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qwerty42

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Everything posted by qwerty42

  1. If you're thinking of a Stomp plus an extra MIDI foot controller, your total setup probably won't be much smaller than the Helix Floor already is. Even moreso, if you ever decide you want an expression pedal. Don't let all the capability of what's inside Helix give you anxiety about it. If the size isn't an issue and it's working well, why fix what isn't broken? FWIW, all those models you never use in Helix are in Stomp too, so they'd still be going unused ;)
  2. One more bit of advice for the L/R delay to achieve stereo width: it's a good idea to add a mono gain block at the very end of your chain, which will collapse your stereo field back to mono, and listen to your patch after you get it tweaked to your liking. It's possible when using delay to align things just enough out of phase that when collapsed to mono, you get significant phase cancellation which sounds thin and ugly. You won't notice phase cancellation problems in headphones since each ear is hearing a signal fully independent of the other, but if you listen with regular speakers it can really be an issue. Sometimes when building patches with stereo width using delays, I first set the delay to get it sounding close to how I want it in stereo, and then collapse it to mono and fine-tune the value of the delay for the 'fattest' sound. That way you still get your stereo image, but you've also aligned the phase offsets to sound reasonably good through monitors. After all of this, just delete or bypass the mono gain block and your signal goes back to stereo.
  3. One other thing to be careful of is that Garageband (on iOS at least, not sure on Mac) has some recording options which have pitch correction applied by default. It has different presets for the mic input, and on some of them (one is called studio vocals or something like that) there is a pitch correction knob. If that's active on the input, you will definitely hear weird Cher vocals, lol. Do you beeliiiiieeeeve in life after looove
  4. Not sure exactly what's going on here, but I can say what comes out of the USB stream is going to match what you hear in headphones, so the problem is probably not the Stomp. Do you have monitoring turned off in Garageband? You need to. If you don't, you'll hear the hardware signal from Stomp, doubled with the monitored signal from Garageband, separated by a small delay. If you're singing and listening to that, it will sound phasey/chorusey/weird.
  5. You can blame Apple for this. Their Lightning connector is capable of being many different things, but sometimes requires extra dongles to do so -- just like if you want it to be a traditional headphone jack. It needs that 'camera kit' to make the Lightning connector function as a traditional USB port. It's the same reason you need it to attach a digital camera.
  6. As @datacommando said, you're wasting your time with the USB/Lightning cable. That one definitely will not work. You have to use Apple's camera kit dongle. This is the one I use: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK0W2AM/A/lightning-to-usb-3-camera-adapter I agree that at this point, you probably need to try another of the Apple camera kit dongles. I have an iPad that I connect to my Helix, and just like the others here have said, you plug it in and it works. Simple as that. Any audio I play out of the iPad, whether it's within Garageband or YouTube or whatever, comes in through USB1/2 on Helix. Also, see if you can borrow a friend's iPhone or iPad and test it. Maybe you've got some kind of weird iOS glitch.
  7. To clarify -- when you say 'NO USB', do you mean no USB at all? Meaning, neither your Helix or your UMC are plugged in? Or does this statement mean 'UMC plugged in via USB, Helix not plugged in via USB'? At this point I would take Helix out of the equation, and plug something else into the *same* input on your interface, and see if it also does this glitching. If it does, the interface is the issue, not Helix. Doesn't fix your problem, but at least helps you know what needs fixed. Also, I agree with @codamedia -- when it's glitching, plug some headphones or monitors directly into Helix and see if you can hear it direct. We need to isolate this issue to Helix or the UMC to make any headway in fixing it.
  8. Hi John, my thought is: what changed? If this config used to work, and now it doesn't -- did you recently update macOS? Did you recently update Helix and/or HXEdit? Are Helix and HXEdit on matching versions? Do you have any other new devices plugged in via USB that weren't there before? Your test cases above pretty well prove it's not Helix's standalone audio processing causing the problem, and test case 5 sounds like it's not the Behringer interface (or if it is, it's a problem that only happens when both the Helix and your interface are plugged in via USB). I'm not a Mac user, so I can't help with specifics, but I would be inclined to check your audio configuration in macOS. When you have both your interface AND Helix plugged in via USB, they both should show up as audio interfaces to your OS. My suspicion is that something related to that is causing the problem -- maybe they are somehow conflicting and fighting each other.
  9. Are your speakers plugged into your Mac instead of the Behringer interface? If so, that's definitely something needing changed.
  10. Step 1 of troubleshooting anything is to break down the problem into simple, isolated parts. Control one variable at a time. I can't recall anyone reporting something like you describe with their Helix on firmware 2.92, so I'll wager a cup of coffee on it being something else. Unplug the Helix from your interface (and unplug USB if you have that plugged in, too), and plug directly into it via headphones or one of its other outputs to your monitors. If you don't hear the issue anymore, the problem is very unlikely to be the Helix.
  11. qwerty42

    Reverb Models

    Great, you again. Haven't changed a bit, I see.
  12. Hmmm... I don't think that's actually how it works. Can you attach your preset here so we can take a look? I suspect you've actually got both of your L/R outputs carrying a mixed signal because it got merged back together somewhere else.
  13. You can absolutely make IRs straight from EQ curves, without anything else. It's an interesting idea for sure. The method would be like @bassbene just described. I think the simplest implementation would be a set of IRs for different SPLs... eg, 85, 90, 95, 100, 105, 110, and so on. Then you could just select one of these IRs for the end of your signal path (where each one is just an EQ curve transformed into an IR, based on F-M curves for those values). If I have some time to kill this week I'll see if I can find an easy reference to create the curves. I'm sure it still won't be 'perfect' for matching a live venue (since the room effects, reflections, etc. of the real place will also contribute), but I think it could get you into the ballpark.
  14. qwerty42

    Reverb Models

    Whenever this topic comes up, I can't help but wonder if opinions would be different, if they'd put the 'legacy' reverbs into the same category as the HX verbs and not mentioned they were older models. Maybe I'm not much of a reverb connoisseur, but I'm puzzled by what is lacking from them... they're stereo, cover a wide range of different reverb types, and by setting the knobs correctly you can dial in just about whatever your heart desires... ?
  15. Your site is an incredible and generous resource for Helix owners. I can't count how many times I've referred to it for various things. Thank you so much for all the work and sharing it with us!
  16. I've never noticed any consequence from it at all, except the lagging meters themselves. No effect on the audio output. Everything else has been reliable for me with 2.92.
  17. Hi, yep, it's a bug. They thought they'd squashed it with 2.92, but in some cases it still happens, especially on path 2. I've reported it to them along with an explanation video & pair of patches that can force it to happen in just 5 minutes of on-time so they are able to reproduce it. Hopefully it gets fixed in 3.0.
  18. Hmmm... there have definitely been reports on this forum of similar issues, with one of the headphone output channels being lower in volume than the other, and I think they were generally hardware faults. However, if you're *not* hearing this problem from computer audio streamed through Helix, then that pretty much rules out the headphone amp hardware as being the source of the problem. Very weird. Are you sure the volume knob is at the same level for the computer audio, as it is for your guitar patches, where you hear the problem? If it really is happening for guitar audio, but not streamed audio, and a factory reset doesn't fix it, then maybe something with one of the A/D chips has gone screwy for the guitar output? Does the problem happen on path 1 and path 2?
  19. You've just discovered why mixing and mastering are entire skilled professions unto themselves ;) The recorded tone you're comparing against is a polished and produced mix, likely with careful eq cuts and boosts to fit everything into the mix and also make it sound consistent at different volumes. Your Helix tone, on the other hand, probably isn't as close to that recording as it seems. It likely has some frequencies missing or boosted in a number of places, such that at a certain volume, it sounds in the ballpark, but those subtle differences get magnified as you move away from that volume. This isn't because the Helix is doing a bad job, nor you for that matter. This is because crafting final, production-quality album tones is an ability most people don't possess. Also, if you're comparing your tone soloed against the original guitar still in the original mix, that'll also be misleading. Mixed guitar often sounds pretty awful by itself because of what is done to it to make it sit nicely in the mix, but when you add all the parts together it sounds nice and full. If you have a match eq plugin like Izotope Ozone, it can be pretty fascinating to compare your closest matches to original studio stems. In my case, I've gotten things that sounded very close to my ear, but the match eq applied a bunch of tiny tweaks that I never would've keyed into otherwise, and they made all the difference when my tone-matched recordings were dropped into the original mixes.
  20. You're probably already aware, but all of the Helix cabs have a high and low cut applied by default. For people using the Helix at stage volumes, that's probably a good thing, but for direct recording or playing through headphones, it isn't always ideal. Go to the cab settings and disable those cuts, if you haven't already. The default high cut does indeed remove a lot of the high freq content. Lastly, setting the mic distance further away can reduce 'honkiness'. Try the other mic options, too. I'm of the position that you can get pretty much any sound you want out of Helix's cabs once you learn how to use them.
  21. Are you trying to connect a real-world, hardware preamp? Or do you mean you're just trying to route one of Helix's built-in preamps into the cab block? If it's the latter, all you have to do is put the preamp block before the cab block in the signal path. No need for anything else.
  22. The 'bad' aspect of it that DI was referring to was that the Stomp and Pod GO won't be getting it, whatever it is. He meant that it's something cool/good, but unfortunately only Floor/LT/Rack will have it.
  23. Wow. Ok. I'll go back to engineering. Cheers Interesting forum you folks have here. C'ya I apologize if my reply offended. I don't take any joy in hurting others, and I'm genuinely sorry if I did. I see this forum as a place for people to get clear and concise help and answers to their questions, hopefully. When threads get as long as this and go back and forth with long statements that sound very convincing/authoritative but then get retracted in later replies, they become increasingly less useful to people who are just looking for answers--and then we end up with the same questions posted over and over again. That's what I meant in my reply when I linked those other two sites and said the time would be better spent reading them than this thread. I wasn't referring specifically to your posts, but the entire thing, including mine. Anyone who reads through those two links will have all the knowledge they need to answer their own headphone impedance questions and won't have to try to decipher the conflicting advice given in this thread.
  24. I know you have good intentions, but you are filling this thread with information that sounds authoritative and absolute but simply isn't. People who find this thread in a future search are going to be left scratching their heads with no better understanding than they started with, because of the contradiction and length of all the replies. Your statement above is not always true. A headphone amp might be capable of delivering high current but low voltage. It might also be capable of high voltage but low current. The former is typical of portable devices, the latter is typical of older high-impedance outputs. The end result is that yes, sometimes low-impedance headphones can be poorly driven by amps with high output impedance, and vice versa, and yes, it is absolutely a side effect of impedance combined with the amp. Sensitivity matters too, but saying it's the only contributing factor to what you described is false. If anyone's looking for headphone suggestions for Helix, anything in the range of 90 to 300 Ohms and 'pro quality' should work best. That's the ideal range. Anything between 50-90 Ohms, and pro-quality should also be acceptable. Anything with very low impedances (there's no hard number for this, but let's call it <30 Ohms) could indeed have audible consequences when coupled with Helix's 12-Ohm output. Personally, myself and many others on a different forum use the Sennheiser HD580/HD600/HD650 headphones (all 3 are very similar), which are 300 Ohm impedance, and I can say from hundreds of hours of experience that they sound great with Helix and get loud enough to harm your hearing. I won't reply any more here because it's just adding to the noise, but for anyone who finds this thread in the future and really wants to learn this stuff clearly from an accurate reference, here are two great links. Your time would be better spent reading them than reading this thread: Headphone Impedance Explained Headphone and Amp Impedance
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