cruisinon2

You can ask for a gold-plated Rolls Royce if you want... but unless you put it in Idea Scale, it will never be seen by anybody who matters.

Fair enough... but either way, a Helix with the same settings won't help, lol.

Not sure why this is coming up again months later... but again, minuscule discrepancies happen in manufacturing. Nothing's perfect. Maybe D'addario f*cked up and let a bum lot of strings out the door... stranger things have happened. And it's a virtual certainty that nobody at the factory is sitting there with digital calipers and measuring each string that ends up on a Variax... such a minute difference would likely go unnoticed. And even if somebody did catch it, they won't care because they're sitting in front of a giant box of strings and 100 guitars that have to be finished by 5 o'clock... but I digress. Point is, you'll never figure out what happened, and if this is the only evidence you've got to suggest the instrument was used, I really don't think you have much to worry about. Besides, it ain't gonna hold up in court. If the offending string is still on the guitar at this point and it bothers you that much, just change the strings.

Square peg, meet round hole... they are completely different platforms. You can't expect any continuity just by copying settings from one to the other. If you want to mimic something you've heard from an Axe FX using identical settings.... then you need an Axe FX.

If Helix powers up one Variax normally but not the other, that effectively rules out the Helix or any settings thereon, as the source of the problem. Whatever the problem is, it's in the guitar. Service ticket time...

Call it what you will, and hurl all the insults you want, but this has nothing to do with L6. I couldn't care less about brand loyalty, and I've had more rigs than I can can count over the years...most of it from other manufacturers. I didn't obsessively meter patch levels on any of that gear either. Wasn't necessary then, and it isn't now.

Seriously... what practical, real world use would this serve? In the end your ears and your brain will determine relative loudness of one patch to another, whether you like it or not. Perceived loudness is all that ever matters. So unless you really enjoy constantly having to adjust volume in every different scenario you find yourself in, setting every patch to some arbitrary dB value accomplishes what exactly?

Hallelujah! Thank you... I've been saying it for years, but everybody still wants a foolproof glowing-LED solution. Though at this point, I have to say the odds of finding myself in a closet with the wife are slim to none. We'll need a new analogy...;)

It's not. There are those who insist on making it complicated, however. There is only one question worth asking, no matter what volume you're playing at, or what you're playing through: Do you like the way everything sounds? If the answer is yes, then it's game over... you've won. If not, adjust whatever needs adjusting until the answer is yes. If there were one...and only one...optimal setting for master volume (or anything else for that matter) then that's all we would have been given as an option. No other explanation makes sense. You'll never find a brochure that says "We've given you 11 different options for 'Function X'! But the first 10 suck because they're "wrong", so don't use them". The "best" way to do things is far from universal... and you're only "doing it wrong" if everything sounds like $hit.

I will preface this by saying that I did time in music retail many moons ago...I know how the game is played. If you're not stupid on day one, if you do it long enough, you'll become stupid. ;) You can actually feel the IQ points trickling away... but I digress. Most music store jockeys can't reliably tell you whether or not they're wearing shoes without looking down at their feet... 98% of the time, anything they say after "Uhh.... let me check", is either a lie designed to make you go away, or a really bad guess that will often turn out to be comically wrong. "Backordered until August" does not equal "discontinued", and "limited edition" anything its exactly that... limited. They make a handful, and when they're gone, they're gone.

That's all well and good, but it's a night and day scenario compared to the question that the OP asked... if you're a guitar player who only needs of a handful of FX and isn't interested in amp modeling, then Helix is silly overkill... Plus, this thread is nearly 3 years old...HX FX didn't exist yet. They released that unit specifically for the OP's needs. Had the HX been released at the time, I'd have told him to get that instead for less than half the cost.

PA- type speakers are designed to project sound around large rooms, and to sound the same no matter where the listener is standing. Individual guitar amps/cabs don't do that at all... they're very directional.

I want my pony...

Oh, make no mistake...artist endorsements work, lol Otherwise nobody would bother trying to sell "signature models" of anything. It's always baffled me, though. Almost any signature model you can point to, be it an amp or instrument, will have a nearly identical counterpart from the same manufacturer, at half the cost. You're paying all that extra money for somebody's signature on a headstock, or next to the power switch. I don't get it. Just my 2 cents...ymmv.

As stated above it was a Gibson Lab Series... frankly, those things were terrible solid state amps, lol. But Ty is a monster, and with a Fender Elite Strat (with the funky push-button pickup switches that were only made for a couple of years in the early 80's) he managed to get a very unique sound... its tough to replicate. I've been trying for 30 years, lol. I'm afraid you won't find a similar amp model in Helix. I've gotten reasonably close using the Soldano crunch (I think). I got King's X tickets in a couple weeks... I'm stoked!

If that's the only thing you're using snapshots for, then you're missing out on a ton of flexibility. You can change up to 64 individual effect or amp model parameters with each snapshot...yes, you can turn blocks on or off, but that's far from being snapshots' only function.

All anybody can do is guess, but they're hasn't been anything new for the POD in years on end at this point... smart money says it's EOL.

Only if it keeps happening... and trying to predict if/when it might happen again is completely pointless. You have one data point... can't do anything with that. Besides, it's entirely possible that it won't occur again anyway. One hangup is one hangup.

You can't take the cash with you, and you only go around once... may as well enjoy the ride!

Anybody interested in a lightly used Spider IV 150 head plus an FBV MKII floorboard? Been taking up space for a while now...going cheap. PM me if you're interested, and I'll send the Ebay link.

Well if it's on YouTube, it must be Gospel...;) As already noted, Helix pitch shifting is currently not polyphonic. Period. You may succeed in getting it to work to varying degrees under certain circumstances... but at some point you're gonna start to hear warbling and/or other artifacts, especially with higher gain tones, and as the shift interval gets wider. Even the Digitech Drop, which is very good at what it does, starts to sound a little funny shifting beyond a 4 or 5 semitones.

Where's the best place in the chain for my Heisenberg compensator? ;)

Beyond what you've already done, no... you might get a response from the Variax "fix-it" guy, who pops in here periodically. But be prepared for the answer to be "no". They haven't made the basses for years on end, and I wouldn't hold my breath for a new one anytime soon. As it is, the Variax guitars are hardly a household name, and I suspect there's even less of a demand for a new Variax bass.

So you've been to Mardi Gras...;)

$1500 worth of paranoia...;)