hal3001

Any luck?

I just saw the end of your post about being able to listen to YouTube. On a Mac, (sorry can’t help on windows) your system default sound card has nothing to do with Pro Tools. You generally specify your output device using Setting -> Sound -> Output tab. Sounds like this is configured correctly for using the helix as your system audio device. Again, the problem is this has no control over Pro Tools. For Pro Tools, you need to select the audio device specifically under Setup -> Playback Engine.

I can give you more details when I’m at my computer but basically setting it up in PT is a three step process. 1. Under setup -> playback engine, make sure you’ve chosen the helix. I usually set the buffer all the way up here since you will be monitoring the helix directly so latency won’t affect you. 2. In setup -> I/O, you will may need to default the input, output, and bus pages. Simply go to each tab and click default 3. Make sure you’ve created an audio track in either mono or stereo and that you have I/O shown for each track. I’ll have to double check but make sure either inoutv1 or 1/2 are selected. You can also record the dry signal if you want on channel 7/8. 4. Record enable the traffic and you should see signal. This is where I would normally mute the track so you aren’t hearing it twice. I’ve had weird results in PT with low latency monitoring enabled and still hearing the track when recording do I just do both now.

I used a Helix with a pair of Mission pedals on a Pedaltrain Classic Pro for about a year and had no problems with viewing or usage angle. If you did have issues, you could always put the Helix itself on a couple of risers and leave the pedals on the board as normal but I never saw a need to do it. At one point I did put the Helix on a riser because I moved it to the back and had a couple of other pedals in front and didn't have any issues either.

I managed to get it all sorted. I borrowed an HD500 and after a few hours of fighting to get the drivers installed on High Sierra, it still failed. After that, I fired up a Windows 7 VM and was able to install everything I needed and it restored the first time.

@soundog thank you for the offer. For some reason I wasn't receiving notifications for this thread and didn't think to look back. I actually do have a friend with an old HD500 that I could borrow. I didn't realize that you could use it for that. I even owned an HD500X and Variax and just used the VDI/USB adapter. I'll give that a shot and see where I get and I may take you up on the offer.

Not the output bit depth of the interface, the input bit depth. I plugged in a real USB cable and it only has one input and no output (as expected) and it’s hard set at 44.1, 16-bit. Also, thank you for this btw. I’ve been a Rocksmith player since it’s launch and have been wanting something like this since the initial OSX release and it never occured to me that it was just looking for that audio device name.

My guess is that it's because the actual Rocksmith cable is set to 44.1, 16-bit, and I can't find a way to change the Helix from 24-bit to 16-bit mode. I'm assuming your old Scarlett supports both?

I recently found a Variax 700 Acoustic and unfortunately the firmware update failed in the middle of the update using a Helix/VDI cable and I can’t get an update to complete and now it’s partially bricked. I’m pretty sure I can fix it with the original USB to VDI adapter but would really prefer to not spend 75 on one if it’s not going to work so I was wondering if there was anyone in my area that has one who would be willing to meet me for 15 minutes and let me use their adapter to get the firmware updated.

Latency from an interface is usually associated with the buffer size setting specified for the interface (usually in the DAW). If you are going to be monitoring your guitar through the DAW, make sure it's as low as you can get without artifacts. I generally suggest against monitoring through the DAW with the Helix or any other interface that can route audio on it's own. If you've selected the Helix as your input and output interface (some DAWs won't let you choose a different interface), you can just disable input monitoring on an armed audio track that you are trying to record so that you are only hearing the guitar directly from the Helix and just play the other tracks as normal. Again, you don't have to do it his way and can just set your buffer settings as low as possible but make sure you aren't monitoring both the Helix and the Helix routed through the DAW.

Check out the templates that come with the Helix. I believe it's the last page of presets in the editor. There is an example of doing just that. I've done two guitars and microphone before but you are very limited to the effects and cabs that can be used. It definitely does work. You also didn't mention which Helix you have. I've done it with the helix rack and 2x G90s. Both G90s going into individual returns and the microphone in the XLR.

So, I've had a Helix Rack and floor controller for quite a while now and I love it but one giant pain in the butt is having so many cables going back and forth between the rack unit and my pedalboard. My current set up uses a BeatBuddy, Infinity Looper, ProCo Rat, Helix Control, ProD2 DI, and two mission pedals. I ended up running 2x MIDI cables, 3x TS cables, and power from the rack to the board, then two XLRs from the DI to mixing board. It's just a bit too much to deal with when moving everything so I think I'm just going to move from a rack to the floor unit where I can just run everything at the board and either run just one XLR out from the helix or keep my DI set up. So after all that, my actual question is other than not having wordclock in (which I use for recording but I can live without it) is there anything else that isn't on the floor that is on the rack or any other gotchas that I might be over looking? My wiring setup would probably be the same. Send/Return 1 <-> ProCo Rat (or another other pre amp pedals), TS main left -> Infinity Looper -> DI -> Mixer, and BeatBuddy -> DI -> Mixer. I can't see any reason why that wouldn't work. I may end up bringing the looper and BeatBuddy in via send/returns and just sending the whole thing out XLR but we will see. The beatbuddy was introducing a lot of noise when trying this with the 15ft cables rack->board->rack. Also, I was thinking about using a G70 with this setup. I assume there isn't anything different than using the G90?

I kind of solved my own problem today. Instead of plugging into the Helix and sending my wet and dry signal out SPDIF, I realized I could just up a hardware insert in Pro Tools on the SPDIF interfaces then just plug into either my HiZ on my Apollo or my ISA 428 and then use my Helix Rack as a standard insert. It worked really, really well.

Just a quick question. I was just wondering if there was a quick way (option somewhere) to send a dry signal out one channel of the SPDIF connection? I usually just create a split and have that run directly to the outputs with the digital outs selected then record the left/right signals separately which works fine if I've set up the patch myself but a lot of presets have pretty much every available path in use. I run SPDIF from the Helix Rack into my Apollo 8 and would like to keep things digital if possible. I know I can run the dry out into an input on the interface but I really don't like all that conversion.

Yeah, that's pretty much the way I had to start looking at it as well.