qwerty42

Ah ok, I understand what you're trying to achieve now. Another thing to try, rather than a phase flip, is the Simple Delay. Put it on one of your paths, set mix to 100% and feedback to 0%, and then adjust the delay in milliseconds. If your issue is a slight phase shift (eg due to pickup location) rather than a phase flip, this can get them aligned in phase :)

There's a block in the volume category (the stereo one) called Stereo Width, if I recall correctly. It has a phase invert option. That said, be careful with this approach. If you're taking two similar signals which are exactly in-phase and then flipping one of them, you're likely to get some significant cancellation once the signals recombine, whether that's in Helix or in the air from stereo monitors...

This is odd and suggests to me that something else is going on, because the default (Auto setting) impedance for most of the Helix amps, as far as I'm aware, is 1MOhm. Adjusting the impedance should only make them darker, because you can only go lower from 1MOhm. 1MOhm input impedance gives you the brightest tone vs. lower values. Are you making this assessment with nothing else in the chain? If not, pedals in front of the amp could be adjusting the impedance lower. There's a new Global setting in v3.0 which is "First Active" for the auto-impedance functionality, meaning if you bypass all your blocks in front of the Amp block, the Helix input will switch to the input impedance for the amp as if you were plugged straight into it. You also need to make sure that "Guitar In-Z" is set to "Auto" in your input block for this to work.

If all you want is a small phase offset, which is what you're hearing from the DAW monitoring, you can do this quite easily with the stereo Dual Delay or even the Simple Delay blocks. Set the feedback to 0, the mix to 100%, and dial in however much delay you want on the channel you want. You can either use these as stereo blocks, or split your path and apply the delay to only one of those paths (e.g. to offset a dual amp or dual cab setup). Also pay attention to how you have your channels panned to adjust the stereo field width (there is actually a stereo width volume block that lets you tweak this, too). I think it's fairly self explanatory once you start playing with these things, but if you want I can make some example patches. A word of caution here: if you do this, it's best to dial in the offset with different amps/cabs/effects on the L/R channels. If you simply add the phase offset but the signal is otherwise identical, you can get phase cancellation issues on mono playback or even stereo speakers. I always check how my stereo patches sound by collapsing them to mono with a mono gain block at the end, which you can bypass to go back to stereo. It should sound good in mono too... If it doesn't, adjustments are needed somewhere.

of course!

Depending on your signal chain, you can sometimes hear a noise from the impedance circuit switching, but I'm pretty sure it's not done via a mechanical relay. (if I'm wrong, please feel free to mock me relentlessly). It's an analog circuit, but it's probably being switched via transistor/mosfet or similar, without any actual moving parts. The sound is just an artifact of the switchover which comes through in the audio signal. The larger the jump when the circuit switches, the louder the artifact, in my experience. So you're both right. Sorta. Close enough? ;)

wut

You might want to try my suggestion above next time. Could be your issue too. No guarantees, but maybe.

Here's how you can know for sure: Buy all of the Helix Rack units everywhere you can find them, until they are completely out of stock, forcing Line6 to manufacture more Wait until they come back into stock Buy 1 more. That one will have been manufactured in the time between step 1 and now

Make sure HX Edit is logged-in to your account first, before you try the update. If it isn't, it'll start the process, download the update, and then just hang there, doing nothing. Line6 definitely needs to fix this snag.

Hmmm... I just watched this to see what you were referring to, and that is very interesting! I'm going to have to play with those two amps and see what's going on there. Looks like I could definitely be wrong about the stock cabs/mics always playing nice together without phasing issues. He doesn't have anything else in his chain prior to that which might be causing a phase shift, so it has to be either the amps or the cabs. Thanks for sharing this and pointing that out. At any rate, the fix would still be the same, using a delay just like Jason did. I don't know of any other way to adjust phase offsets with Helix (but maybe I'm wrong there too!)

Yeah, I think OP has the right idea, it's just that the cabs and mics in Helix don't respond the way they would in real life, where distance would definitely affect phase alignment. (If they did, I can just imagine all the posts we'd get about 'when I use stereo cabs everything sounds thin and quiet!') But if he's getting some undesirable phase behavior from other parts of his chain, then using the delay trick mentioned above is a way to accomplish the same thing as moving the mics would. The only time I've ever had to do this was when I was using two IRs that hadn't been trimmed correctly, but maybe there are other ways to create phase problems in Helix that I just haven't discovered yet... (using the effects loops in a parallel path would be one possibility!)

Tuning might be irrelevant based on its implementation, but it still has to do pitch detection to isolate the discrete frequencies it is shifting by the desired intervals. It's far from trivial to do so. Also, have you tried the Poly Capo instead of the Poly Pitch block? I have only tried the former but it has an adjustable stability vs. speed setting. Might give you better results, or maybe it works exactly the same as the Poly Pitch. I don't know, just a thought.

I don't see that anywhere in this thread... And, I mean, considering the current state-of-the-art, it works pretty well, no? What out there works better, for realtime, low-latency processing, in a portable device? If you expect a digital pitch modulation to sound perfect and 100% transparent for this kind of purpose, I'm afraid you're still going to have to wait a number of years for that. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but it's the kind of thing that will probably require some clever machine learning algorithms to 'know' what perfect should and shouldn't sound like, to augment the already-highly-complicated process of frequency separation and individual note shifting for a combined set of notes. This is very challenging stuff in terms of how it's actually accomplished algorithmically.

FWIW, turning it up much louder with my crappy earbuds and listening more closely, I do hear the slight warbles now. But I also hear warbles just from the small dissonances in the first two bars, when the pitch block is still bypassed. What I'm hearing, personally (and I don't expect this to apply to everyone!) is that those 'normal' warbles that are due to the inherent dissonances of those notes are accentuated a little bit once the pitch block is engaged. And yes I also do hear it affecting the background note ringing out, if I intentionally focus on that. To my ear -- and again, I'm not saying this makes anyone else right or wrong, it's just my personal observation -- I don't think I would ever notice that in a mix. If anything, I'd assume it was just a very subtle chorus effect. I think this sound clip would make for a very interesting poll -- not meant to prove anyone right or wrong, but just to get an idea of people's average acuity for something like this. I think this might be like the blue/gold dress image and the laurel/yanny audio clip (if you're not familiar with either of those you should definitely look them up), where two people can hear entirely different things.

Do you have perfect pitch? I mean that genuinely and am curious. Some people have a *much* higher pitch acuity/sensitivity than others, which makes small pitch differences and dissonances glaringly obvious compared to the majority of people. I'm wondering if maybe you fall into that group and that's why to you it's unusable but to others it's hardly noticeable. For some people fretted instruments in general are annoying to listen to because the notes all across the fretboard don't have ideal intonation just because of the simplifications required to build it. Likewise, some people hear no real difference with 'squiggly frets' (frets bent into weird shapes to correct the intonation) while to others they are a gamechanger.

Thank you, I appreciate that. Later today when I have something other than these throwaway earbuds with terrible frequency response and zero bass, and aren't surrounded by loud background noise, I'll take another listen. As for you @SaschaFranck, all I can say is that based on many of your posts here in the past, you seem to be quick to assume people are trying to debate or argue with you. That wasn't my intention at all, but depending on your default stance for how the world is talking to you, you can make anything come across like that if you try hard enough. I was genuinely looking to understand what I wasn't hearing, and that's why I asked, and is also why I made the self-deprecating remark about maybe going deaf and also noted I was listening through garbage earbuds. You can either interpret that as someone being snarky and sarcastic toward you, or someone who is leaving the door open on themselves to be wrong and looking for better understanding. The one you choose says more about you than it does about me.

Great. I won't discuss it any more with you. For others in the thread who aren't as dismissive, can you please explain to me what is wrong with Sascha's clip, because I'm still not hearing it, and I genuinely am very curious if there's something I'm missing.

I'm only listening through cheap earbuds at the moment, and maybe I'm going deaf, but I'm not hearing--at all--what you find problematic in that. Especially on the first four bars, where it's just on/off with no shift. Sounds totally fine to me. Can you explain what's unusable?

This is what I do too if I'm intentionally trying to force a shift. If you run the stereo version of simple delay, you can even get sub-0.1 ms increments by using the 'scaling' parameter (it sets the relative length of the delay for the right channel compared to the left. So if the base value is 0.1 ms, and you set the scaling to 50%, the right channel will be delayed by 0.05ms while the left is 0.1ms).

What @CraigGT said ^^^ You're only going to get total cancellation (or something approaching it) if both signal chains are using the same amps, effects etc. And indeed if you do this (at least on my own Helix), things sum to zero or very close to it. If you have two different sounds, effects, whatever and mix them back together, the most you're going you get is filtering of what they have in common, which might not even be much especially if they've been altered by other effects like modulation. FWIW I have intentionally tried forcing phase offset problems in my own patches as a test in the past using the stock cab blocks, and I was never able to do it. If the Helix stock cabs are IR-based, they behave like MPT IRs where phase alignment isn't an issue. I've never been able to see any phase shift from varying mic selection or distance parameters on the stock Helix cabs. edit: The Jason Sadites video that @waymda posted above seems to clearly show phase alignment issues coming from two Helix cabs in stereo, so I might be totally wrong about this! Will look into it further... I guess I should add though -- if you are using stereo IRs (by that I mean two mono IR blocks in stereo paths), then yes you can create comb filtering problems if the IRs aren't made correctly and aren't minimum phase transformed. And also if you have a delay somewhere in one of your paths which is forcing an offset, or other time-based modulations, those of course can create static or dynamic phase cancellation when L+R get mixed back together. In those cases, you might find it helpful to add the simple delay block mentioned by @CraigGT above, or you can also use the 'dual delay' on the stereo path with them hard-panned. Flip the final mix to inverse polarity, and adjust the delay until it has the 'most-cancelled' sound. Then when you flip the polarity back, that sound give you the least-cancelled result, but again you're not going to hear anything approaching total cancellation unless the stereo effects paths are very similar prior to combining them. yet another edit: another thing I often do with stereo patches is collapse the path to mono at the very end of my chain to see how it sounds, partly for a phasing check and partly just to make sure things that sound glorious in stereo don't sound muddy/thin/awful on a mono playback device. You can do that by temporarily putting a mono gain block at the end, which barely uses any DSP. With it bypassed it won't do anything, but with it enabled it will immediately sum to mono so you can toggle back and forth to A/B them.

Yeah, I'm pretty confused by some of the replies in this post, too. Maybe it works better for certain types of guitars? For my strat the virtual capo works great, especially for just shifting things a semitone or two. In sample clips I made and shared with friends when 3.0 first dropped, they had no idea it'd been electronically transposed. If you go all the way to -12 it does start to sound a bit artificial, but a standard-tuned guitar pitch-shifted down a full octave isn't going to sound like anything we're familiar with no matter how you do it. It sounds a bit like a bass guitar, but definitely not exactly like one, and I wouldn't expect it to. As for the OP, something is definitely wrong with either his patch or his playing setup. Drives me a little crazy when people post here and say 'X is bad and unusable' but then don't post their preset so others can help them.

Hi, a couple important bits of advice which you might already know: (1) If you want to simulate a room, you want the reverb to be stereo, and probably right at the end of your signal chain. Note that most Helix blocks have stereo and mono versions. If you put a mono block after a stereo reverb, it will collapse the reverb to mono too and make it sound a lot less spacious--so avoid doing that. (2) If you haven't already found them, look in the "Legacy" category of reverbs. (There are three categories: stereo, mono, and legacy. Almost all of the legacy reverbs are stereo. Confusing, I know.) Try putting something like the room reverb from the Legacy category right at the end of your chain. Set the mix to around 40% and pull the pre-delay and decay down to very low values. Experiment with those three parameters to get an idea of the tonal options. (3) Try some of the other legacy category reverbs too. If you want to simulate bigger spaces with more stereo width, Tile does a good job, as does a number of the others. Maybe I just don't have the ears for it but I don't really understand what people find lacking in most of the reverbs. By picking the right one and adjusting the mix, decay, and pre-delay, you can get a wide variety of reverb sounds and nice stereo imaging.

Yep, those are all essentially similar ways of accomplishing the same thing. It's best to check for phase cancellation at the very end of your patch, right at the output, which is why I just throw a mono gain block there (plus it has very low DSP usage). Another useful way to do this is with the phase inversion you mentioned (R Polarity). If you invert a channel and mix it with the other channel, then adjusting for the 'most-cancelled' (or quietest) signal will give you the least phase cancellation when you un-invert it. Sometimes it can be easier to hear how much a signal is being cancelled, rather than vice-versa, so this is another useful approach to have in your back pocket.

Good grief there are some whiny people in this world. It'll get fixed. This wasn't 'software design,' obviously it's an unintentional bug, and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if it's the consequence of some outside package they use in the build of their code, which caused it without their awareness. If people like @sebastopolcp like Fractal so much more, then maybe do us a favor and stay with them. And if you think Fractal doesn't have bugs, well, the FM3 would sure like to have a word with you.