cruisinon2

If it's just for goofing around, then you probably don't need all the bells and whistles of a full-blown Helix. Get a Stomp, or the POD Express and call it a day. Repeatedly setting up and tearing down a laptop and interface is gonna get old quick... use the right tool(s) for the job.

Unfortunately I don't have a solution to offer for this specific issue, and for all I know this course might be the best thing since indoor plumbing...but my in my experience these sort of "quick start" classes are largely a waste of your time. I've done similar things in the past, and mostly it tends to be a lot of "If you want "X", click here", kinda stuff. Plenty of "how", but not much "why". In other words, they tend to assume a certain degree of baseline knowledge (in this case, the use of modelers in general) that you may not have if you're new to it. Fortunately there are numerous youtube Helix tutorials that are quite good (Jason Sadites' channel in particular, is excellent). You can go figure things out at your own pace, and not have to worry about your "mentor" getting lost on the way to his laptop, lol.

Don't you just love stuff like this? LOL...nothing funnier in life than an iron-clad "Maybe...and possibly only on a Tuesday with a full moon." ;)

You can't... there's nothing to buy. This thread is about a "proof of concept" 3rd party experiment that a handful of people are allegedly using. It certainly isn't available commercially, at least not on any kind of scale. I won't say that it would be outright impossible to track down the OP in this thread and get him to build/sell you one... but given that he hasn't been back in more than a year, I'd say it's a long shot at best. That aside, you can use any wireless system under the sun with the standard 1/4" output on the Variax. What you can't do is power the guitar that way, you'll have to rely on the battery. You also will not be able to control/ change models or other other settings on the guitar remotely without a VDI connection. Half the appeal of having the Variax in the first place is being able to switch from, for example, an acoustic tone to a Les Paul, or to switch tunings on the fly with a footswitch from another L6 Variax-compatible device. Only the VDI connection allows that. You can still use the guitar without it, but any changes you want to make need to be fine manually on the guitar itself, which is easier said than done mid-song.

There's nothing you can do for that yourself... it's a hardware problem. Open a support ticket.

I've had patches suddenly go wobbly after extended periods of time, doing all sorts of weird sh*t for no discernable reason. It's a computer flogging a bunch of 1's and 0's... stuff goes on tilt sometimes. Exactly why or how is probably more of a philosophical question than anything else, lol. But your troubleshooting method is sound... though I'd probably just rebuild the whole patch from the ground up in an empty slot, as that will eliminate anything else that might be gumming up the works. Don't copy and paste anything from the patch that's giving you trouble. If that works, consider it a win and soldier on. If the problem still persists, try a factory reset. If that still doesn't help, then there's something more complicated clogging the drain that you're not likely to be able to address yourself, and it's service ticket time.

Could be... but as he already stated, that's been ruled that out.

Would you like a foot massage, too? ;)

The lack of retail stock could have any of a thousand explanations. As for your Linux request...L6 would probably spend resources developing firmware for an abacus before plunging down a rabbit hole that maybe 0.004% of their customer base would actually use.

I don't recall needing any sort of "crowbar"... just don't yank on it like a madman, it'll be fine. If it were that fragile, it would have disintegrated on you at some inopportune moment long ago.

You should be able to wiggle the knob off with little effort...I replaced all the stock knobs for some colored aftermarket ones a while back, simple job (don't ask,I guess I was bored, lol). I don't remember specifically, but I'd be stunned if there wasn't a nut holding the pot to the chassis. If not, then it'd be the one and only pot I've ever seen that ain't fastened that way... don't think this rises to the level of a service ticket. Just my 2 cents...

No argument there... bass players always have a gig, no matter how terrible they are (Michael Anthony, cough, cough) ;)

If I've learned anything in my 50+ years on this orb, it's that when a product can't be found anywhere, it's generally easier to find Bigfoot than it is to get the truth about when said product will be available again. There are countless middle-men between L6 and you, and none of them genuinely knows anything until stuff actually shows up. Retailers will be no help because the rank and file who answer the phone don't have real information...they just regurgitate whatever the inventory screen in from of them says. And even then the odds are 50/50 that they're gonna lie to you because they either want to make a sale, or they want you off the phone. Ask L6 and you'll probably be told something ultra-specific like "soon" ;).

L6 has a long and glorious history of being more tight-lipped than the NSA. The only thing anybody outside the mothership knows is that there will eventually be a Helix successor as nothing lasts forever. We can all guess until we turn blue whether it'll be next week, next month, or next year, because the only ones who actually know ain't talking. Enjoy the mystery...

I believe the technical term for that is "busted" ;). Whatever is causing it, it's not likely to be something you'll be able to deal with yourself. You can always try a factory reset... it won't hurt, but my guess is that it probably won't help either. It's time for a service ticket.

Lol... sadly you have been misinformed. Official eyeballs never show up here. They all hang out over on TGP. Any model/ feature requests have to go in Ideascale, otherwise they'll never be seen by anyone who might be in a position to do something about it.

While I have not had this specific problem, I have experienced a variety of odd issues any number of times in my years with Helix, and 99% of the time it ended up being user error. It's super easy to change a setting somewhere without realizing it...

Symptoms are pointing to a hardware issue with the VDI output... if that's the case, then there's little to nothing that you'll be able to do on your end. If you just bought it, get your money back. That is almost guaranteed to be easier (and less expensive) than the repair odyssey that awaits...

Running anything stereo in a live situation is a mess. The only person who's gonna hear your full stereo spread is the one guy in the audience who's standing dead center between the mains. Everybody else in the room is only gonna hear half. And we're talking about bass... if the sound guy is even half awake, he's taking whatever you're giving him and plopping it straight down the middle anyway.

Setup is about personal preference and the way you like the instrument to feel. We don't all like the same string guage, height, or amount of relief. What you play and how you play it dictate what will feel comfortable in your hands. Do you have a light touch, or do you beat the daylights out of the strings? The blues guy bending every other note will want a different setup than the jazz cat who's never bent a string in his life and considers it sacrilege... Defaulting to factory specs won't help you if it happens to give you action that's too high/low for your comfort zone. Every time you pick it up it won't feel right, and it'll end up back in the case 5 minutes later. Despite the fancy electronics, it's still a guitar. Set it up however you like it and don't obsess over whether or not the strings or pickups are fractions of a millimeter higher or lower than L6 says they should be... it simply isn't that critical. If factory tolerances had such a narrow range of "acceptability" for the instrument to function, there would be legions of Variax users who hate the way their instrument plays because they wouldn't be able to set it up like the rest of their guitars.

The only things in life that are "future proof", are already dead... Because tech evolves so quickly today, anything that's sufficiently "high-tech" will have a limited lifespan. Couple that with a thoroughly disposable economy, and you have the recipe for planned obsolescence. It plagues nearly everything we buy at this point. So no, you cannot reasonably expect replacement Variax guts to be available forever... and especially not for a product that has: A) already been discontinued, and B) Was effectively shelved in terms of development for nearly a decade before it was officially terminated. That being said, the guitar half of product will remain a guitar indefinitely... assuming that you're not swinging it around your head and plunging it through the grill of your 4x12 on stage....

All of the above plus the following: IR = Immense Rabbit hole...;) While they can be useful, you'll find that the commercially available IR packages typically contain dozens, if not hundreds of individual IR's that you then have to audition one by one until you find the couple/few that you'll actually like. It's easy to lose hours on end trying to discern what are often very subtle differences. The current onboard mics and cabs are much improved over earlier firmware versions... imho it's easier to get a handle on adjusting those to your needs. IR's are a fixed result that can't be tweaked... you either like it, or you don't.

"Used" has a thousand definitions. Some units get thrown down flights of stairs, and tossed in and out of the back of crappy vans that smell like socks and farts. Others never see the outside of a home studio, and get carefully enclosed in some sort of case after each use. Some have a light foot, and tap the switches gingerly... others are like an angry Sasquatch stomping on them like they're trying to embed the unit in the floor. Thus, the only useful predictor of hardware failures is exactly how "used" the unit you purchase actually is, and that is often very difficult to ascertain unless you're buying it from someone you know and trust to honest about it's history. Fwiw, my Helix floor is 7 years old. I've only gigged sporadically over the last 3 or 4 years, but for the first couple or 3 years of it's life it was on stage quite a bit. The rest of the time it's been in my home studio, but used pretty much daily. I don't abuse my gear, but I freely admit that I don't baby it either. The screen is in good shape, but there are some light scratches on the housing here and there. All the footswitches, buttons, and knobs work just fine, and always have. Like everything else in life, ymmv..

I think a gear forum is just about the last place you'll get any useful responses to questions about music licensing and the legal complexities surrounding intellectual property disputes. 99% of folks who show up here are trying to solve some sort of issue with a piece of equipment, and likely don't know a blessed thing about the the legal side of the music industry.

You can't select everything at once, but you don't have to fumble with the drop down menu either... at least not if you're on a Mac. Just hold down the function (Fn) key, and then click on the parameter value you want to assign. That'll toggle the snapshot assign function on or off.