cruisinon2

Oh for God's sake, these aren't mathematical theorems...it's ALL SUBJECTIVE. It's impossible to "prove" anyting either way. Those who want the wood to make a huge difference will hear it, and others won't. Present the average person with 2 bottles of wine...fill them both with the same stuff, and tell 'em one is $200 and the other one is six bucks...9/10 will tell you the pricey bottle tastes better. Who's right? Nobody.

Well if the strings are properly stretched, then something else is wrong...bridge may not be returning to neutral position after bends or tremelo bar gymnastics, for some reason. Lousy/worn tremelo springs maybe? Hard to say. I hate Floyds...always more trouble than they're worth.

Cheap Mexi Strat: $300 '59 LP reissue built from 3D-scanned specs of one of Les Paul's personal guitars: $10K Getting all butt-hurt arguing over pieces of wood: Priceless. ;)

Work, work, work...I'm waiting on Pfizer to market a pill that will just make me think everything sounds great. Effortless tonal nirvana, here I come!!! ;)

It "should" sound the way you want it to. There is no universal definition for what sounds good, horrible, or anything in between. For me or anyone else to tell you "OK, now THIS is what Helix is supposed to sound like", is ridiculous and defeats the purpose of owning something as versatile and customizable as this unit is. What I think sounds great is irrelevant...you have to figure out how to get it to spit out tones that YOU like. That's the hard part...and right out of the box, it's virtually guaranteed NOT to.

It's all or nothing, gents...there is no way to go bald gracefully. Half a head of hair looks horrendous on EVERYONE. When the time comes, Gillette offers the only real solution. Cue-Balls unite! ;)

Stereo FX are marvelous for recording, and can make a guitar sound huge, but in a live setting it can quickly become a mess...if you're using in-ear monitors, it'll sounds great to you, but what's going out to FOH can end up sounding lop-sided depending on where a listener is standing relative to the mains. A lot of people only end up hearing half of the effect.

OK, I just gotta know. ..what sort of masochists are standing outside in sub-zero temps to see a band? ;)

Yes, that solves the send/save issue, but won't address the problem of not being able to hear the changes as you make them, without double-clicking on the patch again. Something else is going on there...any change you make should be audible instantly, without the extra step of sending/saving from the edit software, or re-clicking on the patch itself.

Well asterisk or no, the changes you make are either being saved to the device, or they aren't...if not, then try reinstalling the edit software, and/or doing a factory reset on the POD (after backing up your patches). Those are really the only options you've got.

Once you've been at it long enough, and your repertoire gets large enough, trying to create a separate tone for everything you might conceivably play on a given night becomes an exhausting, Herculean task. I gave up on that long ago...go ahead and play "Another Brick In The Wall" with a Les Paul if you feel like it...the only one who's gonna notice anyway is the guitar player standing in the back with his arms folded. You can play all night, any tune under the sun, with 4 or 5 patches tops: crystal clean, edge of breakup, mild dirt, heavy crunch, and a lead tone that you vary with the guitar's volume. And maybe an acoustic patch, if you're a Variax guy. Done and done.

Bottom line....extremes in temperature and/or humidity really aren't good for ANYTHING. Cars, guitars, electronics, fine shotguns, your sinuses....the list is endless. I'm in the north east. No outdoor gigs much past Labor Day. No fun, not worth the hassel...

"Send" doesn't "save" to the device, at least not on mine...though it should. The little asterisk remains on the screen on the POD, indicating that changes have been made, but not saved. This topic came up recently in another thread...I was told this is a long know "bug", and that the changes actually are saved when sent from HD EDIT, but I'll argue all day long that this isn't the case, at least not on my device. If I don't save manually on the POD itself, any changes I made will be lost. As with yours, if I hit the footswitch without saving manually, it reverts back to the previous settings. I made my peace with it long ago. When I'm done editing, I just reach down and tap "save". Irritating, but problem solved. What I don't have is the other problem you mention...I can hear the changes I make on the fly as I make them, without having to double click on the same patch again. No idea what's up with that. You might want to try re-installing the edit software.

Oh, who knows what they're actually doing? They could be stuffing them with gerbil carcasses...nobody's peeling them open to check. ;)

Frozen eardrums...;)

It's virtually impossible to stay in tune in those temps anyway...far from ideal in virtually every respect.

Did I miss Walk-In-FreezerPallooza again?!?!? ;)

Aren't they all? I've used Elixirs...albeit a heavier gauge (11-49)...for years without an issue.

They've been using chambered bodies for some time now. When it's done properly, you still end up with a nice resonant instrument with plenty of sustain. I don't want a 13lb guitar anyway...I wanna make music, not moor an aircraft carrier. ;)

Put a humbucker in the Strat, and the gain issue with the Plexi would be solved.

Doesn't take much volume to drown that out either...I can't even hear the phone ring when it's 2 feet away.

I love first world problems... I'm sure this will get remedied right after TV commercials stop knocking me over the back of the couch because they're 15 dB louder than the show I was just watching. Of course the advertising world and the networks deny that this is the case anyway...;)

It's nice that those settings work universally, but it's just dumb luck. Took me quite a while to balance the levels of all the models that I use, and they certainly are not all the same. At the time I was forced to wonder why they even bothered with global settings at all, as some of the models are quite different with respect to relative string volumes. The global settings are of no use to me at all...fixing one model this way just ruins 3 others.

Even at a volume sufficient to blow you back into last week, you're neighbors are never gonna hear open back headphones through a wall. And if they can, then they also know every TV show you watch, and can transcribe your half of every phone conversation. Someone sitting a few feet away in the same room will certainly hear you, but a closed door is more than sufficient to block it out.

I'm not gonna tell you it's impossible to get good tones this way, but it will be very difficult, and in all likelihood a very noisy set-up. These two units are simply not designed to work together. The lack of an FX loop is your problem. Running Helix straight into the from of the amp is effectively daisy-chaining two modelers together...it's redundant, and difficult to tweak. If you're trying to use the models in Helix, there's nothing you can do to prevent the Spider from coloring everything that Helix is pumping out...and if you're not gonna use the Helix models, then why have it? Yes, you could run just the FX, but if that's all you want, there are far cheaper multi-fx units out there that will do the same thing.