DunedinDragon

Saying it's "simply not true" that people can abandon their old gear and use the Helix standalone hardly makes it a valid statement given the MASSIVE number of people that are happily doing it, and have been doing it quite a bit longer than you have based on how long you've owned your Helix. I've certainly done it, as have many others like myself that have owned and used our Helix units since it's first release both in Studio and Live applications. In my case I don't feel I've lost anything and have gained tremendously not only in the flexibility the Helix offers, but also in the clarity, articulation and general tone quality of what I'm able to produce both in the studio as well as on stage. If your method satisfies your needs, I'm happy for you. But that doesn't make it the ONLY way to be successful with the Helix.

Well my rig consists only of a Helix and a Yamaha DXR12, or alternatively a pair of Yamaha HS7 studio monitors for studio work, and can chameleon into Rock, Rockabilly, Metal, Jazz, country chicken pickin, R&B, Funk, ambient...whatever. But that doesn't always tell the story. A lot of guys with Helix use a more mixed arrangement like yours with 4CM and external pedals. It's not the external amps or effects that determine the flexibility of the system, it's all about what kind of sound makes you happy. In my case I've been performing in bands for over 50 years live and in the studio as well as worked as a professional sound man. My quest has always been about achieving a professional polished studio quality sound both for recording and in live performances in any and all situations. The icing on the cake is a simple enough rig so that setup is easy and dependable. Being a sound man I want the sound that I've dialed in on stage to accurately reflect what the audience hears so that the mix of the band on stage and in the FOH is polished and professional. That's what makes me happy, but that may not be what makes you happy. That's what you have to discover for yourself based on what you want from your system.

It's been noted here and on several other Helix forums that the USB parameters in the Global Input settings often gets munged in the process. Most likely that's your problem.

One of the paradigms I came to very early on with the Helix which may be helpful to you is that patches in the Helix are far more similar to the way physical signal paths might be assembled in a studio rather than on a simple amp and effects pedal system. We get trained to think of things like reverbs as being placed between the pre-amp and amp simply because that's a convenient way to organize it, especially if it's a built-in reverb. But many studio recordings have opted for other arrangements to get a different feel for reverbs and other time based effects such as mixing a reverb and delay together using parallel paths simply because there's more freedom to do things like that in a studio environment on a track by track basis depending on the sound you want. If you think of the signal chains from that perspective, it opens up a much wider range of options for bringing more polished studio sounds to the live stage.

That "X" setting is a bit elusive without knowing your intended use for your Helix. It's different for studio work than it is for live work, and it's different for live work depending on whether you're using a FRFR speakers and direct FOH setup, or using 4CM through a traditional amp and cab, or through a power amp with traditional cabinet. Lots of great tips for any of those, but only useful for your specific intended application. That being said, the one tip I would give you above all others is to avoid the temptation to use global EQ settings. There's nothing you can do in global EQ that you can't do in a patch. But once you apply global EQ you can't undo it in any of your patches. As stated in the documentation, reserve global EQ for variations in acoustics for a given room and you'll be safe.

I didn't say they did. But they certainly don't use hardware storage.

The other problem is the ongoing problem with both Android and Apple in providing a stable platform for interfacing with external devices. The best example is the recent Spider V amp which was supposed to have an edit app available. However, once the Spider V's shipped Android and Apple both had upgraded certain device standards so unless you have an older OS on your phone, the app wouldn't work. It still doesn't work to this day, so they quickly developed one to run on Windows so people could at least back things up. As far as I'm concerned I really would prefer to backup and restore my presets from a more robust and proven filing system like the PC that has plenty of utilities for backup and restoration. My work depends on those backups and I know I can trust my PC and it's filing system and my backups there. Phones are okay for saving pictures or playing songs, but not for storage of really critical info that you can't afford to lose. That's probably why banks don't backup your banking account info on phones I suspect ;)

In terms of the Mackie Thump, we use one with our drummer when he's playing an electronic kit for stage volume. That one's a few years old so they may have upgraded it a bit. Personally, I'm looking to trade that in on a Yamaha DXR12 as it's a bit underpowered and to my ear it's a bit flubby on the bass. We used a DXR12 on the kit a couple of months ago and placed it on the floor in the monitor position with the "monitor" selection switch off which then allowed for bass coupling and kick drum was both very full but well articulated. I know the DXR12 works great for guitar as that's what I commonly use on stage for my monitor. You're probably best off trying out a few to find what meets your needs. My impression in this area is you get what you pay for. QSC and Yamaha cost a bit more, but their performance is well worth it. In terms of your IEMs, there's no explicit output selection for headphones which is what you're looking for. There's no problem with allocating a signal chain so that the ambient microphone and bass are isolated from the monitor/FOH feed. So I guess my first approach would be to route that IEM signal path output to something that's not being used like the USB just so that it's not going out the 1/4" or XLR outputs which are reserved for other purposes. The headphone output would still be active I assume no matter what along with it's own headphone volume knob. My typical setup is pretty much exactly what you're describing. I use a 1/4" L/Mono out to the stage speaker and the XLR L/Mono out to the FOH. On the FOH line I always use a phantom power blocker just to protect from a sound man turning it on as it can create some noise. The way I set things ups is I configure my XLR out to be Mic Level and it doesn't use the Master Volume knob, so it basically sends a full signal to the board that the sound man can gain stage appropriately. The !/4" output is routed to my DXR12 at Line level and does respond to the Master Volume knob. That way any adjustments I make onstage won't affect the signal going to the board.

No global reset and the munging of the USB in/out has been pretty normal. In fact there were a couple of oddities in restoring the globals for me, but easily fixed. The lack of needing a reset was a nice surprise, but in a way expected since it had already been announced this upgrade would consist of a number of architectural changes under the hood...that was apparently one of them.

There's no doubt it could be done, but it does require an update to the Helix itself which currently has no facilities for multiple select. They could probably facilitate a copy path function pretty easily, but that's a bit different than copying multiple blocks as you would normally do with a <SHIFT> or <CTL> select as in Windows or on a Mac.

I hate to be the one negative voice here, but I do see a bit of an issue that would make it a bit more than a "no-brainer". Although multiple select in HX Edit would be an easy thing to implement via CNTL or SHIFT key selections, there's no comparable multi-select on the Helix hardware side. This becomes an issue in that HX Edit is nothing more than a fancy interface to the functional logic in the Helix hardware, so in order to do this it would first have to be implemented via some form of functional button or dial equivalent on the Helix itself so it could be called from HX Edit.

You might want to take the weekend and download and go over the manual which can be downloaded from the Support area of this site. That will at least familiarize you with the basic concepts to make things a bit easier.

I think this conversation is getting wrapped around the axle because it started off with a somewhat faulty idea of how to fix a problem. First off, it's important to understand the control over the signal you send out the XLR to the FOH is pretty much irrelevant given that the mixing board has complete control over how much signal it receives via the gain or trim knob on that channel. As long as you're sending a non-clipped signal in a form the board is set to receive, that signal can be gain staged at the board to an apporopriate signal level. And the typical signal most boards are prepared to use on XLR inputs is Mic level, although line level is also acceptable in some cases. So the easiest way to fix your problem is to configure your system so that the Master knob on the Helix only controls the 1/4" out, and the Master does NOT control the XLR out and the XLR output is set to Mic level. Then you can dial in whatever volume you want for your stage monitor and the signal being sent to the board will be a consistent Mic level signal that only has to be gain staged once during sound checks to the level the sound man wants. That is actually the most important purpose of soundchecks.and if your sound man doesn't understand how to do that you've got a LOT bigger problems awaiting you for that gig. As long as all of your presets/snapshots have been normalized to have the same relative volume and you're not adjusting the Master output for different levels on presets/snapshots, this configuration will work fine/

Your suggestion here means nothing. If you want it looked at then you need to post it in IdeaScale. Unless you want to just keep waiting, and waiting...and so forth ;)

My Helix is used 90% of the time live, and I do some occasional recording with it. In my case I saw absolutely no benefit to getting Native.

The Laney has an effects return so it's theoretically possible I suppose. Could be hard to match the two up volume-wise and tone-wise though given the difference in purpose and design.

I doubt a programmatic interface with HX Edit would be worth having given that HX Edit itself is just a simple visual interface to the embedded functionality in the Helix. In terms of a librarian utility, the presets themselves are stored in a standard data description format which could easily be manipulated directly. Short of that the only open source interface that would be worth having would the the programmatic interface that's used my HX Edit to interface with the Helix units. But as Shanecgriffo points out, that may not be something Line 6 would want to risk having out there for the possibility of it causing problems with Helix units due to poor programming or insufficient testing.

I think some of this placement is dependent a bit on the situation. In my situation our band consists of 7 people with 3 dedicated singers up front and the musicians behind them, so placing my monitor in front of me would allow the rest of the musicians to hear me, but wouldn't work so well for the front singers and the harmonica player. We don't tend to put our instruments through the vocal monitors unless it's a very large venue on a large stage. I think it also feels more natural to the front singers to have the sound all coming from a backline in our situation.

Your setup is almost identical to mine other than the fact I use a DXR12 rather than a 10. Like you I set my monitor behind me in a traditional backline fashion also set to monitor. Additionally I set the low cut on the speaker to 120Hz as that's what most subs are set to and there's really nothing of interest being produced there. I'm surprised more people don't do this type of backline setup as it truly makes a huge difference in giving you a much better blended sound with the rest of the band more so than having it setup in front of you. I'm also not surprised at all at your results. I've had my Helix setup for coming up on two years and have always had terrific results matching up FOH to my stage sound given the FOH system is a fairly modern PA. The only time I had a problem was when the FOH PA was a 20+ year old system using old style passive speakers/subs with a centralized amp and crossovers. It just wasn't precise enough to accurately represent the signal like my DXR12 produced. Fortunately, it was a smaller room so I could easily make up for the difference using my DXR12 behind me to fill in the lack of clarity and articulation coming from the antique PA. Just something to keep an eye on. I doubt you'll run into it. That was a "one off" type of situation and it's never happened again, but it's worth knowing about.

Check your USB settings in Helix global input and outputs. Sometimes the value for USB 1/2 gets munged up when upgrading. Mine did. Once I set it appropriately everything was fine.

Shouldn't be a surprise at all. The normal guitar input is set to instrument level so if the level of the bass is that high it's obviously going to overdrive the input and cause problems. Personally I see absolutely no advantage to high output instruments. They cause way more problems than any advantage they could possibly provide.

I think this really is an important point. I use both hlx cabs and IRs, but the HLX cabs have a long way to go to be able to capture the differences between a Celestion V30 and a Redback speaker, which can really be important for certain types of sounds. Also increasing distance is not the same as being off axis or further out from the cap at a close distance. IMO it's not that the helix cabs can't be made to sound decent, it's really the fact that they can't be adjusted as accurately as can a decent IR. Plus given some of the really good mic and speaker mixes provided as a single IR by many of the IR vendors and you have a LOT of capability that can be accessed conveniently.

In all likelihood you had the pedal pushed forward when you saved the preset. Saving the preset saves the current state of the volume pedal if it's set Per Preset. Personally I like this as I often have to change guitars so going to the next preset ensures it will be a quiet transition between guitars. In essence...it DOES work as expected if the user has read the documentation and has set things up the way they want them....OOPS....

Just to add a bit of clarification. Modeling is more than just modeling an amp. Just like in the real world the signal path created in the Helix consists of a modeled amp (such as a Peavey, or Marshall, or Fender Twin etc.), a modeled cabinet with speakers (such as a 4 x 12 Marshall cabinet with Celestion speakers, or a 2 x12 open back cab with Alnico speakers, etc.), as well as a modeled microphone and it's position on the cabinet to pick up the sound and send it to the PA or to the recording console (such a Shure SM57 or a Royer R-121 ribbon mic, etc). To many of us, it's ALL of these components together that allow us to have great flexibility in creating an accurate model of the sound we want. The reason a lot of people choose to use FRFR (Full Range Flat Response) speakers like an Alto 212 or a Yamaha DXR 12, or any number of others with the Helix is that they add very little coloration to the sound so the realistic representation of all of these components modeled amp -> modeled cab/IR -> modeled mic gets produced accurately. When using a standard traditional cabinet such as your Marshall 4x12, you're already providing the coloration of the cabinet and speakers for the modeled amp, so adding a modeled speaker and mic would simply add additional layers of coloration and wouldn't be an accurate representation of the real thing.

The underlined statement above is the key thing that struck me. Easier to use can have a lot of different definitions. One definition can be just plug it in and twist a knob or two and you're done. Another definition is being able to accomplish some fairly complex things easily. In the modeling world these two things would be different categories, and Helix would definitely be more in the latter category. Getting a sound you'll be satisfied with can have a lot of complexity to it in the modeling world. Not all modeling units allow you the freedom to access and change all of those parameters. High end units like the Helix provide you with the ability to design at a pretty intricate level to get precisely the sound you're looking for, and it does it with an interface that's miles beyond other modelers in this category in terms of making it easy to do it. That's very different from "plugin-and-play" easy, but far more powerful. There is no doubt you can get the precise sound you want with the Helix if you want to invest the time and effort to master all the elements. You can achieve a very satisfying sound pretty easily without a lot of effort. But it sounds like you may have had some history of being disappointed in the sound you've gotten from modelers. In cheaper categories that can happen. If it happens on the Helix that really falls into your hands because you will have all the tools you need to fix it if you learn to use them.