Hillman1312

I agree on the (r)Evolution pack. That pack offers also some mixes and I like in particular the Orange 412/ Mesa Boogie 412 combination for modern high gain. That said the two Marshall cabs I use a lot more for rock/ hardrock stuff (I don't play a lot of metal). If I recall correctly there's also a few free impulses available from Ownhammer which should work for high gain tones. 

That said, if you split the signal into two stock cabs and run each of them with a different mic and use 30-50% of early reflections on at least one of them you should be able to get a very good high gain tone. For example use the same cab and mic one with a R121 or 160 ribbon mic pulled back 3-5" and the other one with a 57 or 421 as close as possible. Use the A/B routing to go anywhere from very dark (ribbon) to bright and in-your-face (dynamic). Or if you want to add in more variables use two different stock cabinets.

True, the internal cabs will never sound the same as the impulses, but that's not what counts ... 

My problem is actually in the vast amount of possibilities .... I should spend more time practicing/ playing and less with goofing around with this great piece of gear ;-) 

1 hour ago, Paulzx said:

You're right, I use the SM57 because I'm most familiar with it, plus it always sounds brighter to me, but I want to try your recommendations of the different mics.

I like Jason's stuff and I have used his templates, but his patches sound like s**t with my gear, really terrible and thin. It's great when he demo's them but for some reason I can't get any of it to work my end. 

I've bought the British pack from Jason and on the Alto 308 it doesn't sound great. To my ears a bit to harsh, but using a bit of EQ helps.

As to the Alto, did you perhaps push the contour button? If you do it will push the highs and the lows which will be even be further emphasised once you increase the volume.

I found your presets very bright (in particular I did not like the IR) so you may need to lower the presence and treble on the amp further than what I did. But the presets I sent you sound ok over here (using a relatively cheap Harley Benton fusion pro with 2 humbuckers). And indeed making a blend with a ribbon mic will give you a much smoother sounding tone. But, if you prefer the SM57... it should work.

Played a bit with your presets; give this a try and let me know what you (or anyone else) think.

Arch test 1a.hlx Marshall test 1a.hlx

I use a similar speaker (Alto TS308) positioned on a stand so that there is no bass coupling. For sure there will be better speakers, no doubt about that, but for my needs (as a complete amateur) it does the job.

I use the Ownhammer IRs for a while now (bought their Evolution pack as well as their 412 MRBW GNR 25 multi-mic pack) and I agree that in particular for the 412 cabs there is much more "low end" compared to stock cabs. This may be the boominess or muddiness that you described. What I do to reduce this is to increase the low cut frequency in the IR block to 110 - 130 Hz depending on the IR file. (Please note that the low-cut in the IR block is more subtle than the low cut in an EQ block.) In addition I sometimes roll back the bass on the amp mode itself. For a more tight bottom end just add a tube screamer with gain set to between 0 and 1 and tone to your preference (I usually keep it at the standard settings though). You may need to reduce the gain on your amp a bit if you do this.

I've built (to my ears) decent rock tones this way using the 2204, 2204 mod and PlexiBrt models.

For heavier tones the Rectifier and the Revv models are my favourites.

Hope this helps ...

Thanks good to know! @gunpointmetal Is it correct that you can plug the guitar straight into the mixer? This is what I currently do with my (very) old Focusrite USB soundcard and it works good enough. Latency in Ableton running Helix Native as a plugin is about 8 ms; not bad for a USB 1.1 soundcard running on a Mac of 2009. But, time to upgrade as my old Mac is ready for retirement :-) and the newer Macs (or better newer OSX) no longer support this soundcard.

BTW, it is not my intention to use Native live, just for home practice and maybe some basic recording.  

Hello,

I'm considering to buy a Behringer XR18 mixer for the purpose of ... well mixing of course. Mainly for my band as we're considering to move to IEM, but when at home it would be nice if I could also use the XR as an audio interface with reasonable latency so I can use Helix native and keep my LT in it's case. 

Anyone tried this? What was the latency you could get? I'm not expecting super low values, but somewhere between 4 and 8 ms would be nice and will work for me. Can the XR deliver that ? 

(I'll be using a Mac should that play any role) 

Thanks !!

Not sure if this is actually something new but yesterday I noted that when working on a preset, if I touch a footswitch for about 2 or more seconds a menu option shows which asks me if I want to assign the effect to a switch. The strange thing is that I turned off this touch sensitivity in the global setting.

Is this normal behaviour? It is not critical nor disturbing, but just wondering.

I'm on the latest FW 2.91.

thx

Since 2.91 no issues so far .... let's hope it stays like that. I found that restarting the unit immediately after copying or moving a preset is helpful. Only after that I start tweaking it further. The "funny" thing is that sometimes presets will be "rebuilt" even though the copied/ moved preset was created in 2.91 and was put in an empty position. 

Anyway, so far so good, but I'm still very careful

All depends what you are looking for, but a nice start may be the PlexiBrt amp model. Depending on the sound you're after and which cab you selected you may start with all setting around 5. For more gain increase the drive and/or master and for a tighter low end and some more distortion add a tubescreamer with low gain settings. I'm using this amp together with an Ownhammer IR (Marshall 412) and it works great, but the 412 baked into the Helix should give you a  good sound as well. Use high/low cuts, EQ and mic type to taste.

Just gave this a quick try, but it seems that on a LT you cannot programme switches 1 and 7.

Cool feature and good tutorial, but I have yet to find the problem to which this new feature provides the solution. I'll keep playing with it though ... just because I can :-)

Looks like corrupted presets to me.

See this thread for some inspiration and ways to resolve the issue .

Thanks for explaining in detail what you did. 

I can confirm pretty much everything you have found and have run into most if not all of the same issues multiple times. I'm at the point where I just don't dare to make too many changes in my setlists and I'm constantly backing up my presets. 

I have also submitted a ticket on the matter but the response from Line 6 was essentially an explanation on how to get things working again once I had these corrupted presets (which basically is a reset of the device). So that response wasn't very helpful. Clearly something is wrong in the way HX Edit communicates with the Helix. I'm not a software engineer so leave it up to the experts to figure out what it exactly is. Just as a user (who doesn't do crazy stuff and/or has an exceptional setup) I need to be very careful in making presets and setlists. For me guitar playing is just a hobby so if I need to reset the device ... well so be it. That said, it shouldn't be like this of course.

Same/ very similar problem here. Might be that HX edit is the cause, don't know about that. But to be honest, this just should not happen. I've opened a ticket with the Line 6 support couple of days ago, but no response so far ...

What I found out is the following (I have no clue whether it is important or not, just wanted to share)

- Reset all setlists of the Helix

- Importing my backed up presets (using setlists import)

- Turn off Helix/ Turn on Helix --> Helix will rebuild the imported presets

- Turn off Helix

- Start my LT connected with USB to my Macbook 

- Open HX edit and copy a preset to a new location

- Closes HX edit and tuyrn off the LT

- Turn on the LT again 

-> At the location where I copied the preset Helix is "rebuilding" the preset. After that I can further change/edit using HX edit without issue (at least, until now).

This is pretty weird because all the presets (including the empty ones) were "rebuilt" after my reset and after the import.

Again, not sure whether this is of importance ... just sharing 

Having the same issue. As themetallikid said it does not take an extreme amount of time to get things working again, but it is pretty inconvenient and just seems to happen randomly. Yesterday I wanted to export a setlist for reason of backup. There were only a few presets in the setlist and for whatever reason all of a sudden presets well below (don't know the exact number, must be around 20 or so) started showing no characters, of only a few. I tried pasting presets into those slots but without any luck.

So, yes, the "fix" is pretty easy, but this simply should not happen. Quite a few people seem to suffer from the issue so this definitely should be on the "to-do"  list for the Line 6 folks working on the software. I'll open a ticket referring to this thread (and actually, there are quite a few others). See what happens ....

Guess that makes me one of the "unlucky few". My LT is currently in repair as the pedal has issues.

- it varies in "resistance" when moving and sometimes makes some noise as well

- the % response is inaccurate; only a slight variation may cause a huge increase/ decrease in the parameter it is controlling

I've owned the LT for little over a year and actually do not use the pedal very often. Just the occasional wah....

I'm hoping to get my repaired/ replaced unit back a.s.a.p. and will seriously consider buying an external pedal.

9 hours ago, Adam_F said:

I'm totally in favour of having a band meeting the discuss the problem, however the guitarist insists there is no problem to discuss - the only thing he has to say is that the PA is not supposed to handle the bass guitar and vocals at the same time so the root of the problem is the fact that I plugged the Helix into the mixer...

 

I don't have the best answer for you and agree with what has already been said before (i.e..... it depends), but it seems you also have a communication/co-operation issue going on in your band. Solving that problem with buying gear might not be the way forward ... 

Hello forum,

While my Helix LT is in repair (expression pedal) I started to use Helix Native to keep ... well hobbying.

I must say I'm very impressed. I have this software rnning on a Macbook pro from mid 2009 (!) and from within Ableton I can run with a very acceptable and for my ears inaudible latency of less than 5 ms (using a USB 1.1 Saffire 6 soundcard). Really amazing....but obviously I will not run any further plugings as the computer has a hard time keeping up :-) 

But anyway, while experimenting I thought about making Ableton change blocks/snaphsots/presets. Unfortunately I cannot get it to work.

I have an audio channel with only the Helix Native pluging and next to that a midi channel that sends (or well, i supposed to send) MIDI to the Helix channel.

For whatever reason the Helix native software does not "see" any midi coming in. I've setup a block to respond to CC4.

I must be overlooking something very simple, but I cannot figure out what goes wrong..... any suggestions?

Thanks to anyone who can help me out... Google has not been my friend until now ;-)

Thank you all for the suggestions. I'll experiment with the different suggestions. One observation I recently made is that to my ears there is quite a noticeable and clear transition where the FM effect kicks in. Indeed as mentioned the volume where that happens is high, but not so high that it is not bearable for at least a short amount of time. I'm making notes indeed of what I'm doing indeed.

Dear forum,

I've always felt the expression pedal on my LT a bit stiff, but didn't want to loosen the screw too much as that would result in the pedal moving to "wobbly" (sorry, hope you understand what I mean). Lately I noticed that the expression % (for whatever model) tends to move rather quickly even though physical pedal position didn't move that much at all. I also notice some difference in the resistance depending on the pedal position. 

So today I had a closer look and noted that the adjustment screw that you can see on the side of the pedal actually does not stay concentrical with the hole which it is positioned. Probably there's something wrong with the internal mechanics of the pedal, but I don't want to open the device just yet (I need to check if I'm still under guarantee).

Anyway, my question is whether this is a typical problem for the LT and it is seen more often; also wondering if there's an easy fix for it?

I love the device, but as I do need to pedal from time to time I want it to be reliable and reasonably accurate.... I don't want things to get even worse.

I'm attaching some pictures to show the " offset"  of the adjustment screw depending on the pedal position. Maybe not very clear, but hopefully of some help to whomever reads this post.

Thanks again !!

Here the screw is a bit more to the right compared to the position in the picture below

I have read several times in this forum that it is preferred to dial in presets intended for live use at "gig level" rather than "bedroom levels". I understood in the meantime this has to do with the Fletcher Munson effect, which actually I have experienced myself let's say "the hard way".

So I get the basic concept, but this actually brings another question to mind as to  what "gig level" actually means. For obvious reasons I cannot crank up my powered speaker (Alto TS 308) at levels that I would use live. It would be very painful and cause further damage to my ears and I'm pretty sure my family and neighbours will not have much appreciation for it either :-)

Any thoughts? How do you approach this?

Thanks and Merry Christmas !

On 11/30/2019 at 2:56 AM, Vang201 said:

So, the helix being a great unit with its versatility. Is known (to some) to be a solid piece of gear. 

I'm debating on purchasing one because of the "outdated" factor of technology. In a few years, a new modeler will come out from line 6, and then all the hype will be on that device. And the helix may eventually become "obsolete". I assume I would eventually have to try and sell the helix for the new product.  The cycle becomes never ending, right?

 

Where as an analog set up will always have some usage. Look at the old hw vox amps and older overdrive pedals being used to this day from a decade or 2 ago.

 

 

What are your thoughts on this? 

I apologize if this has already been covered previously. 

Funny how the initial post resulted in a discussion on MP3, CD and vinyl.

Anyway, to the OP: Just buy what you can afford and gives you the tones and controls you need. The Helix is insanely versatile and can give you an enormous amount of different tones. For me, apart from the tone, the interface, control and connectivity are equally or maybe even more important. You can create a usable tone quickly and adding effects wherever you want them in the signal chain is extremely easy. This is also a downside I have noted because making a decent starting tone sound awful is a risk that comes with the versatility of this device. As the Germans would say "Ubung macht den Meister", i.e. you need to put some practice into creating the tones and experiment.

Yes, you may want to wait for the next generation Helix, but nobody knows when that will come... and even once it is there it doesn't mean the Helix we know today will become obsolete straightaway. I still have a Pocket Pod that I use every now and then. No super tones, but for practising or even recording some ideas it will do the job. There's many people still using the POD(X) HD series. They still work and will continue to work.... until they break ;-) 

In my case I worry more about my playing than about my Helix (LT). But, if it would break, got lost or stolen, I would buy it again immediately and not settle with my pocket pod waiting for "the next generation".

Just my 2 cts.....

On 10/14/2019 at 12:09 AM, georgeseth said:

I have the same thing going on. I opened a Support Ticket on Thursday...still waiting for a solution.

Did you ever get a response to that from Line 6?

The cause of the strange behaviour is still unclear to me. But, I did not further investigate to get closer to figuring out what's going on. I have some ideas on how to get closer, but I prefer to spend my time playing the instrument ;-)

To avoid any issues I don't try out any customtone presets anymore and make all presets I need from scratch myself and in the same setlist (which is a very educational I must say). Thus, I try to avoid as much as possible copying from one setlist to another. Admitting this is not ideal and does give me some "limitations" it works and I didn't have issues ever since I started working like that. Even though I play in a coverband I only have a handful of song-specific presets. Most songs can be done with a few generic presets (with different snapshots or stomps), so that accordingly I have more than plenty of room in a single setlist to be able to play whatever I need to play. Indeed this means that songs may sometimes sound a bit less authentic, but I don't care as long as it sounds good and the actual played notes do resemble the notes of the covered song.

I use the Alto TS 308 for dialing in tones at home and as a monitor or speaker/amp during rehearsal and the occasional gig. Works good enough for me and has plenty of headroom. As was suggested in this thread, if you use the speaker as a monitor you can get some bass coupling, which you may find gives you that "boomy" sound. But, put it on a monitor or speaker stand and it works great. Indeed the vertical position is preferred as it gives you a slightly better idea of the sound. When used as a monitor the sound you hear seems to be a bit more dependent on your position as a player.

As far as the difference between the Alto and the HR, there is a Youtube video where someone compares the two. In all honesty I could not hear a major difference between the two (if at all). Might be my ears though ..... 

Now, the 12" version may (I have never tried....) move a bit more air compared to the 8" which may give you a more amp feeling when playing. I don't think however that sonically there will be a major difference. In that respect I owned a Behringer KXD 12 for some time and that speaker really looked like an amp and actually also gave a bit that "amp in the room" feeling. 

In the end, portability made me buy the Alto. It is easy to handle, very light and seems very well built.

Just try them all out and see what fits you best ...

On 10/16/2019 at 1:06 AM, andymguitar said:

I'm currently using a Behringer eurolive b110d with my LT. It's fine, but I'm pretty sure there are better options!

 

Any recommendations for alternatives? I can't afford a powercab at present unfortunately, does anyone use headrush monitors (or other.) on here?

Using an Alto TS308, which is pretty much similar if not identical as the 8" Headrush. Plenty of volume and a nice form factor (small, light !). 

Placement is an issue; I 've tried several positions at home and find it works best in vertical position at +/- ears height. As a monitor you get a loss of bass coupling. Of course that can be corrected with the Global EQ if desired, but I'd rather just "plug and play". Also take into account you need some distance to get the best idea of what the sound is like. If you're too close it may sound harsh compared to when you are further away. I think this goes for all PA speakers.

On the "FRFR"; that's just a word invented by Headrush. Nothing wrong with that, but it shouldn't be confused with an indication of quality or sound. No speaker will sound "flat" over the "full range". Just try several and you will find the one that works best (depending on how much money you have to spend of course). I'm very happy with the Alto although dialing in a preset remains tough because I can only assume that what comes out of the Alto will sound more or less the same as on other PA speakers. And that's the issue here .... no PA speaker is the same, so a preset dialed in on one speaker will sound slightly different on another.... and it may even sound different when listened to at different volumes and at different angles vs the speaker...... Too many variables to worry about actually. I just prefer to play :-)