cruisinon2

I've never understood the obsession with having the latest and greatest "Product X". A device either fulfills your wants/needs, or it doesn't. I have a 5 year old phone in my pocket. Why? Because it works. How different could the brand new one that Verizon wants to sell me for $1K possibly be? Who cares if an even newer one is coming out in 3 months? SPOILER ALERT: We live in a disposable economy. Something new is always coming out in 3 months. Couple that with a buying public who: A) Has been conditioned to believe that they're "missing out" if they don't treat themselves to every shiny new toy that hits the shelves, and B) Often has the attention span of a house fly... And the result is discussions like this, lol. At this point the "next big thing" IS just around the corner... and that ain't gonna change anytime soon....whether it's from L6 or somebody else, whatever it is, it's coming. You can play the waiting game if you want, but if you get sucked down that rabbit hole, you'll never buy anything... because "what if the next thing is better?" Oh, the horror...;) Buy whatever you want/ need, and can afford. But waiting with bated breath for extended and/ or unknown periods of time for some future, even more magical device, is just an exercise in self-denial. Just my 2 cents...

So choosing to read instructions instead of forging ahead blindly with a multi-step process, assuming that you won't f*ck it up, now qualifies as "special logic"? There's actually another term for it: common sense... but I digress. That aside, how much time do you think you've wasted getting miffed at words on a page? Words that were not even directed at you personally. Or are you just cranky because you screwed it up, and then got called out by a memo? If this kind of thing gets your knickers in a twist to this degree, then what sort of short circuit is precipitated by somebody giving you a dirty look in person? Life's rough... if you can't develop a thicker skin, especially for things that don't actually matter and can be readily dismissed, then you're gonna be miserable for the rest of your days. And by your own choice...

I crack walnuts with mine...

Can't say I'm surprised... and with the official demise of all things Variax back in October, don't hold your breath for any help from L6.

I checked out the Full Compass link... seems that ordering it here in the states is a crap shoot, too. Says "Out of stock, lead times vary". If you ask me that's code for "we have no f*cking clue when this thing will be back in stock", lol. I can try ordering it for you if you want, but for all we know, I might be firing up the BBQ for the 4th of July before it gets here. Your call...

Don't think so...

Really? They kept the absurdly overpriced US models and discontinued the ones that 99.97% of people might actually buy? Lol...That's among the more bizarre business decisions I've seen.

Are you having issues with the modeled sounds, or when using the mag pickups? If it's the models that are the problem (as they often are with the piezo saddles), individual string volumes can be adjusted in Workbench. Adjusting the mag pickup height, or the height of individual pole pieces won't help you... the mag pickups are disengaged when using the models. They have nothing to do with the string volume of modeled tones.

Well let's see... 1) Semi-awesome 2) Awesome* 3) Graphically challenged 4) Virtually knobless Let the games begin... lol

It's anybody's guess of course... but in my experience, companies that wake up one day with a bug up their a$$ to "reinvent themselves", tend to regret it. Now where'd I put that bottle of New Coke? Lol... They either go back to doing what they do best, or they end up in Chapter 11. Being one of the pioneers of amp modeling, I can't see them abandoning the market completely in pursuit of some untested gamble as their new "flagship" device. I doubt Yamaha would be on board with that sort of financial Russian roulette, either...

Could be two weeks, could be years away... the only ones who know, ain't talking. But the smart money says it's still a ways off, so tuck in, as it's likely to be a while.

A shiny, seamless orb...

No can do... from what I can see that amp has no FX loop

These things happen in threes... try not be the first one through any open doors for a while. Let somebody else take the next hit...;) All kidding aside, it is odd that you'd get two lemons back to back, but I suppose anything is possible. It's definitely out of the ordinary, though... the Stomp has been around for some time now, and I don't recall any widespread reports of brand new units failing.

There's a lesson here: All the time you've already wasted trying to get somebody else's patch to work could have been spent creating whatever it is you want for yourself. Even if you get it working, the need to tweak it is as inevitable as the tides. On your end, with your gear and your fingers, they never sound just like the description or the demo you heard on YouTube, anyway.

This right here is the rub... unless you're using the Ramones Tempo Method, where the vocalist screams "One, two, three, four!" at the beginning of every song, then it's the drummer who's in charge of setting the pace. He should be the one triggering the samples, and he absolutely has to play to a click track for this to work. Somebody else might be able to get away with it triggering them as long as the tempo is already established and rock solid, but if the drummer is winging it without a click, you're asking for a train wreck, because you'll never sync with the samples properly. Some guys can do it and some can't, even if they're decent drummers...

I applaud your work ethic, and what you want to do may very well be possible, I honestly have no idea... but for one tune at one gig? You're a better man than I, lol. You could learn 10 other songs to take its place before you get this sorted out.

I lost consciousness about a month into that post... no idea how long I was out. Who's the President? ;)

You'll have better luck (and probably and easier time) ripping the inards from a Tesla and cramming it all into a '72 Pinto chasis...

Just seems like much ado about nothing to me...I'd get it if the devices that have pictures of each modeled unit allowed the user to tweak parameters on the image itself, "turning" a gain knob on a touch screen, etc... at least that would be closer to the tactile experience of working with actual amps and pedals... but that doesn't seem to be how it works. They just give you a big silly graphic to drag and drop onto your "pedalboard", and that's it... then you're right back in the digital realm, scrolling through lists of parameters to tinker with. I fail to see how that's any more "creatively stimulating" than doing the exact same thing without the image of the fuzz box on the display. Just my 2 cents...to each their own, I guess, lol.

I'm curious what you plan to do with the pictures... We're in the business of creating sounds, no? So who gives two wet farts what a model's real world counterpart looks like?;) I've never actually seen half the stuff that's in there in person anyway, and pretty pictures certainly won't make anything sound better, lol. Maybe it's me...

All Variax models were officially consigned to the dustbin of history a couple of months ago. While it took some time for them to be formally discontinued and announced as such (see link below), it's basically been a dead platform for nearly a decade, as the last update of any significance was sometime back in 2014. Whether or not there will be a successor is anybody's guess... but my money's on "no", as previous iterations, despite having a rather devoted cult following, never really caught on with the masses. Yours is a relatively uncommon situation when compared to much of the guitar playing community. Most guys are one trick ponies who gravitate towards a fairly narrow range of musical genres and tones, and they simply don't have the need or desire for a product like the Variax. The guitars themselves are also notoriously finicky, and require a great deal of tweaking out of the gate to get usable sounds, which I suspect turned a lot of people off if they weren't particularly tech-savvy, or willing to put the time in. There was also a huge disconnect between the marketing and reality for a lot of folks. As evidenced by the numerous threads on the topic, a lot of guys bought them thinking that a booming jumbo acoustic tone would come billowing forth from their Marshall 4x12 with the flick of a switch, because they were blithely unaware that typical guitar speakers simply lack the frequency response necessary to do that, and it would never happen no matter how many knobs they fiddled with... so they blamed the technology and the guitar, when the problem was the actually everything else BUT the guitar, lol. Collectively, it all adds up to a tough sell for Joe Average Guitar Player. Without significant demand for a new version, I'd say the odds are slim at best... there's just not enough money in it for L6 to bother. That's just my 2 cents, though...I have no inside knowledge one way or the other.

All of the above... and then just accept the fact that it may have some weird issue(s) that only crop up under certain circumstances. It's a complex device that does lots of different things... and to quote Capt. Montgomery Scott: "The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to clog the drain";)... so while it's a good idea to give it a test run beforehand, no matter how thorough you think you are, there's just no way to audition everything with just a few minutes of noodling. Used gear is will forever be a gamble...

You can't... you'll know you're at or near the DSP limit when almost any additional amp or effect you try to add becomes "grey-ed out" and unselectable. Keeping a running tally wouldn't really help you much anyway... having some counter tell you there's "17% DSP remaining" isn't gonna prevent you from hitting the wall. There's either enough room for everything you want to shove in there, or there isn't. Doesn't much matter how you find out...

The HD/HX designations are essentially meaningless... little more than marketing blather for press releases and product descriptions. All it does is allow you to roughly determine the relative ages of different products. The current generation of devices has carried the "HX" moniker since Helix debuted 8-ish years ago. Prior to that it was "HD"... but do they actually mean anything? Not really... but they need some way of announcing "this is our newest $hit" to the masses. Eventually some new platform will put Helix/HX out to pasture, and a snazzy new designation will take its place. In practical terms all you need to know is that nothing is backwards compatible... you can't load HX models onto an HD device. Occasionally older "legacy" models are ported over in the other direction into newer devices, but it doesn't happen very often, and generally only if they were super popular, and after enough people have all clamored for it.