cruisinon2

Agree with Silverhead...IR's are not a magic bullet for anything in particular, and I've yet to see any that are marketed as artist-specific. Entire presets are crafted to mimic one player or another constantly, but there's a lot more to accomplishing that than just an IR. They're a bit of a time-saver (once you find a few you like, that is), as there are fewer parameters to mess with compared to a cab block, but that's about it.

Like anything else, there are lots of different kinds of headphones, all designed for different tasks. Your's may very well be "decent" for passive music listening... but that doesn't mean they'd be the best choice for use with a modeler. Most consumer headphones deliberately overemphasize the low end, which might explain the muddiness you're hearing. Make/model? You're also comparing two fundamentally different kinds of monitoring. One is right on top of your ears, and the other you're hearing at a distance, WAY off-axis, with room reflections, etc etc... getting them to sound identical is a tall order. In fact, half the reason the Powercab exists was to satisfy the guys who couldn't get used to FRFR and needed the "amp in the room" feel.

1) For any task on earth, one needs appropriate tools. Surround sound is wonderful for multi-channel audio that accompanies gun fights and car chases, but that's not what you're doing. Don't go this route. 2) A PAIR of studio monitors is ideal for the home player who wishes to play along with songs or backing tracks, and/or to mix your own home recordings. One would be basically useless....music is stereo. Also, stereo reverbs and delays are a glorious thing... don't limit yourself. 3) Necessary if you intend to play with others at volume, in a band setting. Overkill for the living room, and won't help you if you want to do any home recording, as you'd need two. (See #2 above)

What most people perceive as "missing" when transitioning from an amp to a modeler is the "amp in the room" sound... or the raw sound of a guitar amp a few feet away, and way off-axis, without the added influence of a microphone. Modelers though, are designed to produce recorded guitar tones... what you'd hear through a pair of monitors in a studio control room while you're amp is close-mic'ed in the room next door. They are two very different things, and it doesn't work for everybody... at least not initially. I suspect that those who've had a bunch of studio experience have an easier time making the transition to modeling, as they're used to hearing themselves that way already. It's a never ending topic in the amp vs. modeler debate. Nobody's right or wrong... you like what you like. I'm not familiar with the Laney you mentioned, but something like the Powercab might suit you better, as it's designed to provide more of a traditional amp "feel".

Amen

Thank you. I hate Les Pauls....but why would I spend even 5 minutes whining to the rest of the world about what I perceive to be their deficiencies? What would my end game be? Plenty of others like them... and they're not gonna change their minds on my say-so, nor should they. So why would I bother? So I can be "right", and convince them to see the folly of their ways? Please... there will be no Great Meter Revolution...they'll either show up one day, or they won't. Nobody knows. So go ahead and want anything you like, folks...desire is emotional, and generally doesn't make sense anyway. It's just there. Submit daily requests to IdeaScale if it gives you the warm fuzzies. But persistently whining about the lack of ANY one particular feature will never help you to better utilize the tool(s) you actually have at your disposal, which makes the whole exercise completely and utterly pointless. Equally pointless is openly declaring (or at least intimating) that the device is essentially unusable without said feature, and expecting everyone else to clap like a seal in agreement...then playing the victim when you don't get the desired reaction. And that's what these threads always devolve into...a long walk off the same short pier. Until some future update changes things, Helix is what it is... so either learn to use it warts and all, or don't...nobody cares. But those are the only two options that exist, and no amount of sniveling or wishful thinking will change that.

Just for my own morbid curiosity... what would you do with that information if you had it? How exactly would finding out the "why" change anything? Oh that's right it wouldn't... because there still wouldn't be any meters. And here we all are after 4 days of this, firmly entrenched in square one. Time well spent! Boggles the mind...

I'm afraid you'll have to move...;)

This... Yes it does...those old patches you loaded are just algorithms, doing the exact same thing today that they did months ago. The biggest variable in subjective evaluations of tone is you. We are not machines...perception is notoriously fickle, and highly variable even from one day to the next, never mind months apart. And our memories are even worse... we like to think they're fixed, but they're not. They change, too. I've been using Helix daily for well over 2 years at this point, with no gaps experimenting with other gear. Sometimes, if I bring up on old patch that I haven't used in a while, quite often my initial reaction is "This is awful, what f*** was I thinking?"...and that's on the same hardware, with the same monitors, in the same room, same guitars. But as far as my perception is concerned, I'm not exactly the same as I was last week, last month, or last year... and neither are you. It's like trying to compare a steak you're eating right now to one you had in 1997...it can't be done in any meaningful way.

Well look at that, I guess the unit won't burst into flames on stage after all...;)

It's perfectly valid, for one absurdly simple reason... sit tight, here it comes: There. Are. No. Meters... making one's ears the only remaining option. The End! (Well in all fairness, I suppose you could consult a Ouija board or Magic 8 Ball, but I digress)...Happy new year!

At this point, shoulds and shouldn'ts, or needs/don't needs are wholly irrelevant. As are the "thousands" of requests. It could be millions, and it still wouldn't matter. We don't have meters. End of story. Can't use what ain't there... we could spend all day chanting supplications to the gods, or dancing over piles of chicken bones and goat's blood, and there still won't be any meters. So either we all make do, or move on to something else with colorful (and apparently reassuring) dancing lights. What's tedious is the repeated side-stepping of this objective reality, and the oft regurgitated assertion that the unit is somehow impossible to use effectively, absent a feature that it's never had. I don't have wings, so I can't fly. Whining about it won't make me able to flap my arms to Vegas.

This issue is nothing new, and guys have been searching for a one size fits all solution to the "why doesn't so-and -so's patch sound the same for me?" question since Customtone and YouTube tutorials reared their ugly heads... trouble is, there ain't one. And swapping out pickups won't be a magic bullet either. It's never ONE thing, it's a combination of factors.... and even things that might seem like apples to apples comparisons, aren't. And in this case it'll still be a different guitar, in different hands, with a new set of pickups... yet another variable. Whether you're in the mood or not, tweaking the patch itself is inevitable.

But it won't.... and truthfully, this is never going to happen in a million years. First of all, we're talking about perception here... which is entirely subjective and highly variable from one person to the next. When the ONLY common denominator is the Helix patch, the chances of tonal continuity from one player to another is near zero, for a host of reasons. It's a different guitar, you're a different player, you're in a different listening environment, you're listening through different speakers (or headphones), and you have no clue what sort of volume the guy who created the patch was listening at... the list goes on. The speaker(s) and volume will be the the biggest contributors to any differences you hear. Then there's whatever degree of mangling that YouTube does to uploaded audio... there's likely a ton of compression. Since your main complaint is a muddy sound, it's a safe bet that you're listening at a higher volume than he was. At higher levels, both lows and highs become more prominent... its just how our ears work. Bottom line is this: other people's patches will always have something that needs tweaking to be useful to you, or to sound similar to something that you heard in a YouTube video... and sometimes they might require extensive modification. Drag and drop instant continuity doesn't exist. Watching videos like that can be very useful for developing an approach to setting up your own sounds, but a 1:1 reproduction of a particular patch guarantees nothing in terms of what the final product will actually sound like on your end. There are simply too many variables.

Yup...WE get tone-obsessed. The typical audience member does not...with the exception of any leather-clad guitar players standing in the back with their arms folded. The average person neither knows nor cares about tone, and could barely distinguish a clean electric from an acoustic without a visual cue... never mind a Strat from a Tele, or a Marshall crunch from a Fender Twin. They're listening to the song... not micro-analyzing individual elements. Even other musicians are not necessarily immune to it... my dear mother, who has been playing classical guitar for 60 odd years, has owned one (albeit a very nice) nylon string for the last 40-ish years, and she is utterly perplexed that anyone would "need" more than one electric guitar. They all sound the same to her. For most people, if it ain't in their wheelhouse, it's a complete mystery.

Every audio device on earth has a noise floor, and higher gain patches will have more noise than others. Add a noise gate if it bothers you. And not for nothing, but unless you're using very high impedance headphones, turning the volume up that high will be punishingly loud anyway... do your ears a favor and roll it back some. Lost frequencies don't come back.

My big toe hurts...I must have a brain tumor.

If this is the kind of thing that keeps you up at night, then modeling is not for you. They're computers... and computers get weird and fail. No device or manufacturer is immune.... but for the most part, those failures hit a small minority of users. You can scour the internet for the rest of your life and find people b1tching about failures of every modeler ever created, but that doesn't mean that they're all worthless, unstable pieces of crap. Know why? Because it's only the ones with a problem who go online to whine about it. The other 99.97% who have no issues are busy playing...

All this melodrama over ONE patch? One. Patch. Did you buy it a ring and exchange vows? Ditch it and build a new one that isn't weird. Use a different amp model, dirt box, IR, whatever... it's not all that hard to get two different amp models sounding nearly identical. There are 1000 ways to build a patch. Watch some YouTube tutorials (Jason Sadites) and try a different approach. Chances are whatever is triggering the behavior won't repeat itself. Patches get corrupted...on a long enough timeline, it happens to everybody. Or you can wait around for L6 to dump a solution in your lap... but here's the ugly truth: You're one guy, with ONE PATCH that has an ultra-specific glitch. They're not gonna be calling any emergency meetings on your behalf, so it might be a really long wait. When you're the only one with a disease, don't expect a telethon.

Of course it is, lol. Sounding like $hit is the easiest thing in the world... nearly effortless, really. And readily accomplished with a "real" amp and pedals, too. These discussions always come back to the same thing: Theres is no "instant awesome" formula, and there never will be. Nor will there ever be a shortage of "If they'd just add 'X', then this one fatal flaw that I've discovered would vanish like a fart in the wind" assertions, either....unfortunately. Nobody likes work. I'd like Helix to read my thoughts and spit out exactly what I want, too... not holding my breath, though.

You're right about this... Customtone is the Wild West, and continuity from one player to another using the same patch is essentially nonexistent, but its not because of a lack of metering. First of all, you're assuming that Joe Average would actually bother to use the meters in the first place. And second, even if everyone did, you'll never account for the laundry list of other variables... the guitar, pickups, playing style, the chosen monitoring system, the different listening environments, bedroom volume vs. stage volume, etc etc... the list goes on. If you want usable sounds, you have to create them yourself.

I'm not out to deny anybody anything...we all have our wish lists, and the OP is free to demand the moon if he likes. I am a realist, however... plus, he summed up his own opening salvo with one very concise thought: "...instead of being an amazing tool, it's another digital rig that just sounds really bad." Nuff said. He doesn't like it, and he's decided that the lack of metering is why. Moreover, he seems convinced that some additional dancing lights would transform Helix into something usable for him. OK...maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't...I have no idea. Belaboring the point accomplishes nothing, though. We don't have meters. Oh well. I owned a Saturn years ago. Hated it. It was a high performance lawnmower, with a $hitty plastic interior that started falling apart after less than 2 years... so as soon as it was feasible, I got rid of it. I could have sat around repeatedly saying to myself, "I'd like this thing a whole lot better if it were a Ferrari"... but what would that have accomplished? Either use the thing as is, or find something that makes you happy.

That's debatable.... but really neither here nor there, as it won't change anything either way. I didn't suggest anything one way or the other. I merely pointed out that it is what it is. There are are no meters... so you either work with the design as it is, or you don't. Reproducibility is two clicks of the "save" button away at any moment. Again, I recommended nothing in particular... nor did I say that Helix would be better or worse if we were to be gifted level meters in a firmware update tomorrow. All I did was offer a perfectly valid comparison to the use of individual effects pedals, most of which don't have meters either.... yet we don't see the world's guitarists taking to the streets, demanding that they be added to every pedal on the market, so that we may all better "understand" our signal chains. Regardless, as of today, Helix is what it is...and no amount of lamenting over the lack of metering will make them suddenly appear. If that's a deal-breaker for you, so be it. I don't torture myself by continuing to use stuff I don't like.... why would anyone?

In the modeling world, if you're relying on your eyes to tell you whether or not something sounds good, then you're doomed from the start. That's what ears are for. We listen and adjust accordingly, and for most users it works just fine. And not to put too fine a point on it, but most individual FX pedals don't have level meters either, yet the giant pedalboard aficionados among us have managed to make those work just fine for decades, without any visual representation of what's going in or out of each one. Modeling isn't for everybody... and that's OK, too.

Who's fighting about what? Never mind... it doesn't matter. Yes, you can record with it... in a bedroom, bathroom, attic, or dungeon. Yes, you can play live with it... anywhere from Walt's Trout Hut to Madison Square Garden. Do both on the same day, if it twirls your beenie...