cruisinon2

You'll never get a convincing acoustic sound from the Spider. Electric guitar amps have far too narrow a frequency response for acoustic tones. You need some sort of FRFR speaker(s). Studio monitors, PA style speakers and/or monitor wedges, or something like the Powercab will all work. There's no need for a separate mixer or DI box...most, if not all of the more commonly used FRFR speakers will have 1/4" inputs.

Honestly, if you're looking to sound good at comfy living room volume, studio monitors are the way to go, and you already have what you need. Those JBL's are great monitors for the price...I have a pair myself. I've seen them for as little as $200/pair new, so whatever you'd get for them used would be minimal. May as well hold onto them. I have an L2T also, which I've been using live as a floor monitor for years now (though probably not much longer, as we're transitioning to in-ears). It sounds great too, but it's really for getting loud. Not that you can't turn it down of course, but I never even turn it on in the house... just no need. Plus they're considerably bigger than the vast majority of studio monitors, and unless you get two of them you'll lose the option for stereo FX, which are magnificent (love me some stereo delay, 1/4 note on one side, dotted 1/8th on the other... sounds huge for solos, lol). Also, even if you don't do any home recording at the moment, you might want to at some point, in which case you're gonna need a pair of monitors... sell the Fender if ya want, but keep the JBL's.

No... you can't isolate and detune one string, but not the rest. And none of the pitch FX in the POD are polyphonic... they're not intended for detuning multiple notes simultaneously. It may work passably in certain circumstances, but artifacts and tracking issues are inevitable.

Just to pi$$ you off... did it work? ;) Nobody will ever be satisfied with how it's handled... the alternative is complete radio silence, and there would be whining and sniveling about that, too. "Whhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy isn't L6 telling us anything?!?!?!?!?!? I've got 38.7 gigs coming up, and I need to know when I'm gonna get the new Wankelmaster Overdrive model!!!!"...insert indignant huff here...;) They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't...

OK, maybe it is then...I played one some time ago, and thought it looked like a slightly different design, but who knows?

No, the are springs... same as any Strat style 2-point floating bridge. Like Wilkinson, etc... And that bridge in the pic is definitely not the same bridge that's on the 89...

Routing for a Floyd removes a lot of wood... on the back of the 69, directly behind the bridge cavity, is a big plastic box where all the "brains" live. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it will be difficult.... and you may end up with a $1000 donation to the toothpick factory. Save yourself a whole lot of grief, not to mention money, and just go with the 89.

It will make it those cuts largely necessary, yes... but you will also lose much of the versatility that a modeler affords. At your fingertips you have the ability to sound like nearly anything you want... Fender, Marshall, Vox, etc etc... but a Boogie 2x12 is never gonna sound like anything but a Boogie 2x12... which is irretrievably awful imho, but I digress. ;)

Should, shouldn't, why, or why not...I don't care anymore. It's all been discussed/ debated / argued over, ad nauseam... and it'll happen 1000 more times. And each time when the dust settles, we still won't have an answer. Besides, knowing "why" won't help the uninitiated grasp what's going on, or understand what to do about it. It like asking "why is everyone who gets elected to public office wildly inept, and/or brazenly full of $hit?" It just is... To paraphrase George Carlin, "I enjoy looking at the world, observing how things are, and hopefully finding a way to make it funny. I have no interest in how things "ought to be", and I certainly have no intention of fixing them"...;)

None of us did... largely because all the unpleasant/ unnecessary highs and lows that FRFR speakers are able to produce were filtered out naturally by the limited frequency response of a guitar cabinet. No need to cut what ain't there to begin with...

Snapshot 2 was saved with the wah engaged, that's all. Select snapshot 2, and with the pedal heel down, navigate to the wah block and hit "bypass" so it's off, then save.

Yes. Bad. The powers that be have harped on it since day one... it contributes to global warming and will get your grandmother hooked on meth.

That explains it... lol. I missed the part where we were dealing with the Stomp.

It's an often asked question with no easy answer, I'm afraid... every mix, every room is different, and my "special sauce" won't necessarily be a magic bullet for you. Often this is a volume issue... specifically the volume at which a patch is created vs. your stage volume. At lower volumes, the tendency is to boost highs and lows... its a perception problem that we all have, just how our brains work. The unfortunate result is that when you crank up the glorious tone that you had at home at lower levels, both the lows and highs become much more prominent, the mids drop out, and you vanish from the mix. If the are any universal "secrets" to EQ, it's this: you'll often get better results by getting rid of what you don't want to hear, as opposed to reflexively boosting frequencies that you perceive to be "missing"... because then you just end up with way too much of everything, and even more mud than you had before. Try more aggressive, and/or more specific frequency-targeted low and high cuts before overdosing on mids...but trying to guess at what the necessary frequencies will be from afar is pretty much futile... we're all in the same boat on that one. You just have to experiment with it, and trust your ears. You'll know when you're done.

Well I do something similar... though I actually want the EQ block in the split path, because it goes to the band's new in-ears that I'm still trying to get used to... so I've never tried to keep that path empty. If something has to be there as a place holder, you could always stick something in there that's not too DSP hungry, like a gain block, if that's what you're worried about. I'll have to fiddle with that when I get home... now I'm curious, lol

No... but the problem is not the POD, it's the Twin. Electric guitar amps have a very narrow frequency response, far too narrow to accommodate the range of frequencies that make an acoustic guitar sound like what it is. No matter what you do it's gonna sound like a clean electric.

That can't be determined based on the date of purchase. There were a limited number of affected units from one of the earlier production runs...so what matters is when it was built, not when you bought it. Stuff sits around in wholesale warehouses and retail stock rooms for indeterminate periods of time, and you'll never figure out how long yours was lounging on a shelf somewhere, before you bought it. You could try contacting L6 and see if they can, and/or are willing to tell you when it was manufactured based on the serial number...but I have no idea if that's even possible, or whether or not they will divulge that information. Either way, there's definitely nobody in here who can tell you anything. Fortunately, it doesn't matter...it's a known defect, and I've seen it mentioned in other threads that L6 had extended a lifetime warranty specifically to the LT expression pedal, so don't lose any sleep over it. If it breaks, you'll get a new one. Rock on...

No can do... with or without a "test tone". HD Edit is just an interface...it's not modeling software. The "brains" are in the POD itself. Can't hear anything without it. What you're looking to do is called "re-amping", and it's possible with a dry, direct-recorded guitar part in your DAW, along with the Helix Native plug-in (or any other amp-sim plug-in) but that's a whole other platform/conversation. Won't help you with the POD.

All other considerations aside, Bluetooth often has terrible latency... sometimes as much as 500ms, depending on the device. It doesn't matter for passive music listening, because you never know it's there... but most of the time it will be totally unusable for guitar playing. Unless you actually want to hear everything as a slap-back echo, don't bother.

Jason Sadites' channel is excellent. He has numerous Helix tutorial videos... really gets into the nitty-gritty of how he builds his patches and why. Might even be a little too much detail at times, lol. Pete Thorn has a couple also, though his are more "product review-ish" than a genuine how-to... but still useful.

Youtube...;) No snark intended. Everything you're asking for is there... in triplicate.

If everybody used this as a yardstick, we'd all be playing a $110 used Squire through a Pignose. Next time she whines about it, go over to the closet and start taking inventory of shoes and handbags. It's more or less a guarantee that the total will surpass what you spent on the Helix before she finishes a sentence...

I can think of only one scenario where an electrical shock and sparks flying about would be "desirable"... and that scenario may or may not involve a last minute reprieve from the governor. ;) Shocks and sparks are never normal. Ever... lol. I won't pretend to know what the problem is, but strange things are afoot somewhere. There's nothing special about the USB cable that comes with the Helix. It's the same thing as the vast majority USB printer cables.

Only one way to find out, but generally speaking the heavier the gauge, the better it seems to work, especially for the acoustic models.... then again I've been playing 11's for 20+ years, so I'm used to it.

YouTube. Can't swing a dead cat on that site without hitting a Helix tutorial video. Jason Sadites' channel is one of the better ones. Pete Thorn has a couple of good ones, too. I don't want to go to work every day... but here I am. "Life sucks. Get a helmet." - Dennis Leary ;) But seriously, you are correct...there is indeed a learning curve. Calculus doesn't make much sense the first time around either, but eventually you learn the language. On the bright side, you only have to do it once. And compared to other modelers out there, the UI is drop-dead simple... you're just unfamiliar with it. But that won't last forever unless you're determined to hate it from the start. It's just a signal chain... same as your analog pedalboard. If you're used to an amp with an FX loop, start by arranging everything in the same order you would a bunch of individual pedals, either before the front end of the amp, or in the loop, wherever each individual effect would work best. Dirt boxes, compressors, wahs, etc. in front, and time based stuff like reverbs, delays at the end. Unfortunately, there's no shortcut around the experimental phase.