billlorentzen

Glad to hear it's sounding great for you. As to the auto wah, if it's the same as in the Pod HD, it's a Mutron, which is nice on bass, but never sounded good on guitar - I had one back in the day. The Mutron was a poor choice for auto wah, and I've been asking L6 for years to model something that sounds good.

Yes, please: user-selectable!

You may have some unexpected results from changing the delay lengths while holding a note or when delays are stil repeating. On my 500, it causes pitch changes as you sweep the pedal. It should be fine if you make the changes during a quiet moment.

Thanks guys.

I've played a custom super strat with EMG SAs for most of my rock and pop work for decades, and love their versatility and tone. Has anyone successfully installed these in a 69? Is there any room for a 9V battery?

The EX1 is compatible, but as a disappointed owner of one, I can tell you it is not a quality unit. It's quite inaccurate; you can rock it back and it may or may not go to zero. The design is really poor. It is cheap though. I would like to see L6 offer a quality pedal to go with their excellent modelers.

I'm glad you can pull it off, but when I add in compressors, gate, delay, verb and modulation I run out of dilithium crystals.

I hear ya. Sometimes the dyna comp might be the ticket - or even the old Orange Squeezer!

I don't know - I was listening to some Pat Metheny and it occurred to me it could do more than it does. I realize it's not going to sound like a trumpet, but maybe instruments that have a somewhat similar decay to guitar, such as steel drum, or other mallet sounds, possibly even electric pianos, pianos or clavinet. Who knows? Maybe just some new sounds that are cool.

I know the variax is not a synthesizer, per se, however it does synthesize sounds. Why not go into some new sound shaping directions - if it can make a guitar sound like a Coral Sitar, aren't there other unique voices it could generate with some creative modeling or model designing?

Wow, that sounds absolutely ideal for the way I lay out my patches. For speed and versatility in performance, I always have two sounds on each patch - a rhythm and a lead - which I toggle between with the control pedal. If there is adequate horsepower, I would often prefer to use two different amps for the sounds (something I can't really pull off with my 500).

Somebody finally gets me! (sob)

My patches all feature two sounds: a lower volume rhythm sound and a higher lead sound. I use the control pedal to rock between those sounds. Often they go from clean or cleaner to more distorted. Most of the time I can only get away with one amp, although in many cases I would prefer two different amps, one for each sound. In order to create the two sounds with one amp, I often need two fx, such as compressors, one before and one after amp to gain stage the sounds. The final reason is that I would like to have more different fx options available on a patch - a chorus, an auto wah, a tremolo, different delays, etc. Of course I can just have different versions of the same patch, that have different fx on them, but on the gig, during a performance (I work as a solo a lot) I don't like scrolling up and down to get to the various patches I need.

Im pretty sure one of them the Distortion +. But do you really like that thing? I had one of the originals back in the day and was overjoyed to finally get really great distortion when I got my first Boogie Mark 3. Some years ago I was about to throw out my D+ and Dynamic Comp, but on a whim, put them up on eBay and got $100 each for them! After I switched to a dbx 160x rack compressor there was no going back to those sucky MXR units for me. This is why I started this thread: those old units were popular when they came out because that's all there was, but they really don't compare to the state of the art stuff out today. So why model them? I say model only the very best.

I will definitely be upgrading my 500, but I don't know yet whether it will be to Helix, Axe8 or possibly Kemper. Not only do I want better sounds, but I need more power (also my 500 is getting kind of tired from steady gigging). The more I use the 500 and explore potentials of all-in-the-box sound creation, the more processing power I want. I keep hitting ceilings on DSP. In some cases, more power would just be a convenience, so I don't have to change patches to have a particular effect on a stock sound. In other cases, I would like to be able to use two different amps (one for the clean sound, one for the dirty), which I could pedal between). I also am pretty stoked about using 3 control pedals! But for $1500, it's going to have to beat all the competition!

I love gold hardware! Chrome doesn't go with my gold George Benson Playboy Bunny medallion!

One more thing I would appreciate is some slight optimization of some of the models. For example, the Divided by 13, which is one of my favorites, could use more clean headroom. I pretty much have to use additional gain staging fx before and after it to get a clean enough sound. I wouldn't want to change the tone, just make it a little more versatile. For the sticklers, perhaps they could make two versions - a straight copy, and an optimized one. On some of the older Marshalls, they could do the opposite - give them a hot-rodded front end.

I agree! One of the things I noticed immediately with the original pod 1.0 was that it could do something no other amp I had used could do (and I have owned some very high end amps). It could articulate the individual notes in a chord more clearly, even while fairly heavily distorted. I'd like to see some really original amp sounds developed. When digital recording was first introduced, some engineers (myself included) who had worked for years trying to get around the limitations of tape were pretty excited - no more hiss, generation loss, biasing, tape degeneration, etc. Of course, at first there were some shortcomings with the converters, but in the long run, I don't think many engineers would really want to go back to the old days.

I like that idea!

I realize "very best" is very subjective, but I'd like to see the Helix get away from "iconic" and big brand names and start adding the most innovative and best in each category. For example, while the Boss Chorus was ubiquitous, the TC Electronic Stereo Chorus was a much better sounding unit - once you heard it you knew. There are prolly even better units out today. I want them in the Helix. The Mutron autowah is another misstep IMHO. Way better units for guitar are available and it's a struggle to get a useful sound with the Mutron. And enough with Fenders, Marshalls and Voxs! New amps do what they did, only better. I want more amps like the Divided by 13 and Dr Z (my two favs), which are going in new directions and/or improving on the sounds of the vintage units. Moving forward, I'd like to see the Helix move into the boutique, high end products, and away from the run of the mill Guitar Center stuff. OK, flame on!

I use the control pedal, increasing various parameters as it sweeps forward. Here's a useful process: 1. Create and perfect a patch with your desired rhythm sound. 2. Create and perfect a patch with your desired lead sound. 3. Use those tones to set all the parameters of the sweep of your control pedal from one to the other. This process makes it simple when setting the ranges of your various pedals, amp tone controls etc. Another trick I use is to place a pan pedal in front of two separate paths, one empty or with a compressor and the other with a distortion pedal. Then place the amp after the mix section. As you sweep the pedal forward, you are adding in more of the path with the distortion pedal and decreasing the clean path.

On the issue with the control pedal toe switch, mine was always very hard to engage as well. I'm not a big wah wah guy, but after a few years, it developed a problem where when I engaged the wah the whole unit would stop outputting signal, even including the mini plug input, until I disengaged the pedal. I'm pretty sure this is from pressure and flexing the unit. Anyway, I pulled out my old Cry Baby and stopped using the toe switch.

I think you're right. Those forms have never worked right for me either.

Nice vid. Really good tones. I love the sound of those Marshall 2x12s. I used to have a couple of them and ran them stereo with a Boogie preamp and stereo power amp. Nice cushy feel to them.

Another possible solution, that might or might not fit your needs is to use it as a control pedal on the master volume of the amp instead of as a volume pedal. You will get your audio taper that way. You may need to also control the drive, to get a similar effect as that achieved with a vol pedal before the amp. You could also try it on a compressor's volume. I almost never use it as a volume pedal, but instead as I suggested above.