njglover

I understand why they have the wait list, but I think they're gonna have to ramp up production or lose out on at least some customers to Line 6. There are a lot of people like us who went on the wait list but were on the fence. If, like me, you went to a forum asking what to do, most people will tell you to pick up the Helix while you wait and return it and get the AX-8 if you don't like it. Well, I liked the Helix, you liked the Helix. It would be very easy for Fractal to look at the metrics of people who got on the AX-8 wait list and didn't follow through. After all, Helix is readily available everywhere, might as well try it. And a lot of us found out that actually it's pretty great. Easy to measure that loss of business. I wonder how many others are like us...

I feel the same way. It would be hard for me to ever be a full endorser of any brand... My rig is PRS, Helix, Malekko fuzz (fuzzes are a weak point of the Helix IMO), QSC speaker... When I played a real amp it was Boogie head into an Orange cab. I play what sounds good and has the features I need.

...and I will be ignoring it. Put in the wait list request before I decided to give the Helix a go, but I've been so happy with the Helix I have no reason to pick up the AX-8 now. The more I use this thing, the more I like it. I'm not sure I could go back to analog amps if I wanted to now. The flexibility of the Helix is incredible, so easy to do so many things with just one button. The amount of effects and tap dancing (or ridiculous MIDI controlling) I would have to do to make some of my patches happen would make live performance nearly impossible. And I've finally gotten my tones dialed in such that I honestly don't even miss my real tube amps anymore. And, uh, I have really nice tube amps, so that's saying something :)

The toe switch of the expression pedal can be assigned to anything, but obviously it is most commonly used to engage/disengage a wah. By default it just switches between EXP 1 and EXP 2, but when a wah is added, it will also turn that on and off. However, you can also assign other things to it, so, for example, for one song I use a volume pedal for swells and also have delay on during only that section. I can assign the delay pedal to the toe switch so that I can deactivate the volume pedal AND turn off the delay in one go. Less foot tapping is always preferable as far as I'm concerned.

I'm not able to listen, since I am at work, but on a Les Paul the place to check for sympathetic vibrations would be above the nut (between the nut and the tuners). This is the reason why you sometimes see people with hair ties or other things around the headstock. I put a piece of foam under the strings on one of my guitars. Strats often have this problem because of the springs for the trem, in which case some people (like myself) will dampen those with a sock or something similar (only recommended if you are not going to use the trem, though).

Does it walk you through pressing various buttons to make sure they work? Does it end up clearing anything out? Interested to know a little more about this since there doesn't seem to be anything on here about it.

It may instead depend on the RELEASE setting of the compressor in question. In this case, the release controls how long after the compressor engages to wait before releasing the compression. In effect, how long to wait before going BACK to loud. So that could explain going from quiet to loud.

Cheaper than a Helix :p

I actually use it as my entire live rig. It has replaced all my pedals (except a fuzz, which is in one of the loops) and amps and cabs. When I need it, I will bring a PA speaker to a gig to use it. The one song per preset method is, I think, the best way to take advantage of what it has to offer. And it's super easy to copy and paste things from one preset into another, so it's not even that much work to do it. I have like 20 presets for my one band so far, working on setting them up for another. And all of that was done without even using the Editor. And with all that, I've still got it set up for an absolute minimum of button presses. I don't need any more than the bottom row of 4 switches on any preset. This includes a patch that goes from a driven tone with delay and a volume pedal to no delay or volume pedal (actually now that I think about it I could simplify further by bypassing the delay with the toe switch) to a solo with volume boost, harmony, and delay, then later the outro has a different harmonizer. Each section needs only one button press. Obviously, if you NEED to go between like 5 different amp tones in one song, my method isn't going to work for you. In that case, yes, it would be nice if the presets could switch faster. But even then, the switching delay on my real amp Mesa Boogie Roadster is about the same (or worse) than that of the Helix and, while annoying, it was always something I could work around. As others have mentioned, the switching delay is probably never going to go away, so you can either work around it (by my method or by simply working around the lag time) or do something else. So, I'm not trolling? But believe what you want. I suggest closing the thread because there is no new information and nothing is ever going to get solved by us arguing about something that can't be fixed, so this is a completely pointless thread. Would be better relegated to an FAQ topic.

Hmmmm, I assume that's probably the closed back 2x12, though. I don't think anyone has the open back 2x12 I want. Thanks for forwarding that, though. Good to look at other IR options.

Shhh you. Someone should just lock this thread, I think it's been pretty well argued out by now.

I can't believe this thread is still going, but the tonal stability you mention is a big part of the reason why it pays to do it that way. Yes, you CAN switch to entirely different rigs, but that is exactly what is going to happen. You have setlists and within the setlists are the presets, which are the SONGS of that setlist. So each preset is one song. Between the two paths available in each preset, there is a ton of processing power. There is really no reason to need to use more than one preset for one song. I run a couple songs where I need to switch between clean and dirty and it's very easy to accomplish by running a clean amp and a dirty amp into the same cab (IR in this case). This makes sure they still have a somewhat similar character to them and that there is no delay in switching tones. I also do some fairly complicated switching but have so far not found a single thing I can't manage to set up in such a way that I can't switch it with one button (utilizing splits, multiple instances of effects, etc). And in all that, I still only need one preset per song, which is, I think, how the Helix was designed to be used.

It depends on how they modeled things. While it seems theoretically simple to just separate out the power amp, I imagine in practice it is not so simple. Let's say they modeled each full amp by profiling it from input to speaker output. Then they modeled each preamp by profiling it from input to effects loop output. Well, now we have a full amp model and a preamp only model, but we still don't have a power amp model. Maybe they never bothered to profile effects loop input to speaker output. Just depends on how they set things up. I guess what I'm saying is that it will probably take more time than you think it will take, so don't expect it any time soon.

I personally like leaving it with the bank switches on the left so that I can quick switch as you describe. I am the sort that likes a different preset for each song, that way I have only the effects I actually need for any given song, allowing me to assign various things to the lower row of buttons and pretty much never worry about hitting the upper row but accidentally hitting one of the lower ones at the same time. Unless I'm in jam mode, then I have generic presets with tons of buttons for various effects so I can play around...

The wide dispersion is actually what I really like about using a PA speaker. I always dialed in my tones sitting right in front of the amp so that I could make sure that the mic would pick up the tone I had dialed in. So naturally, trying to monitor myself on stage always sucked because it was super dull and lifeless so much farther up. Now I can get a pretty consistent tone, which is awesome. I have also noticed the hyped bass and treble and there are many threads here discussing in, but I will just add that the dispersion angle is not the only issue. I do think that the Helix cabs are brighter than real cabs and as such using the high cut on the cab block is crucial. But third party IRs tend to be more accurate in that regard, so I usually leave those alone.

So sort of related, but where would you set the impedance when running a wireless? I think most wireless units use 1M, but does it matter if the wireless is already taking care of that?

Do it. To both. I love the Helix, having a modeler has opened up so many possibilities for me that I was never able to do analog. And the OH IRs give a lot of tonal options, I use them for most of my patches, particularly distortion patches, but sometimes I still want to use Helix cabs. Always something new to discover with the Helix...

Says you :p There are a lot of things I wanted to be able to do with my analog rig that I was never able to do (live) until I got the Helix. And then, to make them happen with minimal tap dancing on the Helix (because otherwise what's the point?), I ended up having to duplicate many blocks. One of my most DSP-intensive presets has probably two delays, two dual harmonizers, reverb, amp, IR, volume pedal... I think that's it? Had to use an A/B split to make it all work, ended up having to throw the IR and reverb on Path 2 to not run out of space. I love having so many options! As a side note, I'm pretty sure that volume pedals use practically no DSP, not much benefit to controlling amp volume instead of using a volume pedal. EQ doesn't use much, either. It's mostly IRs, reverbs, delays, and pitch shifters you gotta watch out for. You know, the fun stuff :)

I'm at work and the audio quality on thin clients is crap, so I can't really give your clip a proper evaluation, but what makes you say it is DIGITAL clipping and not just clipping you don't like? I mean, I guess technically since this is a modeler it is all digital clipping, but you see my point. If it is actually digital clipping, that is a problem. I have not had that experience with ANY of the amps on the Helix, and I have played through every single factory preset and every amp. There are certainly some amps that I don't like the sound of and will probably never use, but none that I thought sounded like something was wrong. Having said that, I definitely find many of the built in amps to sound harsher than I think they actually should, but that is easily remedied by using the high and low cut filters on the cab blocks. While I do think I shouldn't HAVE to do that, I don't find it to really be that problematic as it takes like 10 seconds to do. And if you think that is an excessive amount of fiddling, consider that I tweaked and retweaked my Mesa Boogie Roadster for YEARS before I finally found settings I liked. Heck, if it weren't for the Helix, I'd probably still be tweaking it. I only recently discovered that the unpleasant frequencies I kept trying to EQ out of that amp were because of the cab I had it plugged in to. So the basic takeaway here is that any amp you get, real or otherwise, is going to require tweaking to some extent. The more knobs and the pickier you are, the more tweaking it will probably require. The Helix has so many options that it just isn't realistic to expect to figure it all out right away. But the fact that I was able to figure it out as quickly as I did is a real testament to the UI. I mean, I was able to replicate my entire live rig in about a week, and I mean from the day I opened the box to gig ready was about a week. And, much like the real amps I've owned, I'm still tweaking a bit to really dial in that perfect tone. Always finding new things to play with...

They're not, they are made to sound like the original amp. Theoretically, the "auto" setting would set the input impedance to match what the actual amp uses. Having said that, if you find that you like the sound of it with a lower setting, go for it! That's what it's all about, figuring out what works for you.

Just rolling back the tone doesn't accomplish quite the same thing as changing the input impedance, though. It's not simply that it changes the tone as much as it also changes the response of the pickups, which is very critical for a lot of fuzz tones. I think that when DI says it would be going down a rabbit hole what they are actually meaning is that even true bypass pedals will still technically add a small bit of resistance/capacitance, so trying to figure out the exact (and largely negligible) impact each would have on your tone is just... unnecessary.

Can you name an example? I can't think of anything I would ever use that benefits from being between the preamp and power amp. In fact, the only reason why effects loops exist on real amps is because it isn't terribly practical to try to have effects the guitarist can control somewhere after the mic (which is how it would normally be done in the studio). And the only reason I stick delays before the cab is because that's how I'm used to hearing them, so the coloration helps.

OP was asking about separate amp and preamp, not amp and cab. To my knowledge, however, the amp blocks are a FULL amp, as in preamp AND power amp, whereas the preamps would be just the preamp section of a given guitar amp. There are NOT, to my knowledge, individual power amps. So all you would be doing is running the preamp into another preamp into the power amp, which accomplishes nothing except an extra gain stage.

So... my issue seems to have gone away? Switch seems to be working pretty reliably now, so must've just been some dirt in the switch. I dunno how though, those things are so tiny.

I usually just leave it on auto. I think that most of the time that leaves it at 1M anyway, but in the event that some dirt or fuzz pedal might better work with a different setting it will automatically adjust for you when you kick the pedal on.