cruisinon2

Well this is just one guy's experience of course, but fwiw, in what is rapidly approaching 30 years of gigging I've never once seen or even heard anyone discuss doing that...

Go to the Live Sound/Relay forum and read about it to your heart's content... it'll take you a while to get through it all. Bring a sandwich...

Patches sometimes get corrupted, and Customtone is the wild west... you never know what kind of mangled junk you're gonna end up with. If the pedal is properly calibrated and works as advertised with other patches, then there's something wrong with the patch you downloaded, and you might not get it to work right. If you're really in love with the tone, start from scratch...try rebuilding the patch in an empty slot, one block at a time, but don't copy and paste from the one that isn't working. After each block is added, try the volume pedal and see when/if it starts to malfunction.

You've got two problems... 1) This is a niche product with a tiny market share, and there just aren't that many of them floating around out there (relative to the rest of the world's electric guitars), even on a good day. 2) There are no more good days, lol. Most of the world was shut down for months...and everybody is out of guitars, of all shapes and sizes. Check out the link below, posted on YouTube just a few days ago...Taylor has less than 1000 finished instruments in their warehouse for the entire planet, and they've got more orders than they can fill. This is unprecedented for them, and given recent events, certainly not unique to Taylor. It's gonna take considerable time for everyone's production to catch up... and that's assuming we don't all get locked down again for some extended period. Welcome to the new normal... https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=6E4OywRLUX4

Yes and no...the whole point of using a modeler is to emulate the sound of a mic-ed amp, heard through some sort of FRFR output... whether it's headphones, studio monitors, or a full blown stage PA. So yes, you should be able to successfully replicate what your audience hears through the PA, but NOT (repeat...NOT) the direct "amp in the room" tone that you hear on stage standing a few feet from your cabinet. This in an important distinction, and tends to cause a lot of confusion for those unaccustomed to modeling. And don't expect to just plop the cab block in there, run direct to the PA and instantly have the same FOH tone that you're used to with the actual mic-ed cabinet...that's not gonna happen either. But with enough judiciously applied EQ and choice of cabinet and mic models (you will have to experiment), you should be able to get pretty damn close. That's what this gear is designed to do.

Shouldn't matter... just make sure it's updated with the latest firmware.

That ain't normal...

Congratulations! You have achieved more self awareness and common sense than every tube snob on earth. Most of whom will go to their graves constantly muttering about the inferiority of digital gear, whilst blissfully unaware (or willfully ignorant) of the fact that the guy in the mezzanine isn't hearing all that close-proximity "tube-y-ness" anyway...;)

Like it or not, they did sort it out... melting batteries were a problem, and now they aren't. Lawyers happy, company happy, everybody else pi$$ed. "Two out of three ain't bad"... - Meat Loaf Lmao...

Beyond resting your palm a bit forward of the bridge saddles, there's not much that can be done about it. And those screws are longer than you think... you just don't see what's inside the saddle itself. If you bought replacements and cut them in half, you'll likely find that they're not longer enough to do their job, and I can easily see one getting wedged in there, stripping the head, and then having no way to get it out.

The interface you use is entirely irrelevant, and neither contributes to, nor detracts anything from your tone...the problem is changing output devices (headphones vs a PA), and volume... specifically the effects of the Fletcher- Munson curve. Perceived loudness of different frequency ranges varies drastically with volume... it's just how our brains work. At low levels, mids dominate. When you crank it up, the highs and lows become more prominent and the mids vanish like a fart in the wind... hence the guitarists' constant search for the secret sauce that will allow us to "cut through the mix". There is absolutely nothing that can be done about this....no device that can circumvent the biology. The only workable solution is tailoring patches for both the intended output device and most importantly, volume. I've got a "live" set list, along with one for headphones, and yet another for studio monitors. Yes, it's more work up front... and yes, it's tedious and a royal pain in the a$$. But you only have to do it once. After a while, regardless of how you dialed in a particular patch, you'll get to know what tweaks you'll need to make to adapt that same patch for a different use... but even then it'll only get you "in the ballpark". You'll still have to test drive your handiwork in each scenario, and it's a safe bet that you'll still have to have to edit something. That's what rehearsals and sound checks are for, but there's no escaping the initial grunt work no matter what you do.

I suspect that this is precisely why they resisted including them for so long... they knew that people would plugging into all sorts of meter-equipped external gear. It's inevitable that something "wouldn't jive" with a meter on some other device, and then they'd be fielding complaints about that, too. Come to think of it, that probably explains the lack of a scale... having no numbers to fixate on and obsess over reduces one's ability to whine about accuracy. With no absolutes, there's no comparison to be made. In retrospect, the lack of a scale seems like a pretty shrewd decision. Lol...;)

Lol... agreed. I too have managed just fine without meters for years, and really couldn't care less...I just found it amusing that after years of indignant "Where are the meters?!?!?!" threads they finally caved, only to provide unit-less meters... all but guaranteeing a fresh round of b1tching. The world's first "spite meter", lol

I've been waiting for a Metergate thread with precisely this complaint! I'm amazed it took this long...lmao ;)

I agree with you... but that isn't gonna happen either. Get a BOSS WL-50 and call it a day. Normally I never update anything without looking for fallout from the early adopters... but this time I just went ahead and did it. Lesson learned.

I see what you mean, but it will be difficult to diagnose exactly what those marks are just from pictures. I see three possibilities: 1) Wear marks from playing... if the guitar has been used as a demo for a while, it's a possibility. I have fretboards that are beat up worse than that, but normally it takes years of abuse to get there. Were the frets shot to hell, too... particularly the ones surrounding the marks in the wood? If so, then that would be an argument for calling those spots battle scars. 2) It might be wood filler. I've seen...I'll be diplomatic..."less than perfect" pieces of wood with cracks, knot holes, or gouge marks from someone's f*ck up, used for fretboards many times over the years, from numerous manufacturers... including a certain "authentic" brand that shall remain nameless ;). They just cram the defect with wood filler so they don't have to throw it away and take a loss. Often it's hard to get the colors to match the surrounding wood. Actually, if that is in fact what happened in this case, I've seen far worse matching jobs than this... sometimes it's so obvious, you could see it from orbit, lol. ;) 3) It's just an odd piece of wood, and that's the natural grain. But even blowing up those pics, it's hard to tell. The resolution isn't that great. Regardless of what the truth is, my number one rule for buying a guitar is this: If you're not thrilled right down to your socks, and there are any lingering doubts...be it an aesthetic issue or some functional problem that will need fixing, don't buy it...because you won't be happy, even if it's the "deal of a lifetime". A new guitar should have you giggling to yourself on the way out of the store. If not...look elsewhere.

Welcome to the club. They had a problem with melting batteries, and this is "fix"... it is what it is, and it ain't gonna change.

This.

Forget this... as suggested above, keep it simple until you get a handle on how modelers work. The learning curve tends to be steep at first, and we all went through it. It will take a while and a great deal of experimentation... and I'm taking days to a couple of weeks, minimum. Don't expect to wrap your head around it all on a Saturday afternoon. I spent a solid 2 months with my Helix before I was comfortable enough to gig with it... and that was with a number of years of modeling experience under my belt already. It's a marathon, not a sprint. No. It's not the headphones... This is just personal preference and/ or your individual needs. Stereo is wonderful... through headphones, or with a set of studio monitors when you're sitting dead center between the speakers. Live it's a disaster. The only one who ends up hearing stereo effects as intended in a live environment is the one guy in the audience who happens to end up standing right between the mains. Everybody else hears half of what's going on. That depends entirely on what you buy... if they're traditional guitar cabinets, you can use them with any amp under the sun... but FRFR speakers will be useless with a "real" amp, and will likely produce results very similar to what you're currently experiencing.

There's nothing wrong with your unit... you just don't know how to use it yet. Modelers are not amps, and can't be approached as such. It's essentially a recording studio in a box... you have to think like a recording engineer, not a guitar player. EQ is your friend, and you will be using a lot of it... and I don't mean just the typical bass, mids, and treble knobs we're all familiar with on the amp model itself. Setting everything at noon and ripping away will NOT work. You can expect to have (at a minimum) high and low cut filters, and more likely than not a parametric EQ block to fine tune specific/problematic frequencies. Mic choice and distance parameters are also a HUGE part of your tone... this can't be stated enough. And whatever you do, forget about relying on factory presets and anything downloaded from Customtone. You need to learn how to construct a patch that works for you, and the beginning is difficult for everyone. I suggest watching some Helix- specific tutorials... YouTube is flooded with them. Jason Sadites' channel is a particularly good resource for beginners unfamiliar with modelers. There are also 1000 threads just like this all over this forum where all of this has been discussed ad nauseum... search around a bit and you'll find them overflowing with info and suggestions.

Not likely... with stuff in this price range, it's usually more cost effective to just give you a new one, as opposed to fixing a faulty unit. That's exactly what I got... Don't hold your breath...

This will most likely be nothing but a guessing game. In the absence of an official Line 6 secret decoder ring that would translate the serial number into a date of manufacture, the closest you're likely to get is a relative age based on the firmware version that your unit shipped with... but even then, that'll still only give you vague range. Of course that also assumes that retailer didn't update it before shipping it to you... some places do that.

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I can't say that the situation ever actually presented itself for me... I generally only use a compressor on clean tones, for which there's almost never a need for a noise gate. Conversely, dirty tones that do require a noise gate are rarely (if ever) in need of any compression... don't think it's ever come up, lol

Actually, that's not true: https://relish.swiss/ So you're lamenting a lack of modeled pickup choices, while simultaneously claiming that there are little to no perceivable differences between most pickups anyway... if that's really the case, then just pretend the ones offered are exactly what you're looking for. What difference does it make? No one can tell anyway...