TYancy

I bought a demo HD500X. It had four sections for banks of standard patches. After monkeying around and getting lost, I reset it to factory spec and ended up with three sections of standard patch banks and one section for Variax patches. How do I get rid of the Variax section and use it for a fourth section of standard patches?

When I first started working with the HD500x I had three user banks. I was having a tough time figuring out the unit and got lost. (Unlike the Helix, there is no home button.) After a period of time I gave up and did a reset. When I did, rather than having 3 user banks I had a Variax bank and two user banks. I don't have a Variax. How do I get rid of this and get back to having three user banks? Thanks.

It depends on the looper, as well. The Ditto X4, for example, can store loops that can be played later, as well as saving them to your computer as AIFF and WAV. If you have the looper after the FX and preamp, you can record a loop to the device with a certain FX and Amp setting - such as clean with some echo for a backing sequence - and save it to the device, then change the FX and amp so something with an edgy lead tone and play live with the edgy guitar on top of the clean loop.

I know where you can get a used Sikorsky CH-54 for transporting this.

Looks fragile, but the price is excellent. It might be worth taking to a luggage shop and having them add a removable shoulder strap.

All I know is that is must be expensive. It's a silver poodle.

Can the blinking tap light be turned off, or the brightness greatly reduced? It is hugely distracting and in my corner of the universe a blinking red light either means that we've lost warp containment, that the Borg are attacking, or to hide your girlfriend because your mom is heading for the stairs. If there is a option to toggle this feature off and on that would be great. (I've seen this issue on forums for other Line 6 devices, with responses asking why one would want to. We know what the blinking is for and that's why a toggle would be nice.)

I will create a new patch, give it a name, build it exactly as I want, then hit the save button, but the patch reverts to the empty default setting. I can hunch over the Helix, create it and save it and the Editor accepts the new patch. Does anyone have any idea why this is happening or how to fix it? Frankly, it's a lot easier to create patches on the computer and you don't have to put the Helix on the desk and then hunch and hold your forearms up in the air while trying not to touch the touch-sensitive foot switches.

Unfortunately, I may only be able to buy one Helix, but my enthusiasm is such that I immediately began planning supplemental purchases - a proper road case, a pair of EP3s, which meant a larger road case, cables, cable storage, an ever-expanding herd of speakers and monitors, plus systems for connecting everything but my grandmother's pet poodle. And this was within one day of unboxing. And this was followed by thoughts of what I could put on eBay, whether my wife could ask for a raise at work, and how much I could get for a used poodle.

I guess I am thinking about context more than anything else. I've been a regularly published reviewer and tech columnist - using a pseudonym - for some 15 years, including software that would retail at up to $8K a pop. The best documentation I ever saw was a pair of manuals for Macromedia Director (the 800 pound gorilla cousin of Flash). One manual was pretty much like the Helix manual - how to set this and that. The second manual for Director was for the scripting language, but it went beyond the what and how, and provided a lot of support for the why; providing the context in the form of a number of real-world examples of how to use the script to do various things and the reasons why you would want do this. Many people are strongly left-brained, including classical musicians, as well as most programmers and system engineers, but most non-classical musicians tend to be very right-brained and can be very adventurous in their thinking. With the right kind of information and with a thorough mastery of context within complex systems, many among the right-brained will find that they can take things far beyond what the designers intended. For people such as this, the context is the thing that turns on the lights and makes it possible to bring out the best in themselves and in the tools they use. Will Line 6 move a half million Helixes? Sounds great to me. If the sales figures for this device were to hit such a level that it would pay for the time and effort required, it might be very well worth it to produce such a supplementary guide.

The Helix manual contains some information about receiving MIDI plus the list of CCs and whatever. What it does not cover is how to program the Helix to set up MIDI for controlling other devices. There are all sorts of features and controls that are not even mentioned in the manual. People who are into MIDI in a very big way are used to building elaborate and complex systems that, once the fiddly work is done, are easy to use and make a huge impression on the audience. We are eager to incorporate the Helix in to our setups - taking it from being a cool and fancy FX device to the level of being a key part of the MIDI system. I saw a YouTube video about how use the Helix to switch channels in a lunchbox amp, but I haven't found much more. If there is someone out there (preferably a techie from Line 6) who could put together a couple of pages on this, I am certain that most of us could make good use of it and would be most appreciative.

We guitarists have grown up with stomp boxes and FX of various types. The oldest among us remember the day when reverb and tremolo were the only thing available. The idea of overdriving an amp was not even dreamed of (I'm admitting my age). When Electric Ladyland came out people had simply never heard sounds like that. Period. No modulation or time distortion. We had absolutely no concept of how they heck they did this. Frankly, for rock musicians at the time the world stopped on a dime. Holy ___! What was that? One can't describe the experience of turning out the lights, stretching out between the stereo speakers and listening for the very first time to And the Gods Made Love - the manual flanging and the Echoplex - nobody had any idea how they did this. After Woodstock I heard about the UniVibe and got one, repairing it over and over until it died. Later, when the very first Tascam Portastudio came out (another stunning advance) I figured out how to gently tweak the speed up and down when recording a second track to achieve the flanging and it was mind-blowing (manually hitting the phase right on a cymbal hit was like a drug). I recorded a track with a plastic recorder (flute), manually bending notes by rolling the finger tips. Flanging that track beat the pants off of the flute part on If Six Was Nine (young musicians need to hear that song). No stomp box could duplicate that. But now with modern gear such as Helix you can time-mod a loop and play on top of it to get the effect live without a stomp box simulation. As for overdrive, in the early 80's I had my 50W Marshall half-stack modded with a master in order to create overdrive at club volumes and when I received my Boogie MkII it was truly fantastic. Today we are used to all this stuff and I would imagine that there are around 500 stomp boxes to choose from. Helix, its predecessors, and its competitors can offer a ton of stomp FX in a single package, plus modeling, which has redefined the world of live and recorded music. Frankly, the idea of paying $1,500 for such a great device is a bargain. A few years back I saw a posting looking for a guitarist that stated that the applicant "must have a real amp". It sounded funny at the time, but that was when I thought that making two trips to haul my gear to a rehearsal was normal. Now, as long as you have a Helix and a FRFR that can push some air, that's all that really matters. It makes me think that I could make a mint by creating a fake Marshall half-stack that weighs 20 pounds and has a shelf for mounting a FRFR inside. I apologize for using a forum for airing such thoughts, but young musicians are used to being in a world of great FX and in which guitarists didn't grow up learning the licks from Gimme Shelter and thinking they were guitar heroes, but learning the licks of Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. (There are way too many gunslingers these days and too few artists.) Perhaps the budding guitar gods of today might not realize that musicians born before 1957 were here when there was not anything whatsoever orbiting the earth but the moon, when the coolest gizmo in town was a 2.5 inch square portable AM radio with a wrist strap, and where the only sound you could get from an amp was a clean one with no breakup whatsoever. The Helix, along with its competitors, is a godsend and it's nice to be living in a world where older musicians do not have to retire simply because their backs are shot from years of loading and unloading a a couple of hundred pounds of gear three to five times a week. (The Boogie combo was heavy enough, not to mention the Marshall, plus my rack, Strat and Paul.) A Helix, a L3t and a guitar case will do it for me, all on one lightweight hand truck – plus it keeps me in the game.

I don't know how often Line 6 folk peruse the forums, but there are other ways to promote the addition of MIDI sync, such as opening a support ticket and asking how to sync via MIDI (to put this within the purvey of technical support) and if it can't be done, ask when will this be added.

Yes, MIDI sync is a must-have feature. I'm surprised this wasn't in from the get-go. I've got a Ditto X4, which can sync to a MIDI clock (plus accept CC and other MIDI commands). This is really important, as it overcomes the tempo creep that happens with loopers. By syncing the Ditto with the Helix I could make sure that the loop stays in time with the tap. It would also be nice to quantize the tap on the Helix so that you can get it in the ball park without having to be precise to the millisecond. At the very least, the Helix should be able to accept MIDI clock data, even if it couldn't generate it. As we all know, if the drummer is not rock-solid, tempos can change. Also, adrenaline can make things speed up, with can throw a lot of things off. (I remember seeing Focus perform Hocus Pocus live. They were going so fast it changed the song from an interestingly unhinged feel to a totally psychotic vibe.) Helix needs this soon. (Next week would be nice.)

Thanks. Interested in the Mac version. One can see that Line6 may not be particularly up to speed with web UI design. It turns out (at least on the Mac side) that rather than providing a list of software to download, it spits out everything on the site, including release notes for every minor upgrade and, if you scroll through a year and a half of release notes there is a link to the V1 download at the bottom. I must spend too much time involved in website design that it never occurred to me that anyone would provide software downloads mixed in with rich text files. Never mind me.