kylotan

If the preset you want is not adjacent, you can make it adjacent. :) If you need it to be adjacent to 2 different presets, you can clone it to a new location. I'm not saying it's ideal, just that it's possible.

The original post asked if there was a way to switch to a preset with one step instead of two. This is possible by arranging the presets in a bank (or adjacent banks, if I understand the 8-preset mode correctly). No, you can't assign an arbitrary preset number to an arbitrary stomp, but you can copy arbitrary presets into any bank, meaning you'll have 4 or 8 of them available on the pedals, and they can be whichever presets you want. I appreciate this may feel a bit restrictive compared to having 8 pedals you can assign to whatever you like, but it's not the same as saying it's not possible to change to another preset without 2 presses as was originally implied by more than one poster.

Sure, but the 2nd post - a day before you entered the thread - said 'you can immediately jump into any of those 8 presets'. For some reason a couple of the other posters seemed sure that this was somehow not possible and kept talking as if the device was somehow crippled, causing confusion.

I'm baffled that this thread went on as long as it did, since my impression from every previous post and the demo videos was that you can switch between 8 presets with one press if you don't need any effect toggles during a song, or can switch between 4 presets if you need up to 4 effect toggles. I had assumed, like with every other modelling hardware I've used from Line6 or otherwise, that you only need to select a bank if the preset you want is not in the current bank. And if you really need 8 toggleable effects pedals within a song then you probably don't need multiple presets for that same song, meaning you can use the 'Preset Up/Down and 8 stomps' method between songs. If I'm not wrong, where's the confusion?

Last year I asked about the HD500x and whether it could meet my needs, and the answer was "err... sort of, maybe". This looks more promising, so I may as well ask the same question. Assuming that patch switching time is still too long to be useful mid-song, will the interface, effects availability, and DSP capacity allow me to set the following chain up all within one preset? And if so, can I: switch between those 2 parallel paths at the top with a single footswitch? maybe switch arbitrary sets of those effect blocks on and off with single footswitches, to simulate patch switching within a single patch? If so, is that limited to toggling, or can it be "set this block on, even if it's already on"? add a high gain amp sim in the bottom parallel path (so that I can test patches at home without my real amp) 2 final questions: is there a noise gate option that can be active somewhere in the middle or end of the chain, but which is triggered by the guitar input rather than the input from the block prior to the noise gate itself? is it possible to make it enter the Tuner mode when the volume pedal is switched to zero? This wouldn't be a dealbreaker for me but it's a feature I really like from the Boss GT range.

XT Live has a limit: 1 amp, 1 comp, 1 gate, 1 eq, 1 stomp, 1 mod, 1 delay, 1 reverb, 1 wah, and 1 volume, no more, no less. It's 9 'blocks' (8 fx, 1 amp) but you don't get to stack 2 reverbs or 3 delays or 2 amps or whatever, and the order is almost entirely fixed. (Some blocks can be pre- or post-.) GT-10 also has a limit: 1 comp, 1 overdrive/distortion, 1 or 2 preamps, 1 eq, 1 delay, 1 chorus, 1 reverb, 1 pedal, 2 noise suppressors, 1 volume, and 2 fx of some sort. That's 14 blocks, ordered however you like, but only 2 are totally flexible. The trick these units use to make it seem like there are no limits is to ensure that most of the effects you have enabled are 'cheap' ones, like volume, EQ, and compression. The HD500x lets you use pretty much whatever you like in any order. This means you can have 3 reverbs if you like, or 3 delays. You simply can't achieve that with the XTL or the GT-10. There is the 'limit'. However, I have a lot of sympathy for you. You're just asking for gate/distortion/wah/amps/eq/reverb/flanger/delay, which isn't much. Take out 1 amp, and you could have that on the XTL (but maybe not in that exact signal order). You can certainly have it on the GT-10, with a volume pedal, send/return loop, chorus, (pre)amp switching, and 1 extra effect thrown in for free. The downside is that neither of those will sound quite as good as the HD500x - but a perfect tone you can't actually dial in is worse than a decent tone that you can, right? My personal opinion is that 8 FX blocks is far too few - especially when they're eaten up by noise gates, volume, send/return loops, and hacks to get around the lack of channel switching - which is why I've not bought an HD500x yet. I was hoping they'd replace it with a more powerful model this year, but apparently not. Line 6 use a lot of DSP power for high quality amp sims, which I appreciate, but as someone who has a decent amp and primarily needs an effects unit, the HD500x is lagging behind the Boss units of 5 years ago, which is sad.

It's not my business. At the moment it's a hobby. We can't run the kind of music we play as a business. I've booked our own shows before, I know how the money works out, and I see why most gigs like ours don't pay anyone at all. That's just how it is.

Good advice in theory, but not widely applicable. I don't think most bands these days get to play to 200 people when they're near the bottom of the ladder, and most of the venues I play in explicitly forbid bringing external sound engineers. (Also, most bands starting out these days don't get the opportunity to treat it like a business since there's so little money around. Not much we can do there.)

Of course. But that's an exaggeration. What is more likely is that someone buys something that they think is just about good enough, from a company known for iterating and improving on its products. Which didn't happen so much this time around. It takes a while to adjust to these complex products, anyway. I would think that it's hard to know if it really suits your needs until you've had it a few months. (This relates to me asking a while back whether the signal routing on the HD500x would be good enough for my needs - and the answer was "er, maybe, probably, go try one out". Which I sadly can't do.) There are a fair few. But live music is not doing so well over here, so lots of stores closed down. And I get the impression that Line 6 (or their local distributor) either can't or won't deal much with the smaller stores that don't shift so much stock. Maybe the overhead outweighs the profits. The big places like Andertons seem to do ok with getting hold of it.

This might be your 2 Grammys talking, but you do realise that probably 95% of people on this forum don't have their own sound person, right? Normally you go to a venue, they have their resident FoH person. They may or may not care about your band, and they may or may not be paying attention when you start a solo. They may not even realise it's a solo. We have to let them handle the overall mix, but dynamics are the musician's job. That's not how decibels work. Anyway, a proportional boost that works in the practice room should work equally well through a full PA (Fletcher-Munson perceptive stuff aside). I would advise not setting it up in the bedroom before a gig, though.

You have to make assumptions about support when buying products like this. Mostly this is because nobody is shipping these units in perfect condition (in terms of software/firmware) and it's impossible to test every feature before you buy. But also because you know that companies have a history of releasing updates and you want to make sure that your money spent now gives you the best bang for the buck over the years in which you hope to own the gear. I'm not saying anybody has the right to a refund or anything. They got what they paid for. But they're entitled to think that it's a poor showing compared to previous offerings from L6. Maybe the latest update in the last few days will satisfy most of these people, however? Unfortunately for me, neither this update nor the FireHawk are fixing the problems I have with the HD line.

I never said it was stated by Line 6. But people buy new products based on the track record of old ones, and based on reviews which predict future updates, and it is very surprising that development slowed down rather than sped up.

Most of the dealers on there have had no new stock from Line6 in months. I asked all the local dealers and some even said Line 6 don't return their calls when they've asked for more stock. And no, most people in the UK won't make a 100 mile trip to speculatively try out gear. (Vehicle fuel is about $6 per gallon).

I'm not the OP, or even an HD owner yet, but I see 2 things wrong with this. 1) Lots of us were led to believe that the HD would end up seeing as many amps as previous models did. It's unusual for a company to bring out a successor that is less fully-featured than the predecessor, after all. But maybe that was taking a risk, sure. 2) A lot of us don't get to try these products before buying. I mentioned in another thread recently that it's almost impossible to see an HD500 or HD500x in the wild over here in the UK. The time and cost of travelling to find a showroom with one in is expensive. So we read up on things, compare it to previous products we might have owned, and hope for the best.

I don't think I missed the point. But maybe I wasn't clear about what I meant. I need one switch to switch the amps AND switch fx at the same time. I don't want it set up like a conventional pedalboard where I toggle each effect individually because I routinely need to make large changes to the sound instantly.

Ah yes, that would work well in most situations. One switch toggles everything. I can see it getting confusing if I make any other switched adjustments though - for example, if I use another switch to add reverb and delay (eg. for making a rhythm sound into a lead sound), switching back to clean is going to toggle all those effects off, right? This is probably all academic if I can't get my entire chain in there. Even by assigning the volume pedal to amp/return levels, I still need more slots than it's giving me.

The blending thing isn't going to work for me - I need instant switches from one to the other or it's just going to sound weird. It's a real shame that the HD500x doesn't let you assign the switches to all the same things you can assign the expression pedals to. That would have solved a lot of these issues. It makes sense about not using the simulated power amp and cab section in my situation, and that is exactly what I intended to do. But the combination of limited FX within one preset and the 15ms mute when changing between different ones is looking like a deal-breaker for me. I don't think it really matters, but I usually only need 2 or 3 different tone switches within one song - clean <--> distorted, all of reverb/chorus/delay off or on, and maybe an effect like the harmonizer - so I'd just assign the relevant changes to 3 switches, and I could do that in ABCD mode too, right? I don't really want or need to be able to switch each effect individually - I'm just trying to get the effect of full patch switches without drop-outs.

Could I assign the volume pedal to the amp channel volume AND the return level on the send/return block? That's what I'd need to do, to be able to shut both off. I don't consider 8 effects to be really effects intensive, which is perhaps where Line 6 and I differ. My GT-10 handles about 10 effects in series without problem. Even my venerable XT Live could handle plenty - compressor, gate, eq, stomp, mod, delay, reverb, wah, and volume all available in every patch, before you add in the amp and cab. I know the quality of the effects has gone up, and there's more flexibility these days, but that means nothing if I can't use enough of them to reproduce the sound I've had for years. I'm not convinced that I can get around patch switching dropouts just by changing my style. If the silence is up to 15ms, as pfsmith0 has suggested, then that is going to be very audible no matter what I do. You really need spillover to mask a gap like that, and the HD500x won't do that apparently.

Ok, that's disappointing about there being no channel switching. (Why? What were L6 thinking?) If I use an extra volume block, it looks like I can't use the chain I want to because that's now 9 fx blocks: the channel switcher volume, overdrive, send/return, harmonizer, chorus, delay, reverb, noise reduction, and the volume pedal would be the 9th. I rarely use the harmonizer so I could ditch that for all but one song, but I could really do with a solo boost as well, and an EQ for playing leads. So this isn't ideal. Another idea I had was to have 2 patches, one clean and one through the amp. Since it would always be going to or from clean, the drop-out might not be so noticeable. But I'm still hitting that 8 fx block limit even without the channel switching volume block. That might be the deal breaker. It's also a shame about the noise reduction, since it makes a lot of sense to have it operate on a loop. (The Decimator pedals don't come with a loop... that's why they advise you to buy 2, one for before the amp, for the FX loop!) Still, it's true that I probably won't need or want it with the cleans. I'm going to have to give this serious thought, because it's hard to justify an 'upgrade' that is going to lose me 3 or 4 effects when compared to my GT-10. Maybe I should wait and see if they announce anything better at NAMM next year.

I'm hoping to upgrade from my venerable GT-10 to a HD500x, but I'm not sure whether the HD can do what I want. Maybe you can advise! I'd be using the unit live and I usually use 2 to 4 different tones in a song, so I do what I can to cut the patch switching time down and avoid any audible drop-outs. On the GT-10, I would mostly do this via switching between the 2 channels which is instant (whereas loading a new patch is not). To complicate matters, I use the 4CM because I want to use my amp's distortion. So my typical effects chain would look roughly like this: The GT-10 allows me to press the current patch switch to toggle between path A (the Clean amp sim above) and path B (the overdrive and the send/return block), so basically one stomp to switch between clean and distorted with no drop-outs. A couple of questions about this: 1) The GT-10 allows me to press the current patch switch to toggle between path A (the Clean amp sim above) and path B (the overdrive and the send/return block). I couldn't find anything in the HD500x manual to either re-use the current patch switch OR to even switch between the 2 amp paths. Is there a way for me to get the above signal chain, and to be able to switch between those paths with one click? 2) The GT-10 allows you to place noise reduction at the end of the chain, but still trigger it on the guitar source rather than the previous block in the chain. This is why lots of noise reduction pedals have send/return loops on them. But the HD500x manual implies that their noise reduction block can't do this. Is that the case? I could move it in front of the overdrive as a compromise, but then I'm going to get amp noise coming through. If I leave it at the end, it's going to be impossible to calibrate it to trigger correctly on both the clean and the distorted input. 3) Are there any other problems with this approach? Any concerns with sending a clean amp sim into my real power amp? Is there a better way of doing what I want to do, while still using the HD500x's clean sims and my real amp's distorted channel? I'd consider just having the clean and distorted paths on different patches, but I'm worried that with there being an audible patch switching time, and no capability for reverb or delay spills to fill the gaps, that it wouldn't really cut it live.

I see what you're saying, but people bought this with the implication that, like previous Line 6 devices, the number of models would grow. Maybe there wasn't a promise but people would be forgiven for thinking there was at least an implication. Yet the HD500X still has fewer models than the venerable XT did. I was reading a review of the HD500 just yesterday which said, "I do sorely miss the bass amps and vocal preamps but I won’t be surprised when Line 6 announces model pack or free upgrades to include a few of those." Are people demanding that the updates are free? I think people would be happy if they could buy extra amps if the price was reasonable. If I ever do manage to get an HD500X I'd pay a bit extra for a Peavey 5150 or 6505 model.

That's missing the point slightly: of course, there are places which have old stock, and especially if you like ordering musical gear online without trying it first. But this thread was talking about ongoing support, right? Actually finding one in a shop near me (not in the USA) is proving impossible - not because they don't want to stock it, but apparently because they can't. I'm not going to name a specific dealer because our conversation was private. But you might want to look into why none of these dealers in the Midlands in the UK have an HD500X on sale, despite stocking other Line 6 products, because I doubt it's purely through lack of interest: http://www.simmondsmusic.com/category/187/effects-pedals-and-electronics/#.VEzR7MkdiUm http://www.rattleanddrum.com/guitars/guitar-effects-pedals.html?manufacturer=106 http://www.musicjunkie.co.uk/shop/Guitars/Guitar-Effects/Multi-Effect-Processors/LINE-6 http://www.millennium-music.co.uk/guitars-and-amps/line-6

I've been following the HD500X recently, with a view to replacing my ageing Boss GT-10 with it for live use. I was a bit disappointed when I saw that the HD500X was a bit lacking in high gain amps compared to my venerable XT Live, but figured it probably wouldn't matter as I'd use my real amp in the loop for that instead. I was also a bit concerned that there don't seem to have been any additions to the amp models, when back with my XT Live I remember a handful of different upgrades - the Metal Shop, FX Junkie, etc. Despite this, I'd decided recently to take the plunge and buy an HD500X. That's when I found out that none of my local dealers stock it. Some stock Line 6 products but they only have relatively old ones: M9, M13, HD400, Pocket Pod. I spoke to one of the dealers and they said that they want to stock the HD500X but Line 6 have basically stopped replying to their calls for more stock. Even some of the online retailers that order stock on demand aren't listing it, probably because they're not confident they can get hold of any. So it doesn't just seem like Line 6 aren't doing much for existing owners of the HD500X, it seems like they aren't particularly pushing it (or anything else) to new people either. Maybe they're gearing up for a big relaunch and are scaling back support for legacy products (and let's face it, the HD500X is just an HD500 with some component upgrades). I don't know. I still want one, but I'm going to have to travel some way to find one (or order online), and I'm not expecting many updates.