cruisinon2

I sympathize with your plight... and I agree with the underlying sentiment. Unfortunately, the march of technology and the realities of the marketplace in a disposable economy that prioritizes the acquisition of the "latest and greatest" above all else, means that this kind of problem is never going away. It's hard to marry that reality to something like a guitar... It doesn't much matter for things that we tend not to develop emotional attachments to, like big black boxes with lights and footswitches... but for something like a guitar it's always gonna be a problem. I suspect that's largely why I've gravitated back towards my other axes over the years. For all the things the Variax does well, it's too tech-dependent and way too easy to upset the apple cart... that, and I can't be wireless without losing all the control capabilities. With all my other instruments, there's almost nothing that I can't fix myself with allen keys, a file, some contact cleaner, or 5 minutes with a soldering iron... but if the Variax guts $hit the bed or Workbench becomes obsolete and unusable, then I've got a $1K doorstop.

Different output = different tone, and headphones and studio monitors are very different beasts. With monitors, the sound is bouncing all over the room. High end frequencies dissipate readily with increasing distance from the source, and they also tend be absorbed by anything that's not hard, flat, and reflective...carpeting, big poofy couches, etc etc. So it doesn't surprise me that your monitors sound "dull" compared to the headphones. The cans are right on top of your ears, and the high end will seem more pronounced as a result. You'll notice the same thing if you stick your head right up next to a guitar cabinet. Up close it's chainsaw-shrill... but off-axis just a couple of feet away, and all that high end ripping your head off disappears. Generally speaking, when switching between two very different kinds of outputs, you're gonna have to do some EQing, and this will be true no matter what monitors or PA speakers you buy. The simplest solution is keeping different setlists for each intended use... yes, it's more work up front, but you only have to do it once... otherwise you'll be constantly tweaking back and forth every time you switch from cans to monitors. It's not likely to be a magic bullet, for the various reasons listed above. If you're dialing in your patches with headphones, they're gonna sound different through anything else... and vice versa. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot...depending on the patch and the volume at which you're listening.

Help the devs do what? If you're waiting for some future update to deliver reverbs as lush as what you get from a Strymon (or anything comparable), you're gonna be disappointed. Many of those pricier reverb units that can drown you in impossibly saturated stereo reverbs are capable of doing so because they have as much (if not more) DSP than Helix does, and it's all dedicated to doing just one thing... reverb. Modeling any of those pedals would likely use up so much of Helix's available DSP resources, that you wouldn't be able to have much else in your signal chain. Don't hold your breath...

Do you get any sound out of it at all? If the tuner isn't recognizing the VDI input, I'm surprised that you can hear anything. Set the input block to Variax or Multi. Fancy electronics aside, it's still a guitar...the rest of the instrument isn't significantly different than anything else you've ever played... if you can successfully mute strings you don't want to hear on other guitars, then you can do it on this one. You can swap bodies and pickups to your heart's content in Workbench and save whatever you come up with to the guitar as a custom model... since there's no SG model in there, you'll have to experiment and see what gets you close.

I believe this is the first time I've seen someone go to the trouble of resurrecting a 2 1/2 year old thread, solely for the purpose of $hitting on Line 6, lol... well done! ;)

Maybe you can't read. I said I don't use meters at all... and before you go out of your way to correct me yet again and tell me how foolish that is, do us both a favor and don't bother. I submit. You're the smart one and you win. Use your meters to your heart's content. Make your graphs and pie charts and "prove" whatever you like, I don't care. I play music... you can keep your lab reports.

Interesting... been using them for years, but I had no idea they were just slapping their magic coating on somebody else's strings. They still last forever compared to regular strings, but this kinda ruins the mystique a little... oh well, lol

You haven't found any discussions about it because it's an incrediblely narrow topic...if it can even be called that. It's one pickup combination. Nobody's doing their PhD thesis on that. There are no magic bullets...there's only trial and error. And relying on anonymous opinions from the depths of the internet won't get you very far. You can't evaluate stuff like this in an abstract vacuum... Try stuff. Keep what works, and discard the rest. And be prepared to wake up one day liking something that you previously despised once you give it another go. It happens. I hated Teles for years until I built a parts-caster that I liked. Now it's one of my favorite go-to guitars. Opinions change. Tastes change.... but there is one, and only one way to find out if you're gonna like something. And I promise you that diagrams, equations, and guesswork ain't it.

You have a number of impedance options in the input block when using the guitar in... then there's the input pad you can mess with, as well. Futz around with various combinations and see if it works for you.

Dude, there is no universal truth for any of this stuff... not with how we perceive sound, see colors, or what a cheeseburger tastes like. Plus, guitar players are crazy... you'll never get 10 guitarists to all agree on anything. Perception is weird and fickle, can be influenced by everything from the weather to the pain in your left big toe. It's highly variable from one guy to next, and completely unpredictable. You might love how your rig sounds one day and hate it the next, having changed nothing in the interim but your socks.

There are no definitive answers to any of those questions, as they are all entirely subjective. Can a pickup not be hot enough? Well that depends on what you want to do with it. If you're trying to play Norwegian death metal on a vintage Tele, you're probably not gonna be happy. But if you're a country guy you'll be in hog heaven, and you'll never question the pickup's output. No one can possibly predict whether or not you will be able to perceive subtle differences in tone between various pickup configurations from looking at a diagram.... and neither will you for that matter. There is exactly one way to find out... and the answer will boil down to a combination of several things: 1) What specific pickups are we talking about? There are a million pickups on the market for a reason... they're not all the same. Not all humbuckers react the same to being split and/or coil tapped either... some do it better than others, so you may notice more of a difference with the in between positions with some pickups than others. 2) Then there's the guitar itself...put the same pickup in a Strat, a Tele, and a LP, and you're gonna get three different tones. 3) How good are your ears? Can you listen to a recording and know whether you're hearing a humbucker or a single coil? Can you tell whether it's in the neck or bridge position just by the tone? Have you been a musician and/or mixing and mastering recordings for decades, or are you like my wife, who will never understand why anyone would want or need more than one guitar, because "they all just sound like guitars"?

I know it's all been discussed to death a million times, but this is exactly why I don't bother with dB meters, lol.. If a meter tells me that two tones are both 'X' dB, yet perceptually one is clearly "louder" thanks to our faulty brains, then what good is the number to me? I'm still gonna hafta boost or cut one relative to the other if I want things to sound level. It's more of a rhetorical/philosophical musing than anything else... not trying to pick a fight, lol. Whatever works for you, me, and the bum hanging on the lamppost, is what works...

Lmao...that's fantastic. The "golden ear" crowd won't like it much, but screw 'em...;)

There are a million places you can boost your overall volume besides the master volume knob. Most blocks have an output level parameter, but the for the sake of simplicity, the output block at the end of the chain is your best bet. But regardless, volume is a huge contributor to tone, no matter where it's being raised or lowered... if you boost or cut enough, your perception of the tone will change, and there's nothing you can do about that... it's just how our brains work.

You don't.The powers that be took it away from everybody some time ago... No collusion! ;)

No matter...I declare your assertion falsifiable! ;)

Well copyright rules being what they are, you won't get a list from Line6...otherwise they wouldn't have bothered to thinly disguise the names in the first place. You might find some enterprising soul who took the time to write them all down, but I'd post this in the Helix forum if you actually want anybody to see it... it's gonna go largely unnoticed in here. But as far as these two examples go "$$$ for Nothin' " is arguably one of the most iconic guitar riffs ever recorded and about a self explanatory as it gets, and I can only assume "Senor Sandman" is "Enter Sandman".

Just get a decent pair of studio monitors and call it a day. If you're not gigging and/or don't want or need to get particularly loud, then this is by far the most versatile and dollar-friendly solution. Plus, since you've indicated an interest in recording, stereo output is a must anyway... you can't mix multi-track recordings in mono (well technically you could, but the finished product will sound like baked a$$). And even if you never record a single note, stereo reverbs and delays are glorious. You'll thank me later... lol

Well if you're buying the Helix floor, then there's really no need for a separate controller... you'll have plenty of switches at your disposal.

We know. You're brilliant... and we're all very impressed. We all stand humbled in the presence of greatness. Tell us again. It never gets old.

Give him a minute to get out his slide-rule and lab coat...

They were way behind the curve after the shutdown last spring... wouldn't surprise me if they're still playing catch up to some degree. Even their "in stock" selections are not a plentiful as usual.

That's a very common assumption... trouble is, it's never true. There are numerous variables beyond the patch you bought. It was dialed in with guitars and pickups you don't have, on a different output device(s), in a different listening environment, and at an unknown volume... the volume is particularly significant. And if you're comparing it to some demo video you've seen, all bets are off as you've no idea how much post processing may have been done after the fact. And if all that isn't enough, there's the fact that any given tone can sound very different in a mix compared to playing solo. There will never be perfect 1:1 tonal continuity from one player to the next when the only common denominator is the patch... and as you've already seen, sometimes the difference is night and day. There are simply too many variables. Save your money and learn to create your own tones... it's the only way. You can buy all the patches you want, from every "professional" under the sun, and the same thing is gonna happen every time.

Oh goody, here we go again...

This entire thread is an excellent example. And I didn't say evil...I said insufferable. This is a red herring... but I'm quite sure you already know that. Opinions and subjective assessments can be neither proven nor disproven. A preference has no intrinsic value, and there is no universal preference standard by which to evaluate yours, mine, or anyone else's. The OP tried a setting he hadn't used before, he liked the results, and choose to share that opinion. You waltzed in and told him he was wrong, demanding that he prove otherwise. It's insulting. None whatsoever. If I like eggplant and you don't, that's terrific. Neither of us will ever change our minds, and no matter who says what, the sun will still rise tomorrow. Precisely. Yet you continue to dump on the OP, demanding "proof" that his personal preference for one setting over another is demonstrably/quantifiably "better". What this dance does for you, I cannot possibly fathom... yet here we are.