DunedinDragon

To be VERY clear, the FIRST thing you download AND INSTALL will be the editor. If you're on Windows 10 it's possible that when you select the "download" button on the the page to download the editor, it may only download it which will then show up on the lower left hand side of the window. You then need to select the drop-down arrow on that box in your window to tell it to install the software. That will then install the editor, the audio driver, and the updater application.

Interesting setup. 4 hours to load it, unpack it at the gig, and set it up. Play 4 one hour sets 4 hours to tear it down, take it home and unload it. 12 hours of labor that (if your lucky) equates to minimum wage. Sounds like a plan!!!!!!!!!!! :huh:

^^^^ Apparently home schooled..... :wacko:

"Some guy twanging on his Les Paul or Stratocaster through a Fender. " Only a metal head would respond to a thread on the Helix by referring to videos of guys twanging through a Fender. And, oh by the way, a Les Paul and a Strat nor would a Fender amp necessarily be the right tools for many of the genres mentioned any more than a Fender would be the amp of choice for metal. How about old style country such as Chet Atkins or Merle Haggard? Maybe a Gretsch and a Supro, or Gibson amp might be a better choice? Or possibly some jazz like Wes Montgomery or George Benson. You really think they use Fender amps, or Les Pauls or Strats? I guess this all serves to validate the old addage: "When all you know is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail".....

You can, however, run it direct into the PA and they can feed it back to you in the monitors, if the monitors are decent.

Well that would certainly be a nice respite from the flood of metalhead videos on the Helix, that's for sure. If I had more time I'd probably take some of these on. But they all tend to be pretty complex if you want to do them right and completely. For example, there's not just ONE country setup. Modern country tends to have a different feel than traditional country, or even instrumental country like Chet Atkins. Same with blues and jazz. That's a LOT of individual videos for sure.

I personally don't think there's any mystery to "can it do metal". 95% of all the videos out there on the Helix tend to be oriented toward metal. The questions are really about, can it do jazz, can it do country, can it do funk/soul, or R&B, or Rockabilly, or Delta blues versus Texas blues versus Memphis blues...and on and on and on.....

I understand how people might like the usefulness of snapshots. But even before we had snapshots I wasn't among the people clamoring for them The features already available were more than enough to handle the things I needed to do. Once they came out and I saw what they did and how they worked it wasn't something that added any benefit to the way I was doing things, but it certainly added complexity due to the additional layer of abstraction they represent. I guess I'm just a "production" kind of guy from so many years in as an engineer. Keep it simple and straightforward and you're less likely to run into problems that might impact production and/or maintenance.

I'm actually amazed by how much extra time I have for practicing and playing my guitar because I don't go ditzing around with my setup. Found a setup that works good and moved on.... ;)

Yep. Great sound. It's always hard to match up with a video like the one you posted at the beginning when you're using a guitar with different pickups from those used in the video. But I think you nailed a great tone for that tele for sure. I think people are too quick to try to jump to pedals on a lot of tones when a simple tweak of the gain knob will easily do the trick.

All of these problems serve to reassure me I'm glad I don't use snapshots.....

The ASIO driver, by definition, isn't available in the native Windows playback system as native Windows uses a WDM interface. That's the whole problem here. Two completely different audio interfaces and architectures. DAWs can use the ASIO because they bypass the native Windows interface and directly use the ASIO interface.

I'm absolutely positive it has nothing to do with Windows 10. Windows has nothing to do with the capabilities of a driver. It simply routes requests to the driver through the WDM interface (in the case of the using Windows native playback faculties) to the driver software provided by the vendor. In the Helix case they apparently provide an ASIO driver and a WDM driver. So my guess would be the WDM driver provided by L6 only supports those two formats...which I think is a pretty good guess.

I'm on Windows 10 and I just checked the properties on the playback device which in my case is the POD HDProX. Under advanced properties it shows options of 24 bit 44100 and 24 bit 48000. These options should be based on what your playback device supports.

Make sure you haven't inadvertantly thrown the Helix into another mode. It's easy enough to do by accidentally hitting the both preset up/down switches at the same time. The first time I did it I thought the unit had frozen because none of the footswitches would respond. But all I had to do was hit the "Exit" button and it went back to the normal mode and all was fine.

I get some minor hiss on certain amps, but nothing that can't easily be dealt with using the noise gate. Certainly my Strat tends to be a bit noisier than my Les Paul or Gretsch, but I attribute the minor hiss to an artifact of how the amp stages would act in real life on a real amp. So that leaves me a bit confused as to what it is you're hearing. I'm assuming the "glass sound" you're referring to is the somewhat brittle sound you get from the highs produced by a FRFR speaker which has much greater response on the upper end of the frequency spectrum. As mentioned before, most people mitigate this by using high cut filters to limit the response in the high range that wouldn't be there with a normal guitar cabinet. I still do that to some degree but I've found I need to do less of it once I started using IR's which allows me more latitude in what mic is being used and where it's placed. I still tend to cut some of the high end, but not as dramatically as I used to with the stock cabinets. As far as level setting, I normalize all my presets to a given setting of around 100db (using a sound meter) with my Helix Master set at 12 o'clock and the volume on my Yamaha DXR12 set at 12 o'clock as well. The only thing I really worry about in that regard is my stage volume. I know I'm sending an ample line level signal to the board and I leave it up to whoever is running the board to gain stage that signal to the level it needs to be relative to the other instruments and vocals. I've never had any issue on any board not receiving ample signal strength. On leads I allow a boost of around +4db and it all seems to work out as long as the sound man exercised caution in not gaining my signal to hot at the board...but again, I've never had a problem.

Isn't that just going to be an abrupt change though? Not exactly the same as how a pedal steel slides in and out of suspended chords or minors to majors and such. That's where the bending technique becomes important.

Maybe he finds it easier to play guitar with his feet rather than his fingers.... ;)

Or, maybe he should just go ahead and do it and we'll all sit back and wait for the mushroom cloud to show itself halfway through the set.... ;) Confusius say, "Just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you SHOULD do it"....

Bundle, by definition, is a backup of all presets so yes, it overwrites all presets including factory presets. That's the nature of ANY kind of backup/restore operation. If you don't want to overwrite factory presets then do a setlist backup or a backup of individual presets. I would think that's pretty obvious. If not, maybe they can document that along with how to turn on your computer.

There's no reason you can't accomplish this. The key to what is causing you the problem are statement like "I found...". In order to get where you want to go you will most likely need to build your own presets. There's nothing hard about this and you already have all the information you need in the presets you downloaded. Take that information and plan out your own single preset divided into a set of snapshots. Downloaded presets are a very good way to learn how to setup presets, but to get the most out of your unit you will likely need to invest some time and energy in learning how to do things yourself. You'll get far more mileage and far fewer restrictions out of your Helix once you make that investment. By the way, you can copy and paste elements like effects and amps between presets.

I do a reasonable pedal steel simulation just using a re-tuned strat, a slide, finger picking, and some creative use of the volume pedal. Asking for an effect that would do all of that would be a pretty big order. It has less to do with the Helix than it does technique.

Actually, no I hadn't looked. But it doesn't surprise me. I figured it would be something like that or XML. Maybe one of these days when I get ambitious enough I'll track down some libraries for handling JSON objects and come up with a reader that populates a database for easy reporting and querying. That assumes, of course, that I'll actually get ambitious......miracles do happen sometimes though.

Personally I wouldn't get too hung up on DSP usage unless you're building big, complex signal chains with lots of amps and effects. If you want to be sure you have plenty just route your 1st signal chain to go to the 2nd signal chain for output and you'll basically double your DSP allotment and can add in all sorts of stuff into that second chain.

I had always understood many of the HD models had been ported over to the HX system early on. I guess the fact that I saw no real improvement in certain amps like the Fender amps reinforced that idea. Regardless, they've certainly improved the accuracy and dynamics of the newer models I assume due to things they've been learning along the way.