cruisinon2

Fractal...;) Sorry, couldn't help myself, lol. Sadly I'm not the one to ask, but someone will likely chime in. Be prepared for IT- themed questions like what OS you're running, etc etc.

First thing in your signal chain is the input block, which has a noise gate...season to taste.

With all the Variax platforms having been officially discontinued several months ago, I'd say the odds of finding a new USB dongle anywhere is slim to none. You can always trudge through the swamp that is the used gear market on eBay and/ or Reverb and maybe you'll get lucky. But honestly, those things were hard to come by before they deep-sixed the whole product line.

Lol... so we're to believe that sloppy playing and/or the "wrong" choice of pick somehow magically forces a DETUNED signal from a piezo saddle that has had its output set to zero? Well that's some Old Testament-level miracle stuff, right there... I'll sum up, yet again: - A string output OFF. - Play palm muted notes on aforementioned A string, with ZERO OUTPUT. - DETUNED notes exit the instrument, clearly audible through amplifier. Zero output is zero output. If notes played on a string with zero output still manage to come through the amp, AND those notes are detuned, despite the fact that the selected tuning DOES NOT ALTER the pitch of the string in question, then there's only one place that signal can possibly be coming from: The ONLY saddle that's set to detune the pitch with the selected tuning... in this case, the Low E. But by all means, let's blame the pick...after all, I'm 15 lbs overweight because the guy at the next table is eating cheesecake. If I play on a string that has been turned OFF, then it wouldn't matter if I were using a chunk of gravel or a razor blade as a pick... off is off. I should hear NOTHING coming through the amp...but that's not the case. And if I were 12 years old with 2 weeks of guitar lessons under my belt, I might accept the "you don't know what you're doing yet", noisy palm muting explanation... but that ship sailed 40 years ago. It's OK to admit that the tech is imperfect... because that's the truth. Or you can just keep grasping at straws and trying to gaslight everybody. Peace.

At the risk of beating a decade-old dead horse, this is not a sloppy technique problem, and it doesn't have a blessed thing to do with what kind of pick one might be using, and it's all easily provable. Go into Workbench and turn the A string output to zero. Then go ahead and chug away on the A string. If perfect isolation from other piezo saddles existed, you'd hear nothing at all coming through the amp, but that's not what happens. The notes are still clearly audible through whatever it is that your playing through, albeit at a lower volume. And with the Drop D tuning engaged, the notes you hear WILL be detuned from the actual pitch you are playing. With the A string output at zero, and a DETUNED note coming through the amp, the only possible conclusion is that the low E string piezo is capturing the notes played on the A string... because the Drop D tuning doesn't alter the A string, only the low E. That's not sympathetic ringing, or the "dual tone" phenomenon of heating both the acoustic pitch as well as an altered note. With the A string output fully OFF, playing on that string alone should produce no sound at all through the amp, never mind a pitch one whole step below the note being played.

You are correct...I did all the same experimentation that you've mentioned when I got mine 10+ years ago. There's no getting around it. It was never fixed and it won't be, as I don't think it's possible... it's a mechanical issue inherent to the design. Plus, all the Variax stuff has been discontinued anyway, so they're not working on anything anymore. As you've noticed, there is cross-talk between adjacent piezo saddles, most noticeable when palm muting on the A string. The Low E saddle can "hear" the A string, and with any of the "drop D" tunings, detunes it by a whole step, and outputs it along with the original un-altered note(s) from the A string itself. There a reason nobody writes whole step harmony lines ;)... it's frightfully unpleasant. High gain tones make it worse. It's only a problem with alt tunings that detune some strings but not others. When all the strings are being dropped by the same interval it's a non-issue because any bleed- through to other saddles will produce the same altered pitch as the original string. But with adjacent strings where one is alerted and the other isn't, the result is a mess. Depending on the tune/riff in question, sometimes you can get away with it... but much of the time it's useless. This was one of my primary reasons for wanting a Variax in the first place, and turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Bottom line is the Variax does some things very well, and others not so much. There are some technical hurdles that I'm not convinced can ever be fixed, and this is one of them... unless somebody figures out a way to truly isolate the signal from each string. Till then, it is what it is.

Mercifully, no...

Nobody from L6 monitors these forums. Product/ feature requests have to go in Ideascale, otherwise they'll never be seen by a single eyeball capable of acting on the suggestion. And fwiw, similar requests have appeared in here more than once over the years. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.

Yup... our lunch special today is a $hit sandwich. Line up and take your bite, lol. Everybody hates it, as evidenced by the dozen other threads all gripping about the same things. In today's world "new and improved" often means "broken". It's the new normal, so buckle up...it's gonna be a bumpy ride. Politicians call it "progress". Enjoy! ;)

There are at least a half dozen other threads with the same gripe. Absent some official proclamation from the powers that be, you can guess until you turn blue about what the cause is. Website glitch, migrating stuff to another server and/or software platform, purging a bunch of crap for no particular reason... or maybe aliens stole it all. Your guess is as good as anybody else's. There is good news though... now instead of spending hours on end auditioning dozens (if not hundreds) of patches to find the one that might actually be useful without extensive editing, now you can spend that time actually learning how to use your device and figure out how to create what you need on your own. In the long run you'll waste far less time, and you'll gain knowledge that you can apply to any modeler under the sun, no matter who made it.

Without more details, all anybody can do is guess. Does it happen only with one particular patch, or can it be any patch at any time? Is there a volume pedal block in the affected patch(es), or are you using an external expression pedal for anything? Aside from a volume pedal drifting one way or the other and needing to be recalibrated, I can't immediately think of what might be causing it. Is there anything specific that you do that will trigger the problem? Posting the affected patch(es) would allow someone else to download it and see if they can reproduce the same problem on their end. Whatever it is, it's unlikely to be hardware related. If it's just one particular patch, then I'd say it probably got corrupted somehow... rebuild it from scratch in an empty slot and see what happens. Otherwise, as with pretty much any odd and unexplainable behavior, just about the only option you have as an end user is backing up everything and then doing a factory reset. May or may not help, but it certainly won't hurt. If that doesn't solve it, then it's time to open a service ticket.

Lol... Allow me to translate: "We're on it! (since 5/19/2020). Keep your eyes peeled!"...;) If it hasn't been addressed in nearly 4 years, then clearly it's not at the top of anybody's to-do list. I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. This reminds me of the running joke throughout that old Tom Hanks movie, "The Money Pit"...every time he asks the contractor for an end date to the already months-long renovation project, the answer is "Two weeks!" Hurry up and wait, lol...

Lol...I went digital a dozen-ish years ago. I have no amps left to "capture". I'd be stuck downloading somebody else's profiles... which is guaranteed to be the same exercise in futility as combing through the Wasteland of Unusable Sounds that is Customtone, ;) If that's the "future", then I'm SOL...

Trust me, they don't... it's a user forum. L6 personnel rarely show up. Feature requests have to go in IdeaScale, otherwise nobody "official" will ever lay eyes on it.

Hard to say if it's a lack of understanding about the target demographic, or the genuine belief that "I have no use for this thing, therefore no one else will either". We live in a bizarre time, and people are weird. And guitar players are weird and crazy....

Ok, then. Unfortunately, just about the only recourse we have as end users when weird stuff happens (no matter what it is), is to back up everything and do a factory reset. It might not help, but it certainly won't make anything worse. If the issue persists after you've restored everything, then it's time for a service ticket.

All kinds of weird stuff can happen when you copy/ paste a patch to another slot... it's also possible you've discovered a bug. However, if the behavior only happens after you copy and paste, and the original patch otherwise behaves normally, then at least you know how to avoid it...

This is kinda like asking if anyone's ever driven a Chevy, and if it's better than a Ford, or a Kia. The "best" amplifier is the one you can afford, that also suits your needs. They're just tools... and you might decide that you like the inherent characteristics of Marshall amps more than Fender... but that doesn't make one any better or worse than the other. They just produce their own distinctive tones... you like what you like. Also, as L6 is primarily know for their amp modelers and not so much actual amplifiers (though they have made several), you have to decide what it is that you actually want/need. Modelers and traditional guitar amplifiers are two totally different kinds of equipment.

This is a nearly 10 year old thread... and according to his profile page, the last time that guy logged on was in 2018. Don't hold your breath for a reply.

Getting a convincing acoustic tone is mostly about what you're listening through when creating your tones. You need some sort of FRFR speaker solution, as that's what you'll be dealing with at the gig... studio monitors, a good pair of reasonably flat response headphones, etc. If you're currently running your POD Go through a traditional guitar amp, you can tweak until you turn blue, and it'll never sound like an acoustic guitar as typical guitar speakers lack a sufficiently wide frequency response. Also, it will then sound wildly different when you run through the PA. Beyond that, you don't really need to bother using an amp sim in your chain either, in fact it'll probably do more harm than good. Some compression, a studio preamp, EQ, and any fx you might want (reverb, delay, etc) are really all you need to get a decent acoustic tone. You could also just run a completely empty patch using the raw Variax acoustic model of your choice, and let the sound guy deal with the EQ and fx...if you were playing an actual acoustic/ electric guitar, or a mic-ed acoustic at the gig, that's exactly what would be happening anyway.

You don't mention anything about what cabs you're pairing with a given amp, or more importantly your choice of mic sims and their position. Just grabbing a cabinet and dropping it in the chain after the amp block is only half the battle. The mic choice and where you put it have a HUGE impact on the final result... just as it does in a studio mic-ing a real cabinet. There are a bunch of mics to choose from... try different ones and move them around. I assure you that the cab/mic sims in Helix can produce anything from the "wet blanket" effect you mention to "screeching like a f*cked cat during a bird calling contest". Your job is to find a happy medium...

You should post this over in the POD Farm section, under "computer based recording". Those whom might have the answer you're looking for are not likely to see it in here... The Lounge is a ghost town, lol.

The mustard sub-menu would be exhausting. I can think of at least a dozen adjustable parameters for Dijon alone...

Pastrami Overdrive would be a great Weird Al album title...

If Helix can't make me a sandwich after the next update, I'm going Fractal...