cruisinon2

I've been using one (mostly) cheap clip-on tuner or another on stage for as long as I can remember. Never fails, easily visible on a dark stage, no toggling in and out of tuner mode or engaging a separate pedal. And unless you're jumping around like EVH in his prime it ain't going anywhere. Just roll off the volume knob, tune, done. Through more years than I can count, I can recall exactly one instance where it fell off the headstock. And the cheapo Snark tuners you can get for about 12 bucks are just as good as the fancier expensive ones. I probably wouldn't use one to set intonation, but for tuning up between songs they work just fine.

There are a number of options in the Helix family of devices that would suit your needs... it'll boil down to your budget, and exactly how many of the bells and whistles you think you'll need. HX Stomp, or he Stomp XL might be a good place to start.

Yeah that about sums it up. They'll send you a copy of the report from the CEO's last colonoscopy before letting go of any IP...;)

Unfortunately, I think they have...;)

Yup... but Variax was effectively DOA a decade ago (give or take), updates of any significance having ceased sometime in 2014, before the Standard even arrived on the scene. Honestly, I'm not sure why they even bothered with it. It was always a niche product, and whether or not one finds it useful depends a great deal on the individual player. It's too dependent on what you play and how you play it... issues with higher gain tones, palm muting, and the dreaded "piezo plink", for example. The tech just wasn't ready for prime time... still isn't, imho. It works for some, but not others, and you can't build a successful platform that way. Whatever a product does, it has to do the same thing for everybody. You can't have strange issues that only crop up for some folks, and allow them to go unsolved/unexplained for years, as was the case with the aforementioned "piezo plink"... because the result was essentially telling everybody: "All the fancy features work great, but only if you never use more gain than Angus Young". That doesn't look good in the brochure, lol...

I've had Helix for 7 years, and yet after all this time the damn thing STILL won't make me a sandwich. I'm writing a letter...

If you're talking about the factory patches, save yourself the aggravation and just pretend they're not even there, lol... they're useless, for a variety of reasons. Modelers can be a little weird, and there's generally a learning curve. Best part is, there really are no rules... if whatever you've constructed sounds good, then it's a win. Doesn't really matter how you got there, and what works for me might sound like nails on a chalkboard for you. Experimentation is really the only way to get a handle on it... but once you've done it enough times, you'll develop your own "preferred method" for creating tones.

I find it very hard to believe that both batteries just decided to have the same catastrophic failure simultaneously... stuff like that rarely happens, if ever. A rechargeable battery's performance/longevity declines gradually... it doesn't just suddenly fall off the cliff from one day to the next, and certainly not two of them announcing "We're dead now" at the exact same moment. Nope, something else is going on. What it is, I have no idea...

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...