kylotan

A preset change is basically a digital version of doing a full load-out of your current gear, followed by a load-in of the new gear. The fact that it can be done in tens of milliseconds is pretty impressive - but obviously not always good enough. A snapshot change is more like using an A/B box on stage to rapidly and seamlessly switch between 2 different paths through your onstage gear - except not only does the digital equipment let you create 8 different path permutations, it also lets you associate those paths with new parameters as well, meaning you could pull down the gain on the simulated amp instead of needing to switch to a cleaner model, reduce the delay feedback to clean up the tone in a certain section, etc.

This is a joke, right? ...Right? I wanted better reverbs, and a Metal Zone, and I got both of those (even if the Metal Zone is a legacy version), so I'm happy. I also know it's not previously been physically possible to ship a Helix update without having to include extra Marshall amps, so I admire the fact that they managed to get away with only doing a Marshall clone this time around. ;)

Finally! A Metal Zone pedal. Now just waiting for the HM-2 simulation... I would have loved to have had all these a couple of weeks ago when I was trying to recreate some old Pod XT tones on the Helix, as being able to use the legacy models directly would have helped me get into the ballpark quicker.

Yes, the implication was that there would be an equivalent block in the new preset, of course. I don't know about the gap between presets but I suspect that it will still be present because the new preset is being set up during that period - no audio from any source is being processed, or can be processed, as I understand it. The block to receive the input wouldn't have been loaded yet, nor would the routing for that block or anything around it. So I don't think it's possible for this to be seamless. For seamless switching, that's where snapshots come in. Alternatively a reverb and/or delay patched in after the Helix might do a decent enough job of hiding the preset switchover.

The external device certainly won't know to stop producing output when you change preset, so providing there is some way to accept input from that device on the 2nd preset (just like you would have had on the 1st preset) then there will be spillover. If you think about it, it's exactly the same as when you play a note on the guitar and change preset - the input keeps coming, so the note 'spills over'. In your case the 'instrument' is actually an external delay or looper or whatever, and it's coming in a return rather than the usual guitar input, but it will continue to generate its output regardless of the state of the Helix.

This is exactly what an impulse response is. It (in theory) is a recording of the audio response to an infinitely short 'impulse' of sound. (There are other ways to generate it, but mathematically the idea is to produce this same output.) Then this audio is convolved with your other audio to produce the output. Convolution is essentially a multiplication operation and is commutative so you could, in theory use the impulse as your performance and your performance as the IR and get exactly the same output! This is why impulses can be represented as simple audio files. An impulse response function - and thus, a file that accurately contains that data - captures the way a linear system responds to incoming audio in both frequency and time, which is why IRs can simulate reverb and echo as well as speaker and microphone response. However, when capturing mic/cab responses, typically there are no room reflections being captured, just the direct signal from the speaker, whatever frequency characteristics the speaker and mic impart, and phase cancellations resulting from position. These are all things that, theoretically, can be modelled with parametric equalisers. If that wasn't obvious enough, microphone manufacturers publish the frequency response of their mics and you can replicate those curves in your EQ. Would I expect to adequately model a cab/mic combination with the Helix's 5-band Parametric EQ block? Hell no. Would I expect to adequately do it with maybe 10 bands, the option of minimum or linear phase EQ, and a computer learning algorithm to do the hard work of performing all the adjustments and measurements? Definitely.

An impulse response is just an audio file, measuring a very specific type of audio, so you can apply all your usual audio treatments to it. On a very trivial level, you can approach cabinet modelling as an EQ matching exercise; capture the IR with the mic at 0", then capture it again at 0.5". Use an EQ matching algorithm to measure how the response has changed and generate an EQ curve to approximate it. Do that for your range of distances, with the same number of EQ bands available each time. Then, to smoothly model any mic distance from the cab, you can blend between 2 adjacent sets of EQ settings, apply that to the impulse, and then use that impulse as the cab sim. You don't even necessarily need to store all the impulses, just enough so there's a small enough error between the blended/simulated impulses and the ideal values. You might even find you don't need to store the impulses at all if your EQ curve is sufficiently accurate. (The people using the 'OTB' presets might agree with this.) Generally speaking you would spend a fair amount of time tuning the hyper-parameters here (e.g. how many EQ bands is needed for an accurate model? what filter type works best? how many different mic positions? how short can we truncate the IR and still get a good match?) to find out what works best. But it's certainly not impractical for Line 6 to have captured 30 cabs x 16 mics in maybe 10 different positions each and then leave the computers chewing over how best to blend them.

To get back on the original subject - just the other day, I was trying to reproduce some of my favourite Pod XT patches with the Helix - going through matching up the amps, cabs, effects, etc. And it's actually incredibly hard to do because the Helix has far, far less top end by default. So much so that I wouldn't be surprised if they deliberately added an extra high-end cut to avoid complaints about "fizz" (or indeed "squirrel"). If anything I wish there was something to bring back some of the 'air' that is missing. I do think a lot of the debate is mostly cork-sniffing and confirmation bias - people listen to their Helix through high quality monitors containing tweeters pointing at ear level, and are surprised to hear more high-end than when they're playing through a floor-level cabinet or combo on the floor, and they put this down to the modelling as they expect that to be harsh and fizzy, when in fact a lot of distorted guitars are harsh and fizzy until the cabinet and the listening environment dulls it a little.

Let's just say that there are a couple of things I miss from the venerable XT Live which I'd really love to see in the Helix, and each time an update comes around, I will be hoping to see them. :)

I have to be honest and say I'm a little disappointed with the selection. We get a 7th, 8th, and 9th Marshall amp (not counting the 2204 - also, no JCM 900?), but still no Engl Powerball or E530, and no Diezel. A sixth fuzz effect but still no Metal Zone (which was in the XT and the HD). (Yes, I know, spot the metal guy. We're not all over at Fractal, you know...) Good to see another compressor, long overdue, but still no simple Boss CS-1, which was considered worthy of modelling twice back in the XT days? Finally, nobody could turn their nose up at a Space Echo sim, but with the Adriatic Delay and Elephant Man already in there one could argue that the delays were already Helix's best feature. Don't get me wrong; I'm happy with the Helix as it was when I bought it. It's just that the clamour about updates builds up expectations... and then knocks them down again. ;)

I was quite disappointed to see that the Metal Zone isn't in the Helix, given that it was in the Pod XT, and that it's a classic pedal for certain genres. Another overlooked one is the HM-2, the mainstay of several death metal bands to this day. Neither pedal is a smooth tube-amp tone but neither was meant to be. I'm really hoping one or both are added soon.

I have reverb all over every single one of my clean and lead sounds. Live, at home, everywhere. It's part of the tone, not just simulating a space.

I play black and doom metal and I'm quite happy with the Helix so far. I'm feeling the lack of HM-2 and MT-2 simulations in the Helix, but I figure that I can experiment with the Centaur and Rat sims for now - and who knows, maybe one of the Boss pedals will make it into the next update.

Although I have some preferences (Metal Zone pedal, better reverbs, maybe a more intuituve compressor) I was totally fine with whatever was going to come along in the next update... ...then I had a dream the other night where the update was announced, and it was "7 new effects pedals: 5 new overdrives, including a reworked tube screamer, and 2 fuzzes", which made me wake up with a cold sweat.

The LePou plugins are great, and I've used them on albums. But you get a lot more amps with the Helix (Native or otherwise), and a ton of stomp boxes and effects. And a ton of convenient routing options within the plugin. I'm not going to comment on fizz or thinness; most of the time I think this is some sort of negative confirmation bias. Nobody has ever known when I've used amp sims on my recordings or when I used real amps.

I think some of the presets may have changed in recent versions, because I'm positive that my Helix bought a few months ago has a Deafheaven preset, but I don't see it in your list.

Normally the panning is something you handle in your DAW, on the track you've recorded onto. The software or hardware you use for the performance doesn't matter. What DAW are you using?

The last 2 responses suggest that maybe I wasn't clear about what I'm trying to achieve. I actively want to be able to make changes on the computer and have them reflected on the floorboard, and vice versa as well. So I don't want them entirely separate. It's just that it's easy to lose track of these changes if you're not very careful. For example, say I'm working on a demo at home, so I tweak my clean tone in Native and come up with something I prefer, but I don't get a chance to plug in the Helix Floor and synchronise it. Then I play a gig and make some adjustments to my clean tone afterwards based on feedback. The next time I sync that tone - whichever way I do it - I'll lose one of my changes, and it won't be obvious. I will probably just use version control so that if I do overwrite something by accident, I can revert back to an older version and then work out how to merge them together. I'm not sure whether the Native plugins store their full state or whether they store a reference to a preset, so it's going to be interesting to see what happens when I load a preset into one song in my DAW, update that preset in another song (perhaps by loading a floorboard preset), and then go back to see what has happened in the first song. Probably there'll be no change unless I explicitly re-select the preset. Probably. :)

I'm going to save each preset out to disk, but even there the problem remains... if I pull the latest presets from the floor unit to my computer, I have to remember which ones I changed and overwrite the saved ones on the computer, and not overwrite ones I edited in Native. As I'm a programmer, what I might do on the computer is actually use version control software to 'commit' the changes when I save them to the computer, so I have a history of changes and can revert them if necessary. That doesn't help me with the sync process however, just reduces the chance of accidentally losing something.

I have a Helix Floor and Helix Native, and I anticipate keeping the presets broadly synchronised between the two. I'm going to be creating patches on both devices, often to be used on both devices, with the idea that tones I create for recording sessions can be used live, and vice versa. For now, I'm going to use the USER 5 setlist for my computer-made presets, and the USER 1 setlist for my floor-made presets - that way, I should be able to import whole setlists from one to the other without risking overwriting changes I made on 'the other end', but allowing for the preset to be copied between setlists if necessary. What I want to know is - am I missing a better strategy for this? Is there any facility to just say "load in every preset from the setlist or bundle, except any that are older than what I have already?"

From what I understand, for this to work properly you need to: Ensure your Send and Return blocks are set to Instrument level Ensure your volume dial is where you want it (i.e. probably higher than you think: see my thread - http://line6.com/support/topic/29175-output-levels-seem-a-bit-low/ - ignore the random posts about the Optical Tremolo...) Adjust the Return block level if the physical amp is too loud or quiet Notes: 1) Line level is a lot higher than instrument level. You know an amp expects an instrument level signal, so assume that is correct for a Send into the front of an amp. And for the Return, you're obviously seeing that the signal coming back is quite low, so setting the Return to "Instrument" tells the Helix about this and lets it adjust accordingly, hopefully bringing your levels up. 2) Since the volume dial is an attenuator then strictly speaking you normally want it at 100% for 4CM mode. I don't personally think that's desirable, so I have it at about 50% but with +9dB in the output block to compensate equally. 3) You may still need to tweak the levels a bit, so I suggest setting up 2 snapshots - one with the Send/Return in place, and one with a preamp block with similar gain and other characteristics and a 'reasonable' channel volume - and switch between the two, tinkering with Send/Return block levels until they are broadly similar enough. Then you can be fairly confident that the loop to the 'real' amp is acting much like a modelled amp and providing levels that the Helix is comfortable with.

Okay, my guess is this: the Helix editor uses the OpenGL rendering system your computer is struggling with whatever OpenGL settings the editor normally uses 256 color mode forces the app to pick some different settings that your graphics can actually work with Your first port of call might be to try and update your graphics drivers. Perhaps they broke something in OpenGL for you recently. This can happen because driver manufacturers care a lot more about DirectX than OpenGL so sometimes they break edge cases of the latter in order to improve the former. Your second attempt might be to ensure you have enough memory free. Older and cheaper computers sometimes share the system memory with the graphics memory - so when a program like the Helix editor asks for a whole screen of pretty graphics to work with, the operating system can say "no, that's not gonna happen". 256 color mode sometimes works here because it asks for about a quarter as much memory as it normally would. Try running the editor with all other applications open, and attempt to close down any background applications that you don't need. (Note, this is memory, not disk space; don't bother uninstalling anything or deleting anything, as it won't help.) Last up - maybe contact Line 6 support with your system specs. They may be able to tell you how to get more information from the crash, or point you at a file which you can send to them so they can get more information. This probably won't help you in the short term, but in the medium term it increases the chance that they can fix the editor for you and people in your position.

Let's back up a bit - what is the actual problem? i.e. What happens when you just run the editor as-is, without trying any workarounds or special processes?

I asked how much attenuation the volume dial gives; well, my experiments show, roughly: full / 5 o clock = 0dB, i.e 100% volume 3 o clock = -3dB 2 o clock = -4.5dB 1 o clock = -6dB 12 o clock = -9dB 11 o clock = -18dB 10 o clock = -20dB 9 o clock = -40dB This is interesting because it shows that you get more resolution on the volume dial with it turned down than with it turned up. So, what I will probably do, next time I take the Helix out, is set the output block to +9dB, and set my volume dial at about 12 o clock. This should mean I'm sending broadly the right amount of signal to my amp, the same as if I had the output block at unity and the volume dial at full, but I will have some scope to use the volume dial to tweak the level. (And hey, for sh*ts and giggles I added the Optical Trem in as well. It does virtually nothing. Possibly a slight scooping of the mids. Don't waste your time.)

I do still think that having a large volume dial act only as an attenuator is a flawed decision, for the same reason that a mixing desk usually lets you push the sliders above 0dB - being able to boost the output is useful. But, it is what it is. I will probably just try and push the Output block higher so that I can have the volume down lower. The sound engineer controls the levels on the PA, but they want to make sure I am producing the right levels onstage for their microphones and for whatever other constraints they may have. That then gets fed into their desk and then to the PA.