gunpointmetal

These are probably the two most important factors for live performance, for me anyways. That first bold section is where a lot guys tend to fall off with the modelers because they really, really like the idea of showing up with just a Helix backpack and 30# PA speaker, but they fail to grasp that that type of setup is never going to FEEL like a 100W tube head into a 4x12, no matter how good your IR is, how you adjust settings, etc. I've seen that get really frustrating online and IRL for people. I've seen guys just about have a meltdown because they were asked to turn their tube amp/dual 4x12 rig down in a club that a 2x12 would get obnoxiously loud in. I write music for myself, I perform music for an audience. If the audience isn't having an enjoyable time because I need to be peeling paint with a full stack to play guitar "properly", I should just stay in the basement.

The only way to make Helix sound like a guitar amp and a guitar cab is to use a guitar cab. (big period) Guitar cabs are terrible amplification devices, but they work for the voice of the guitar and they're what most people are used to hearing/feeling when they play. The PowerCab gets closer because of the cabinet design and the coaxial driver, but if you want the experience of playing through a 4x12, you gotta play through a 4x12. If you want the SOUND of a 4x12 mic'd properly in a high-end studio coming back to you through monitors, that's what the Helix is doing through an FRFR/PA system. Even with far-field IRs it's not gonna sound/feel the same. There have literally been thousands of threads about this on the internet since modelers have been a thing, and it all comes down to playback system. If you're a "live and loud" player a FRFR system probably won't satiate your desires when you're playing. I grew up practicing in headphones with lollipop little Zoom and Boss modelers, and like a controlled stage, and I LOOOOOOOVE my in-ears, so the whole "4x12 mic'ed up in another room" sound works perfectly for me, but I totally understand why it doesn't for some people and while they always feel like something is missing.

In Modeler land that's the equivalent of turning an amp on with whatever settings it is already on at a music store through a no-name cab and then wondering why it doesn't sound great, lol. I appreciate a lot of the knowledge available on the internet, but sometimes people need to admit when they're making assumptions of speaking outside of their knowledge base. The accurate thing would have been "We weren't really sure what we were doing and we only had a few minutes to do it. When we hooked it up and solo'd it we thought it sounded the same, but since it got buried in the mix with band we must have missed something."

I've heard just as many high-end traditional rigs from Mesa/Marshall/ENGL sound AWFUL as I have heard digital rigs sound awful. IME playing lots of shows and seeing lots of shows, more people make their amp/cab rigs sound like lollipop than people with digital rigs.

I think its fine here, it became this whole 25 page thing on pyschoacoustics and got pretty hilarious. I don't comment over there anymore after a certain speaker designer with no social skills reported literally every post I made as inappropriate for calling him out on a being a condescending douche to everyone. Being a "professional" musician in now way qualifies anyone as an authority on tone. I know a few guys around here that make their living playing music and they definitely don't have what I would consider to be a good sound.

OMG did this thread over on TGP turn into a sh!tshow, lol.

I think it's entirely a player/personal thing. I HATED real amps when I started gigging because guitar cabs are not, for most part, very well designed speaker boxes. They're roughly the right size to hold an arbitrary number of high-sensitivity drivers that push the main fundamental frequencies of the instrument (again, for the most part) but they literally sound different in every room, they sound "bad" right up next to them if the sound is "good" in playing position a lot of times, and I was pretty much fed up to my eyeballs with buying gear/amps/EQs/distortion pedals/different speakers and spending time by myself in a rehearsal space dialing things in to sound really good to me (standing at my pedalboard) only to take it to play a room with poor treatment and have my big, full, rich, tone sound boxy, or small, or flubby, etc because the stage was hollow, or the floor was really reflective, or the ceiling was untreated, or someone was leaving the doors open etc, etc, etc. I still loved playing, but there was always a tonal disconnect between what I would dial in at rehearsal versus what I would get at most gigs. I finally went FRFR when I got a brand-spanking new HD500 (my fourth modeler after using Boss GT-6/8/10) and it was a revelation! My guitar tone was hitting me in the ears with the sound I was expecting to hear, and due to the nature of the FRFR speaker, it was always really close to what I was used to hearing at rehearsal no matter where we went. OTOH, the bass player in one of my bands is quite an accomplished guitarist (he played/toured with Sarah Longfield in the Fine Constant for years) and though he likes MY sound using FRFR, he doesn't like to play that way. But we'll hook the Helix up to his Dual Rectifier FX Input and his Orange 2x12 and he'll get lost for a long time in the lush tones available to him that way. So for my experience, amplification/reproduction is the most important part of the equation for most people, even if they don't realize it. The Helix Floor/LT are both definitely performance-oriented devices, IMO.

You could do it either way. I would probably go with the "custom preset" route with his board plugged into the aux input.

I think you'd be better served just getting a small digital mixer.

If they're on that kind of board, the room isn't going to be very big and there's hardly a need for anything outside of your own amplification anyways. If a place is that small/running that cheap of gear, the room isn't gonna be big enough to necessitate a powered on mic on anything onstage anyways. My redundancy in those situations is our IEM rack with an XR18 in it (a $450 digital mixer with separate phantom power on every channel) and we'll just go through that and send a master two-channel to the house board/amps/speakers because so far, 100% of the time, if that's the PA situation, we're gonna be better served doing our own mix anyways.

I can't think of a time where I've played somewhere that had a board that had "all or nothing" phantom power that I would have been plugging in to FOH anyways. That's not a real a venue, and that's not a real board. If you're playing basements/garages/backyards, just bring your own amplification anyways. I do carry a DI (actually two, one stereo, one mono) everywhere I go, but I've never actually needed it for the Helix. It's usually the other band's bass player, or the sound guy didn't know that the first band had six keyboards he wants to run to the board separately instead of having his own mixer like a normal person.

If your levels are consistent and not clipping that's all that really matters. I also set the big knob to only control the 1/4" outs that I use for my stage monitors. IEM and FOH each get an XLR that stays at a consistent level regardless of my speaker level on stage and so far everything works as expected.

Well, if he says your studio monitors "suck" its because he doesn't like whats coming out of them, lol. I think its going to come down to either sharing presets, or setting aside time outside of rehearsal for him to bring his guitars and Helix to you so you can both hook up to your mixer and dial in tones together. Is it possible the device is a little overwhelming for him and he's too proud to explain that aspect of the issue. I have a bass player who is "pedal guy" but he's always eyeballing my Helix. He acquired a Boss GT-6B and the thing was just waaaaay too complicated for him. He was always fiddling with levels and adjustments even after multiple explanations of how these things save a preset and it sounds the same every time you pull it up. The options were too much to resist even though he wasn't very sure what he was doing, but also uninterested in the RTFM approach, as that would imply some level of incompetence on his part. He's back to his little pedalboard with a B7KUltra at the end that we DI to our IEMs and things are much better now.

That's kind of what I was figuring since you're trying to get more gain out of it. Is it possible that something is wired out of phase (I don't know if those pickups can be split) in the guitar. Those tones are sort of reminiscent of combining two single coils in strat.

It's hard to say since I don't have the best monitoring, but it kinda sounds like what I would expect from having both pickups selected and the volume/tone rolled back a little. The PV should be crunchier with humbuckers.

@Maidlife when you record via USB, what is your DRY guitar track peaking/metering at if you record off of USB 7 or 8? If NONE of the amps are breaking up or you have to really push the gain on models like Panama/Angel/Placater something is up with your input signal. Getting distortion out of the amp models has nothing to do with your monitoring system, so that's not an issue. The only things I can think of are that something is wrong with your pickups, your cable, or the physical input on the Helix. You're not accidentally using a speaker cable, or one of those cheap little 5' instrument cables that comes in a "starter pack" or anything? I'm not trying to be condescending, I just know when I'm having an obvious problem it usually comes down to me skipping over something simple and over-thinking my troubleshooting.

So when is this thing gonna come out? Does Line 6 just not like providing amplification for guys who play in loud-lollipop bands in places with questionable sound reinforcement?

Asio4All is a pretend ASIO driver to make non-ASIO devices work with ASIO stuff. Use the Helix driver. If it still doesn’t get better you’re probably having a device or driver conflict.

This is why so many beginners playing heavy stuff aren’t happy with their guitar tones. They think stuff like Meshuggah or Periphery is all guitar tone and half of what they’re hearing is bass.

Just out of curiosity, what did you have to do to fine-tune them? I selected the preset for my positions (pole and floor) and they were pretty much giving me a louder, slightly beefier version of my studio monitor tones. Wondering if I'm missing anything that might make them even better.

If it's just one speaker and only on a certain note, you probably have a loose screw holding either the control plate or a driver in place and it just so happens that that particular note matches the resonance of the cabinet enough to cause it to rattle. I can't imagine how in this instance it would be with the Helix/mixer/cables. If they're under warranty get someone to look at it. If not just tighten every visible screw and if it doesn't go away open it up and tighten all the screws/check for damaged anchors inside. We recently had to do this with an older Behringer Eurolive powered speaker at our rehearsal spot. Making the weirdest rattle/buzz with anything below the A string. Opened up the control panel and the XLR pass-through output jack had vibrated the solder off the board (direct-mounted to the board) and the pins were vibrating back and forth on the broken solder.

Yeah, if you're gonna use toobz and cabs live, all of the cab modeling is unnecessary anyways. I do the self-mixed IEM rig with computer back tracks/samples for both of my bands, so going FRFR and DI eliminates a couple of cables, a microphone, speeds up our set-up/tear-down, and provides me with an ultra-consistent monitoring situation. I'm also usually playing multi-band bills with 30-40 minute set times, so the faster I can get on stage and start rocking and the faster I can get off stage the better. I really only miss the big cabs when I'm spacing out by myself at the rehearsal spot.

Depends on the tones/preamp, but in the real world there are lots of guys getting good tones running a preamp into a real amp in a similar fashion, but its usually a dirt preamp into a clean preamp. That's part of the fun of the digital rig; you're not gonna blow up anything doing it "wrong" in the signal chain. Now I'm thinking about a clean preamp as a "boost" into a dirty preamp.... hmmm

I mean L6 did kind of address this by releasing their own FREE IRs, which are actually quite good, if a little to hi-fi for some people. The lack of mic movement is kind of a glaring defect in cabinet modeling, I think. I personally would have a preferred an Edge-Center adjustment over a Distance adjustment right out of the gate. If they could manage BOTH on the stock cabs, I probably wouldn't need IRs (at least for live playing), but I seem to remember a couple of earlier generation modelers with those adjustments and those cabs were straight trash.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks some of these classic rock "giants" were just OK and in the right place at the right time.