Line6Adrian

I pretty much just used one sound with a boost pedal to drive it harder and my volume knob to clean it up. I used this amp with mainly one guitar that had single coil pickups. I added the bright switches when I got a Revstar with humbuckers. Thanks for the love! Cheers! Ben

Hi all. Your speculations are all generally correct. The first Helix models were done over fife years ago. When we did those early models, my cohort and I were just turned loose to make accurate models without regard to DSP usage. Those became Helix models once the firmware and DSP interface was finalized. We captured a bunch of data such as amplitude, frequency, wave shape, sag, duty cycle, duty cycle shifts, bias excursion, etc. We would try to match all of these. Of course, we might have gotten good matches in five of the categories, but one was way off. when we'd go to match that aspect that was off, we could get it closer, but other aspects would become less accurate. Then we listen and decided how to balance the modeling parameters so that we get a very accurate match that might not be PERFECT in the data, but sounds dead on to our ears. As time went on, we realized which aspects of the data capture and matching were most important to getting an model that matched sonically and felt good to play. We learned where the "on paper" data was most important and where to ignore the "on paper" data in favor of sound and finger response. I'm generally pretty open with how we do the modeling, but in this case I'm not going to write about which technical details make the most difference when modeling. So yeah, we got better with experience. We got better with trial and error. We got better by realizing we needed new DSP processing abilities and having our DSP programmers adjust the DSP code on our modeling "blocks. The first amps aren't bad by any stretch, but we were leaning very far towards absolute accuracy "on paper". Since then we've pulled back a but and with sacrifice a bit of that accuracy for a more realistic feel and experience. Cheers! Ben Adrian Line 6 Lead Sound Designer & Sound Design Manager "On Paper" is in quotes because we never actually put anything on paper. It all captures and matched with Audio Precision test equipment as well as other, in-house software. No need to bring dead trees into this process :)