kylotan

Looks like your network driver is not a good one. When you say direct, do you mean via an Ethernet cable? And if so, do you know the make of your motherboard?

Impossible? Certainly not. Unnecessarily awkward? Definitely. I'm happy to step in and defend the people asking about this strange absence, because it's a totally reasonable query. I do all my editing in Helix Native because metering is an important feature for setting up signal chains. Hopefully one day this will be available in the unit.

Your claim is that dialling in transparent-sounding compression just by ear is simple enough that you don't see the need for metering, despite the vast majority of hardware and software units having metering for this very purpose. You're right, it is getting quite tedious to keep hearing your variations on "you don't need this" or "you shouldn't do that". Literally thousands of people have asked for metering on Ideascale and yet you still talk like everyone who asks for it is wrong and should just use their ears.

A VERY common compression workflow is to dial it in so that it's essentially imperceptible but taming some of the peaks (and maybe increasing sustain a little), and then you have increased headroom and a reduced dynamic range. This will help you sit in the mix (stage or recorded), avoid clipping, etc. This is very easy to do when you have metering that shows when your signal is being subtly attenuated. This is much harder to do if you're trying to listen for a change which is deliberately hard to hear.

Maybe so, but there's a difference between "no increase until 75%" and "10x decrease at 50%". Is it a realistic model of a Rat? I have no idea. It definitely isn't a realistic model of the specific Rat someone else was gigging with and which I was trying to emulate. The R47 VST plugin was much closer in that regard. Metering would at least have avoided me wasting a lot of time trying to work out why the Helix one sounded so bad. (In the end the Helix Native metering helped a lot. Hence why it should be in Floor as well.)

Demonstrably false. There's plenty of room for subtle compression to be useful even when you can't hear it. In fact thousands of records are compressed with exactly this intent in mind - to change the overall signal level with almost imperceptible changes to tonality, attack, etc.

Nobody suggested not reducing the amp gain significantly. I also wasn't suggesting using the Rat at 5 - but it's a pretty weird setup to set those levels at 50% and to see the signal level drop by a factor of 10.

That's because it's inconvenient and/or expensive to add it to hardware. On software - pretty much every compressor has a meter, and a visual indication of the threshold and knee, and if you're lucky it'll show the signal along that response curve in real-time too. The Helix is capable of this, so hopefully it's just a matter of time before it appears.

See, here's part of the problem. I don't own the pedals in real life, and never will. So dialing in the Helix has been a bit frustrating as it (more than previous Line 6 products) seems more aimed at the crowd of people who have gone through lots of vintage gear and are just trying to slimline their rig. They know how the stuff works and set the Helix up to match. The rest of us are left trying to dial in good tones with models of hardware we never used and trying to coax something useful out of it. The other part of the problem is that I'm not convinced that the Helix always does model the real-life pedals, because when I did try and copy a chain from a pedalboard, the Helix made it sound like mush and seemed to seriously attenuate the signal in an area that didn't make sense. So that complicates matters.

Meters tell you what kind of 'wrong' you have. They help you avoid the 'wrong' in the first place. They show you where the 'wrong' is along a potentially complex signal chain.

I don't want to argue this point again because the optimality of the tone is entirely subjective, but the fact is that: some well-known and respected metal musicians use exactly this chain, to deliberately get a super-distorted tone that, yes, a typical guitarist might consider unusable mush; it works well in the real world (for that subjective notion of 'well') it works well with other highly-regarded Rat/5150 VSTs when using settings close to those seen on the physical pedalboard it typically sounds like lollipop on Helix Native with those same settings copied from the pedalboard Now, given that we both know that the Helix modelling is generally of a very high quality, the problem here is likely to be down to the interaction between 2 blocks that are rarely tested together. (Given how many low and mid-gain amps keep getting added, I'm not surprised nobody is testing Rats in front of 5150s - that's obviously not the type of tones the Line 6 people are aiming at.) And my best assessment was that the signal levels on the Helix blocks were significantly different to how they are on the pedalboards of the guitarists I was basing my patches on, because I managed to get significantly closer by moving the gain and level values quite some way off how they'd be used in the real world. The metering on Native helped me a lot here, by showing that the Vermin at Gain=5.0 and Level=5.0 gives almost 20dB of gain reduction. That's the kind of thing that is hidden when you have an Amp+Cab block after it which inevitably introduces several dB of additional gain. I think that was quite common in the 90s. But then so was using the Boss HM-2 pedal with literally every dial turned up to 10, which is well beyond what most people would consider usable. And sometimes they'd add a little amp gain too for good measure. (https://youtu.be/-MdH7JWkSxA?t=439) And if I can't see it, it's unlikely I'll be able to get it sounding good. Visuals please!

The problem is. in the real world this simply isn't true - for example, before an amp your signal will be at instrument level, then after the preamp you'll be at line level or above. You expect a 20dB increase in the signal which is going to have real implications for the behaviour of whatever effects are in the chain. So we have 2 options: The Helix doesn't need to actually amplify the signal by 20dB to achieve the same tonal results (as it's all digital), so you will broadly want unity gain on all blocks (as you suggest)... or... The Helix attempts to model the physical units directly, so certain blocks will push the signal significantly up or down by design, so you will need to compensate for this accordingly. Neither is necessarily wrong. However I don't know what the Helix developers intended, or whether they have a consistent philosophy for all the blocks, or whether it's just a case of having to learn each one. Metering is part of the solution here; the other part is making it clear what levels each block ideally expects.

The problem is more like - if it sounds wrong, it's hard to know why it's wrong. e.g. I struggle with good distortion tones on the Helix, when trying the standard metal approach of distortion or overdrive pedal in front of a high gain amp. It would often sound awful. The 'obvious' suggestion is "that's lots of gain, you need to turn it down", but apparently it's quite easy to set some of these blocks to produce too low an output, which means the amp after it isn't able to drive it in the same way. The volume is compensated for later in the chain, but the damage was already done. Same with compressors. I've not got the hearing acuity to spot the subtle differences that changing the parameters can have, especially if I'm playing material that might not be triggering the compression at that moment. But give me a visible meter - e.g. as seen on every single compressor plugin that isn't pretending to be 'vintage' - and I can dial it in quickly.

I agree with the OP. Level meters are an annoying omission for such a complex device. Pointing out that traditional pedals lack metering is a poor comparison because: putting meters on each pedal would require extra hardware in almost all cases, whereas having them on the Helix would be a single new software routine applicable to all individual pedals tend to come with documentation - the Helix is notoriously poor on documentation when it comes to the individual blocks regular hardware often gives less scope for error, whereas the Helix easily allows massive level differences between blocks To make matters worse, many of the blocks seem to emulate analog gear which works best at certain volume ranges to get optimal saturation, or compressors which kick in above a certain threshold. Am I providing the right input ranges? I'll never know.

Most likely you have some other devices that have bad drivers and which interrupt audio devices that need the cooperation of the rest of the system to obtain low latency. You can try latency measuring software like LatencyMon or DPC Latency Checker to see if any particular devices are causing problems, and then upgrade the drivers or disable them. You might also check generally for background services and tasks which could just be using a lot of CPU. Also try updating the drivers for your USB ports, your motherboard, etc.

I don't have time to try and do a proper match, but I had a play around and I got closer with these settings: Scream 808: Gain 4, Tone 8, Level 8 L6 Badonk: Drive 4.5, Bass 2, Mid 0, Treble 7, Presence 9 10 band EQ (replacing existing EQ block): -2dB @ 500Hz, -2dB @ 1KHz, -5dB @ 4KHz, +6dB @ 8KHz, all others 0dB There's a lot of mid-scooping there and I struggled to get the right blend of top-end. If I were to continue I'd probably experiment with different amps - maybe the ENGL or the Mesas, although the album your clip is from used a Marshall JCM800, so that's an option too. That would be how I'd try and pin down the scooped mid-tone - then I'd try the various condenser mics with different cabs to get the right top-end.

Simple question, hopefully - if I were to get POD Farm 2.5 Platinum, would my old Pod XT Live patches work on it, and sound like they did through the hardware? Or does this software map to a different unit (Pod X3, HD...?) I have a Helix but sadly it's almost impossible to replicate some of my old Pod XT tones on it, so I'm considering buying the Pod Farm plugin so that I can do this, and maybe mix and match the two for the best of both worlds.

Actually it's revenues - and given the relative price, it's likely that CDs are still outselling vinyl 2 or 3 to 1. (But yes... I don't expect tubes to disappear, as long as there are analogue fans in the world.)

Wow, where to start on the Wall Of Text... Sure, it's a nightmare. But am I supposed to be able to turn my drummer's kick down via the Helix? Well, no. Pretty much everywhere I play, there's a monitor mix. It's necessary. I need to hear the other guitarist even though his cab is 20 ft away, pointed 90 degrees away from me, and has a loud drummer in the way. Ideally I also need to hear myself in the monitor because my cab is behind me and that is not a particularly clear sound - especially when competing with the reverberations of the room in front of me. Alternatively, the sound engineer - you know, the guy who can actually hear what the PA is sounding like out front - can issue instructions during sound/line check to guitarists to adjust their levels. That's their job - not my job to second-guess the venue. Because speakers are directional. In a typical small venue with minimal space between the stage and the crowd, someone who is front row centre is not only closer to the drum kit than to either guitarist's cab stage left or right, but they're usually well off-axis for those cabs. Not only that, but they are often parallel with, or sometimes even in front of, the main PA. Not that I tweak my guitar level for those fans - it's the venue's job to ensure everyone can hear properly. But it's still a fact that onstage sound is a large part of what you hear near the front if you're at small, loud gigs. Example, of where I played last Saturday: The people stood in the front middle there are getting very little from those PA stacks. They'll get a hell of a lot of drums, and a fair bit of guitars depending on where the cabs are placed.

Totally agreed on this. IRs morph a sound so much that you risk not really comparing the Helix features but the different characteristics of the impulse response. I would pick a pretty 'standard' cab and mic combination - e.g. 4x12 Greenback25, 57 Dynamic, Mic distance to minimum is pretty standard for hard rock and metal - and then tinker with different amps feeding into that.

So... should we perhaps just have a single Marshall and a single Fender model? Rather than about 10 of each? :) Even though I almost never touch those amps, I can appreciate that - to aficionados - each of them and the different channels have distinctive sounds which are non-trivial to reproduce with EQ, boost pedals, etc. So they're modelled separately. And so it extends to high gain, in an ideal world. Someone could claim that an Engl Powerball is the great-great-great-grandson of a Marshall amp. But you can certainly hear the difference. So it would be good to have it in the box. Sure - and the problem is that if you start off with a poor range of high gain amps (like L6 did in 2015 or whenever the Helix was released), you lose those customers (to Kemper, Fractal, etc). And then that just leaves a few people here to ask that L6 try to turn it around. If nothing else, I don't want to ever see someone there say "we checked the forums, and none of our customers were asking for high gain". Best to be heard, even if it's a minority voice. I could go out and buy an Axe-FX III - but I'd rather stick with my Helix. We'll see what happens!

Well. 6 of those 13 are Mesa Boogie. Of the rest, several are 'Line 6 Originals' ported from the HD range, leaving a small handful of real choices. But the Fender and Marshall variations just keep on coming! I've said it before on this forum, but if you look at the worldwide metal scene there are a ton of popular amp models that are just not represented here: Engl Powerball, Engl E530, Engl Savage, Diezel VH4, Diezel Herbert, Orange Rockerverb, Orange Thunderverb, Laney Ironheart, Peavey Invective, etc. I mean, the Diezel VH4 is so versatile that the Axe FX 2 has 6 different models of it. But nothing from Line 6 for the Helix. It's kind of the same story with distortion pedals. The HM-2 is such a distinctive pedal that entire sub-genres are based around it - but it's not in the Helix. The Metal Zone was another distinctive unit, which is only available as a 'legacy' model. But if you want fuzz, hey, there are about ten of them to choose from.

Splitters like that are fine, except the G10S doesn't want a full-power cable like that, so I'd need another thing in there. I have no road crew and don't get paid for gigs, so I'm keeping my load-in and load-out minimal. Thanks anyway.

Very true. I hope they get fixed. Provably false, unless your definition of 'high gain' is broad enough to be largely meaningless.

Sorry to be the opposite data point, but my usage is entirely bug free and very usable... I just want some new models for metal musicians to counterbalance the 20 or so Marshall clones in there. :)