kylotan

There are several Ideascale entries for this - no idea if anyone is checking Ideascale these days, but adding your vote can't hurt. https://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Expression-Pedal-Response-Curves/890716-23508#idea-tab-comments https://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Curve-parameter-for-expression-pedals/905964-23508#idea-tab-comments https://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Helix-EXP-Pedal-Curve-Control/791011-23508#idea-tab-comments

For clean/ambient and rock tones, I expect the Helix (LT or otherwise) will give you better results. The Helix effect range is great and I'm led to believe that you can use more blocks in one patch than you can with the AX8. You also get more power to vary things within a patch with Helix Snapshots than AX8 scenes offer. For metal tones, the AX8 has a better reputation and the comparison clips online favour Fractal's offering. Some would argue that those people are more experienced with dialling in Fractal gear so it's not a fair comparison. But others would point out that the AX8 has a ton of high gain amps compared to the rather anaemic showing in the Helix which seems somewhat more Marshall-heavy than previous Line 6 offerings. This may or may not matter to you. On balance, I'd recommend the Helix LT.

And I'm saying that what "sounds dire" is subjective. If you think putting a compressor in front of an amp is going to achieve what I've been using a distortion for then it's obvious our subjective idea of what is needed here is too different to have a useful discussion.

Maybe that's what BigJayBrian is alluding to - take 2 lush stereo performances, pan them hard left and hard right, and you may as well have had 2 mono performances (which would have had less chance of frequencies being cancelled out during the stereo->mono summing). My hard-panned patches are all mono. But patches that I expect to have down the centre usually have stereo output showcasing the delay and reverb (albeit usually the legacy reverb since I don't trust the stereo image on the newer ones).

Not interested in arguing with the "you shouldn't do that" tone police. Not relevant here. I think I have the answer to my original query, anyway - it seems like most of it is caused by the output level from the Helix Vermin model being far too low, and partly because the PV Panama model has some characteristics that don't sound great in situations where other modellers do okay. I'll work around it.

I said there isn't enough evidence. I did however post examples of 5 different modellers/VSTs using very similar paths where Helix was the clear outlier. That is evidence - not proof, but evidence - and whether it's sufficient or not is another matter. I'd like to hear the original hardware to be sure. Sounds barely different to me with it on or off. That's not the sound I'm going for. Glad it makes other people happy. Definitely. I only just spotted your previous post about using the TSE Rat sim before the Helix amp. What I find is that the TSE R47 before the PV Panama is pretty bad sounding, but starts to approach being usable if I pull the drive back to 9'o'clock. The other way around - Helix Rat into TSE X50 - it sounds bad in a way I find hard to describe, which is hard to fix without pulling the Vermin gain down low and pushing the level up high. Looking at the metering in Helix Native, the Rat does a lot of attenuation - with Gain and Level both at the half-way mark and Filter at zero, it's taking my roughly -20dB guitar signal and pulling it down to about -45dB. If I have the level below 3 then the output is basically gone entirely! Compare that with the Classic Dist from the Legacy models (so nobody thinks I'm Line 6 bashing!) - drive and output at halfway with filter off gives something like a 4 or 5 dB boost. The Classic Dist is louder on 2% output than the Vermin is on about 25%.

line6bbd: "The VSTs you have been using are not going to offer the fidelity of modeling you are getting from Helix" - I don't necessarily agree. Line 6 have done a great job with the Helix but VSTs from smaller developers where they have a focus on single pedals and amps have generally been outperforming general purpose modellers for years. When it comes to this specific permutation I wouldn't be surprised if Helix does a better job on the Rat than the other VSTs, but regarding the 5150 the general talk in the metal tone community is that the Helix's model is not the best. It certainly isn't taking pedals in front the way I'd expect. "only valid comparison you can make is with the real Rat and 5150 [...] this is an apples and oranges situation which simply does not support a strong statement such as 'something is wrong with Hx gain staging". It's my conclusion. It is obviously not your conclusion. :) There isn't enough evidence either way, and I'd love to hear from someone using the actual hardware. "referenced Englund's patches (details unspecified in the clip IIRC) so we don't know exactly what he did" - Ola's patches are downloadable in the description under the video. When using the Helix cab, he's got the Compulsive Drive (gain=1.4, level=7.5) going into the PV (drive=3.0). Both blocks sound reasonable when the other one is disabled, and sound bad together. He has another patch where he used his own IR, and that is the Scream 808 (gain=0, level=10) going into the PV (drive=4.7). That one just sounds pretty bad all round. And this is with overdrives - distortion is sounding even worse, to me. gunpointmetal: "a Rat into a 5150 or the 2204 sounds like a recipe for harsh mud" - it is meant to be harsh. It is not meant to sound like the typical "zero gain Tube Screamer before the amp". What it's not meant to do is sound fuzzy or like a bitcrusher. Several modellers do exhibit this property, which suggests it is inherent to the chain, but only the Helix does it to such a large amount.

I accidentally overwrote one of the factory presets, and would like to get it back. However, the only option in the Helix Native menus seems to be to restore all factory presets, and it's not clear whether that will also clear out my user-defined setlists. Can anyone comment either way?

Line6 support said "this is how it's meant to sound" so that was a waste of time. I have found some sort of workaround by pulling the distortion gain down to 1.0 and compensating by pushing the level up to full. But that's not the settings I've used elsewhere so something obviously isn't modelling the original hardware very faithfully.

Well, my response to the support ticket was basically as I had expected: "Helix is giving you an accurate representation of the real life gear/ gain staging". This is implicitly saying "Helix is right, Fractal and everyone else is wrong". There's a chance they're correct, but until I hear a clip of the real gear, I'm gonna doubt it. The rep goes on to talk about cab positioning which is clearly irrelevant so I doubt I'm going to make much progress there. I tried the 2 presets line6bbd posted above. The first sounds no better than my previous preset (not sure if it was meant to?). The second sounds 'better', but is tonally quite different from the result I'm expecting. If I pull back the un-distorted signal into the amp relative to the distorted signal, it's back to mush pretty quickly. About the best I can do is pull the Rat gain down to below 1.0, push the level up to 10 to compensate, and then it just about plays nicely into the PV amp. This no longer resembles the settings I use on every other sim with decent results, so it leaves me with the same conclusion I had at the start of this thread, namely that something is wrong with the Helix's internal gain staging.

I use the harmonizer a bit in one of my songs - after the amp block, before the output to a cab. I have a second path with a small delay block of 20ms to humanize it a bit and then 100% harmonized signal on that path, before merging both paths back together prior to my reverb block and the output. I don't find it very good, the same way I don't find the shimmery reverbs in the Helix to sound good - there's an artificial quality that I find hard to put into words. But, it is usable in small doses.

If the amp only has 1 send, then you only have 1 signal to choose from, meaning you can't blend between the 2 outputs at all - splitting it into 2 won't help you as both signals will be identical. So you only need 1 return. However, you may be able to blend in some way between the 2 channels by having the expression pedal alter the send level to the 2 channels - but that is likely to sound quite different from blending the return (which you can't do). For example, if one channel is higher gain than the other, a 50/50 split of output is likely to have a lot more signal from the high gain channel in the return. You might be able to ameliorate this a bit by adding a volume block in there controlled by the same pedal, but I've not tried anything like that.

I tested it 3 times the other day at different tempos and the light was slow every time. I just tried it again today and this time the light was exactly on time. So something quite weird is occurring.

Yeah, a lot of 90s death metal tone was entirely from the pedals. Quite a few albums are basically the sound of an HM-2 with everything turned up to full. Not the tone I'm going for, but it would be nice to have.

Maybe, maybe not. I use it happily with overdrive before the amp. It's just with distortion in front that it collapses to mush - which might mean getting an HM-2 block is not much use. Not tried your suggestion yet though.

Very good Arch Enemy tone, but we're not going to get much closer to the At The Gates sound until Line 6 give us a HM-2 distortion block! https://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Boss-HM-2/808260-23508 https://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Boss-HM-2-Model-for-Helix/864084-23508

I don't use my Helix as an interface so this is just a guess, but I think you want to read the "Hardware Monitoring vs DAW Software Monitoring" section of the Helix Owner's Guide. I'll copy and paste here: "When a DAW track's software monitoring is active, you'll likely not want to simultaneously hear the Helix hardware monitoring signal. To achieve this, you can set the Helix Output block to USB Out 3/4 or 5/6. These Output block options will route your Helix-processed, stereo signal out to your DAW software without also providing the Helix hardware monitoring to USB 1/2. You'll then need to set your DAW track to receive from the same selected Helix USB Out to record the Helix-processed signal into the track - or, you can optionally set the DAW track input to Helix USB 7 or USB 8 to record a dry DI signal - see the next section"

Confirmed here on my floor unit. After 100 repeats of the Simple Delay at 1000ms with tap tempo set to 60bpm the tap tempo light flashing is about half a beat/second behind. If I set the tempo to 140bpm, then set a stopwatch for 2 minutes and watch the flashing light, I see about 275/276 flashes when I would expect to see 280.

I think you can also right-click the parameter, choose Controller Assign > Snapshots. (This is similar to HX Edit, which also has a right-click menu with Snapshots on it.)

I've not tried an EQ, as I have no idea what I'd be doing - and I don't really want to alter my raw guitar tone, to be honest. I can work around this in other ways to get the tone I want, using some other pedal and getting more distortion from the amp. So it's not a massive problem for me. I'd just wanted to take the nominal chains I'd used on other modellers for 2 previous albums - Metal Zone > Bogner Uberschall, or Rat > Peavey or Engl - and reproduce it with the newer technology. But the Helix won't play ball with either of those permutations. So right now it's really just about asking Line 6 if they know why this is happening, and perhaps they will have an idea.

Scarlett 6i6, 1M Ω instrument input. It's not the interface, though - the same unpleasant distortion can be heard with the Helix Floor unit. Drop in a Vermin Dist with gain between 2 and 5, filter at 0, followed by a PV Panama with drive below 5 and Bass/Mid/Treble all around 5.. If you have the Vermin producing roughly unity gain, the combined sound is awful. If you pull the level down on the Vermin, the sound starts to get thin and unusable.

For anyone who comes across this later, there's a lot more detail in the linked thread, but the situation is that Helix is not the only modeller or sim which shows this fuzz/bitcrusher break-up with a chain like this, but it is the only one that can't be cleaned up by pulling the output level down on the distortion sim. This supports my initial suspicion that the issue is some sort of internal gain staging mismatch, and I've filed a support ticket with Line 6 to see if they can look into it.

It's tiring, and unnecessary, to get insults about this. I posted my patch above and claiming that the amp is "dialed in unrealistically" is ridiculous. Additionally I posted a video by a professional guitarist who has almost 200 thousand subscribers to his YouTube gear channel, where he has extensive experience of high gain tone, both real amps and sims, and the Helix sounds bad there too, with the same problem I have. The proof is right there, but you want to claim that it's user error... that somehow, there's some secret to dialing in a Peavey 5150 that is eluding me (and this other guitarist), but somehow we can get perfectly good sounds all the rest of the time with any other gear... nah, it doesn't add up.

I appreciate stomp distortion into amp distortion is too much distortion for 99% of styles. For most of my patches I have subtle overdrive from a Screamer or similar (which is usually there to deliberately reduce some of that 'oomph' - high gain amps often get a lot of low end building up during palm muting which the overdrive helps to reduce). But for this specific scenario I have been using a small amount of Rat or Metal Zone distortion feeding into a Peavey or Engl amp for an intentionally very high gain tone with with a lot of mids and top-end. It worked well on the Pod XT Live, and it works on all the other sims I tried, providing I can adjust the stomp's output level - it's only the Helix which can't handle it for some reason. The models sound good in isolation but crap when in series, so I suspect a problem with the internal gain staging. I've filed a support request and I'll see what happens.

If you're using the Floor version into a real-world guitar cab (e.g. by way of an amp), but are using the same patch in Helix Native with computer speakers or headphones, it will definitely sound fizzier as computer speakers and headphones have a much flatter response, and thus show a lot more high end, than a guitar cab. If that's not what you're doing, perhaps post up your preset (or list of the blocks you use) and tell us what you plug the Floor unit into typically.