leveled and dressed, only pressed in. I do know how to level, crown and dress frets, but I don’t have the tools for stainless steel. So I took the neck and guitar to my local trusted luthier and let him do it. That added quite a bit to the overall cost, but I don’t mind giving some business to these guys as they provide real value to me. The higher frets are for bending. You need the string to dig into your finger so it doesn’t tend so slip when you bend. You also want your finger lifted off the fretboard so you don’t get a lot of friction between your finger and the fretboard when using vibrato. And you want those silky smooth stainless steel frets to reduce the friction to almost nothing. I don’t mind a thick neck. Most of my other guitars have pretty big necks and that’s fine. So I opted to have the JTV-69S be a little thinner to provide a new option. Now since that is the guitar I tend to pick up 90% of the time to play, even though I have a Strat, Les Paul, and Tele that are “much better instruments” should say something. My only issue with my JTV-69S is that the sustain is weak. But the combination of a Variax, Helix and Powercab is such a nice, convenient, flexible combination, I tend to gravitate there pretty often.

I’m afraid OS updates are a fact of life with modern laptop computers, and early adopters of amp and effects modeling devices. Frankly I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to update and retain the value of my digital investment that would otherwise be obsolete long before it has reached it useful life. Re: Windows and MacOS, generally MacOS is easier, faster and more reliable to update. But not if you’re crossing the 32 to 64 bit threshold. You can probably updated a 2013 MacBook Air to the latest OS, but you will probably have to loose all your current 32bit applications. That may or may not be a problem. It’s the price of modernization. I think its worth the effort.

Before you replace your JTV-69S neck, be aware that there are some advantages of a thicker neck. First they're more stable, hold their setup better, stay in tune better, and are not impacted as much by changes in temperature and humidity. This can be important if you're playing inside air-conditioning and outside gigs in the summertime. Second, a heavier neck and body can give better sustain, and more uniform response up and down the neck. It might be a good rule of thumb to use the heaviest neck that fits your hands.

Another option is to use one HX Stomp in the effects loop of the other although this will cost you a block. Better yet, use on as a "pedal board" in front of the other in series, and only have the last one in the chain connected to the computer though USB. Put front of the amp effects (wah, compressor, phasor, flanger, UniVibe, fuzz, distortion, overdrive, etc) in the first HX Stomp, then use amp, speaker, chorus, delay reverb in the second.

The Lexicon MPX-G2 also had an analog front end with analog and digital distortion choices. It was a fantastic unit. I used one for years. The big thing this unit lacked is the ability to use IRs for speaker models. Tone shaping is OK, but not nearly as realistic.

Well... If you're clever, you can use a tool like Logic Pro X's Impulse Response Utility to capture an IR of the HX Stomp cab model you like and put that IR in PowerCab+. But I wouldn't bother. Just use an amp+cab block in HX Stomp to get both with one block.