cruisinon2

We'd all love that.... but it's never gonna happen, no matter how nicely you ask or how high on the corporate ladder you climb. This is a liability issue, end of story. And like it or not, the chosen "fix" is artificially limiting the battery's charge capacity. The lawyers will never allow them to roll the dice and redistribute the old firmware. Thank the users who left the batteries charging endlessly and set fire to the drapes... whomever they are, they're the reason that this product no longer functions as originally advertised.

I suppose you could try installing a backup... perhaps patch 32C is corrupted and causing your problem... but that aside, a factory reset is generally the only other recourse an end user has to revive these kinds of devices when they crap the bed... if that's not working, then it's time to open a service ticket and see what they tell you.

Don't see what cleaning the pickup selector switch has to do with whether or not the battery is in place, or why you'd need a syringe... just give a quick blast into the switch and toggle it back and forth a few times. It usually does the trick, but even if not, I fail to see how you'd make anything worse.

In principle, I agree... but you might as well go ahead and ask for that unicorn. It's a disposable world, and the march of technology will only speed up, leaving countless good products in its wake that end up marginally supported (if not outright abandoned) because keeping them endlessly forward-compliant simply isn't cost effective or practical. They won't stay in business selling you one guitar that you go on to use for the next eleventyone years, with updates till Doomsday... this is largely why my 69 isn't a big part of the arsenal anymore. I saw the writing on the wall years ago.

This is 99.97% of it right here. Again... one man's "wow" is another's "sounds like boiled $hit", and you can't point to anyone's emotional reaction as conclusive "proof" of anything. Had you been standing right next to him, you could just as easily have found it to be awful, no matter what his reaction was... and there's absolutely no way to know. Subjective assessments of sound are exactly that... subjective. Plus, you still have absolutely no clue what Demo Guy is hearing in the room. If this is your yardstick, you'll be spinning your wheels forever. Instead of trying to duplicate what makes somebody else say "wow", figure out what it'll take for you to have that same reaction.... because that's all that matters.

Yes, exactly. This underscores everything I've already said... you're not hearing what they're hearing, period... and you never will if all you do is replicate whatever settings they're using on their end. Plus, everyone has a different definition of what "this sounds great" means, and there's no way anyone can possibly fathom what some guy in a video is hearing in the room he's standing in... all you can do is guess. Perception is very much an individual phenomenon. You might love a tone that I hate, or vice versa... but so what? Nobody's "right" or "wrong". There's a steep leaving curve with modelers. We all went through it. I would suggest watching some of Jason Sadites' Helix tutorials on YouTube. He goes through the reasoning behind the settings he chooses, but he's careful to emphasize that fixating on specific numbers is pointless. That's what you need... the how's and why's that various parameters do what they do, and ways to manipulate them to achieve a certain goal. Mimicking individual settings verbatim and expecting 1:1 continuity with a tone in a youtube video is a fantasy, and it will will get you nowhere. It won't sound the same to you no matter what you do, for all the reasons I've already laid out. You have to experiment and do it yourself. There's no way around the grunt work... and yes, it sucks. It's tedious and time consuming. But you only have to do it once. And no, there's nothing wrong with your guitar. Going out and buying something else wouldn't provide the secret sauce either... it would only introduce yet another variable. Spend some time learning the unit, and you'll get there. I didn't gig with my Helix for a solid 2 months after I got it, until I was super comfortable with everything... and I had already been using other modelers for years at that point. These aren't plug and play devices...

Perhaps your experience will be different, but don't count on it. To their credit, L6 replaced mine after the update halved the battery life of my original unit, but the new one is no different. Now I just use one and keep the other charged, and swap when it gets into the red zone after 2.5-3 hours. When these units are done and both battery's already limited capacity fades, I'll be looking for another wireless solution... this one is a hobbled product.

You can hook it up any way you want and it won't make any difference... no cable will be the magic bullet you're looking for. If that picture is any indication, what you're hearing in that video is a mic-ed Powercab, and I assume you're listening to yours live in the room... that makes all the difference in the world, and you're comparing apples to oranges. Take your favorite amp to a studio, play it standing few feet away in the live room, and then go listen to what the guy at the desk is hearing through the monitors. It will not be the same sound, and that's exactly what's going on here. The mic is but one in a long list of variables, and an enormous one at that. Then there's the guitar, pickups, the volume he's playing at (which is unknown with no way to verify) vs wherever your levels are, different listening environments, you with your fingers and him with his. Other people's patches are a waste of time... don't care how famous or accomplished they are. There's never any tonal continuity between what you hear on a demo video and what you get on your end. There is no drag and drop solution to tonal bliss, and it can't be purchased... you have to learn to dial in the sounds you want yourself. What ends up working for you, me, or in somebody's YouTube demo are more or less guaranteed to be entirely different.

I'd like to think so... but it won't happen. Gullibility, "keeping up with the Jones' ", and the FOMO mentality have made planned obsolescence the most successful marketing strategy of all time. We're all in... from "built to last" to "built to $hit the bed right on schedule" in two generations. Sad.

Bug fixes are fine and dandy, and appreciated. But nobody asking about new/revised features considers that an "update"...it's fixing a screw-up. Nothing "new" has been added in nearly 7 years, and the smart money says there's nothing coming down the pike either. Hell, marriages start and end in less time than that, lol...Just because something is still on the shelves, doesn't mean it's still being actively developed. And the more time that passes after a legitimate update, the less likely another one becomes... the market demands new products, not re-tooled old ones. Business is business...

Check your pickup height. If they're too close to the strings, intonation problems can sometimes result. It tends to be more of a problem with single coils, but a magnet is a magnet... too close and it can push you out of tune just enough that it makes intonating some strings difficult, if not impossible.

This takes me back to the summer of 1979...Dad dragged us to the 9V Battery Museum in Squashed Possum, TN. Worst vacation ever...;)

The last update of any significance was in 2014... interpret that however you like. But imho, that's a pretty good indication of where the product currently ranks on the dev's list of things to do...

Show one a rotary phone and see what happens...a communications device with moving parts? They'll jump back 6 feet and poke it with a stick.

Lol... Some folks think that the dudes at CERN are gonna create a black hole that swallows the earth... but I'll bet money that one of these oh so fruitful discussions will do it first. Keep stretching the limits of conjecture, wild guessing, and wishful thinking to this extent, and that'll rip the fabric of space-time before the guys with the lab coats...;)

And after years on end of steadfastly refusing to announce release dates ahead of time, you can't possibly be surprised when you don't get an answer. A hint or two about what's in it? Perhaps, but as for when you'll get it... you might as well be asking for the results from his last prostate exam.

Assuming that the next generation is also piezo driven, then sure... that's possible. It's highly unlikely that the next one will have backwards compatible guts to drop into existing guitars, though. It simply isn't in their financial interest to do so. They want to sell you a new product, not update an old one. Besides, 10+ years in, the official party line is still "don't touch anything yourself". Hell, they expect you to drag it to an "authorized service center" for a friggin' setup...I seriously doubt they're gonna want anybody trying to retrofit an old instrument with a new brain. They'd be drowning in repairs from butchered DIY attempts.

Then the fact that it's not there is almost guaranteed to pi$$ you off. If I've learned one thing about guitars in 30+ years of playing, it's this: Don't settle. You won't be happy, and a few months later you'll be trying to unload it on Reverb, and getting annoyed at taking a loss while you try to find something that actually suits your needs. We're not talking about tolerating it because it's not your favorite color, or because it only comes with a gig bag instead of a hard case. Some guys never touch the tone knob and it's always on 10... and others ride it all the time, and it's part of their tone shaping. If that's you, then taking it away is gonna feel like chopping off a finger. Buy what you actually want...

Do you honestly think that hum reduction is the sole reason than anyone would bother using a guitar equipped with humbuckers? While that may have been the primary motivation for their design way back when, the tones they produce are fundamentally different than single coil pickups...there's simply no mistaking one for the other. It's as night and day as anything gets, and I'm not talking about the relative levels of noise that each produces. Now nobody "needs" one or the other, per se...it's a matter of personal preference more than anything else. But noisy or not, you can't make one sound like the other no matter what gear you're plugging it into...

The palm muting issues have nothing whatsoever to do with the magnetic pickups, no matter what kind they are... it's a piezo-related problem that affects the modeled sounds only. No. These guitars are full of quircks as it is... active pickups are just gonna be a pain in the a$$, and you'll have a tough time finding a place for the battery.

It's nice to see that the "Where's my free $hit?!" threads are a cross-platform phenomenon...;)

This.

Yes... this is precisely what studio monitors are designed for.

Post this is the Helix forum... it'll go largely unnoticed in here.

Yes.