zappazapper

Right. It's the unique feature of that line. Peavey even put it in some of their non-6505 amps, like some of the Valve Kings. The guitarist from a death metal band I record has a VK212 and our standard setup has become the preamp of my Mesa Boogie .50 Caliber Plus into the power amp of the Valve King because that Resonance control just rumbles. It's possible that the non-S 100 has it built-in. Resonance is like the opposite of presence. Presence is high-passed negative feedback on a reversed control (0 is full negative feedback, 10 is no negative feedback), which reduces high-frequency distortion. Resonance is just low-passed negative feedback on a reverse control. Even non-Master Volume Fenders have high-passed negative feedback to reduce distortion, just not that you can control. Whether or not it's standard practice to add low-passed negative feedback to every high-gain amplifier to reduce low-frequency distortion, I imagine it's a primary element of EVH's basic power amp design and it's quite possible that the circuit is there even though it's not on a pot.

Oh I'm not suggesting it's not a good sounding amp, only that for me at least, the Resonance control is what makes 5150s unique enough to bother with them rather than really any other high-gain amp. When I saw that the new firmware had a new 5150 model I just assumed it would have a Resonance control because, like I said, what's the point then? Do I need another high-gain amp sound at this point?

Well then in that case, I should have said "A 5150 HEAD without a Resonance control isn't a 5150 head". That's bizarre. The product page for the non-S 100 even says it has a global Resonance but it's not there. What's the point then?

I'm talking about the new models of the 5150 III

I'm not wrong...

I think that, considering it's a Tube Screamer clone with individual Treble and Bass controls, the Screamer model in the Legacy folder should suffice...

Anybody up for an Ideascale request? XD

He's cranky most days XD @datacommandoyou know a lot, and you help a lot of people out on this forum, but sometimes the way you communicate isn't very helpful. @kaffekaskisn't asking a stupid question, and even the whole "sticking to his guns" routine is reasonable. There are concepts that come with this thing that are foreign to many players and we should have patience with having to say goodbye to one mentality and being forced into another. With all due respect, you didn't buy a pedalboard. You bought a multi-fx with models of a lot of pedals. Like I said before, the answer is that the Helix doesn't work like a pedalboard, or at least not a 32 pedal pedalboard. If you want that kind of behavior, you'll need to buy a pedalboard. On the other hand, if you want to take advantage of the very powerful control paradigm that the Helix offers, that you will probably enjoy more than a pedalboard, there are many helpful users on this forum that can help you. Datacommando is one of them but you sometimes have to sift through his passive-aggressive manner to get at the good stuff. He knows his stuff. But if he's not to your liking, there are many others who know their stuff as well.

Fair enough. The short answer, then, is that the Helix doesn't work like that. The long answer is that the way the Helix DOES work is based on the idea of gapless switching of sounds in those moments when an audible gap would be distracting. Changing presets causes an audible gap. The Snapshots feature addresses this by allowing the user to load up all the blocks (s)he would need for a song in a single preset, and then save different combinations of the bypass and parameter states of all of those blocks so that sounds can be switched without having to dump and load blocks from the memory. Then the user would theoretically select another preset between songs when an audible gap isn't (shouldn't be) an issue. So the Helix is really kind of designed around the idea of "songs" and "sounds". You load up a preset that has what you need for all the sounds you'll use for a song, use Snapshots to do the necessary switching, and then move on to the next preset for the next song. What you're doing is loading up every effect you're ever going to need for your entire life in a single preset. Nothing wrong with that, except ya, how do you control everything? So you might want to think about being more "song" and "sound"-based. I say "more" song-based because even I play multiple songs with the same preset. I have presets that cover entire albums, because I was able to figure out a way to get all the sounds on that album into one preset using a combination of stomps and snapshots. But then I also have presets that are for just one song because trying to pack that in with everything else would make EVERYTHING more difficult to control. It's really about reducing the amount of footwork. You can have all the sounds you want, but if you spread them out over multiple presets and use the switching features available to good use, it'll be FAR less work than even if you could have multiple pages of stomps.

My own experience with the Poly Capo is that it's perfectly usable, especially for a -1 shift. I've used it at -5 (Korn) and while there is latency and artifacts, it beats bringing a whole other guitar to a gig for one song. I don't have any experience with the Drop, other than that the other guitarist in the band used one and it wasn't obvious to either of us that either was better. @SaschaFranck can offer an opposing view of the Poly Capo. He says the latency and artifacts make it unusable, which is a valid position because every player is different. I don't know what he uses for his pitch shifting needs.

Have you posted on Ideascale and lobbied on this forum and other forums concerning the Helix for support from the community? That's the only realistic way to convince the "team" of your thoughts on design.

Here's my Ideascale post proposing extending the ability to reassign Snapshot definitions on a per-Snapshot basis to be able to do the same with Bypass and Controller Assigns: https://line6.ideascale.com/c/idea/1054308/comments/1054470 I will also say, however, that I agree with anyone who's expressed the opinion that L6 has provided some very powerful tools to change sounds that you've chosen to not make use of. Honestly I can't think of a multi-fx that had enough footswitches to control everything it does, but at least with multiple switch assignments and snapshots, the Helix is the easiest multi-fx to control that I know of. But that doesn't mean that there can't be improvements, and the ability to update the firmware allows the unit to improve, and we've been given at least some degree of input on those improvements via the Ideascale website. I encourage you to check it out and post your idea and try to get some support from the community. Sometimes things you want get in eventually. If there was an ability to have multiple pages of stomp controllers, I'm sure I'd use it. In the meantime, there are 8 footswitches that you can assign to control stomps, and if you set Global Settings > Footswitches > Preset Mode Switches to "8 Snapshots", you can press the Mode switch to bring up the Snapshot selection mode, which could theoretically be used to control 8 more stomps if you were careful about how your Snapshot Bypass and Snapshot Control settings were set. At the very least you could use it to select one of eight stomps to be on at any given time. The point is, there's a lot you can do if you spend some time to learn how the features the Helix DOES have work (I feel confident in griping about what it doesn't do because I know every nook and cranny of what it DOES do). Beyond that, the only way I can think of getting 24 stomp switches is to buy a couple of external MIDI controllers and fight with that whole mess.

Yes. Audio is "iterative". Nothing you do at one point in the signal chain is unaffected by every other point in the chain, and going back and forth and adjusting settings from one point in the signal chain to another is essential. In a typical tube amp, the effects return/power amp input occurs before the phase inverter. The phase inverter is almost always also a 12AX7, and it has no less of an ability to color the frequency response and add harmonics than the preamp tubes and the power tubes. So if you run the multi-fx at half volume and the master volume of the amp higher, it's going to sound different than maxing out the volume going into the phase inverter and turning down the master volume, even though both settings might both output the same amount of "loudness". The phase inverter is often the least-considered aspect of a tube amp's sound.

https://www.guitarworld.com/news/kurt-cobain-boss-ds-1-auction ...'cause this one is different...

Ah. Ok. Am I wrong that it used to be on a second page in the Bypass Assign menu? Am I just thinking that because the new Snapshot Control feature is part of the Controller Assign menu, on a second page? Does it maybe make sense that Snapshot Bypass should now be in the Bypass Assign menu for the sake of consistency?

I don't seem to have a Snapshot Bypass option anymore, although it still works on presets that I created before the update to 3.50 that use the option. I select a block, press the "Three Lines" Menu button, press Knob 1 to enter the Bypass Assign menu, and turn Knob 1 to select a Footswitch. My memory is that selecting an appropriate switch would add another page to this menu, which could be accessed by pressing the "< PAGE" and "PAGE >" buttons, where the Snapshot Bypass option would be. This second page does not appear. The option does not appear in HX Edit either. Furthermore, I have a preset that was created before the update that has a Poly Capo block that is controlled by a Footswitch, and I had Snapshot Bypass disabled for that block. The preset still functions as I intended, with the Poly Capo only being controlled by the Footswitch, and ignoring Snapshots, even though the option to enable and disable Snapshot Bypass is no longer visible. Clearly the functionality still exists and functions correctly, but the setting is not accessible. Furthermore, I suspected that perhaps the functionality of this feature was changed such that a user has to explicitly set the bypass state of the block to be controlled by Snapshots by setting the "Switch" parameter to Snapshots, but a) Snapshots doesn't even show up in the available options for the "Switch" parameter (my memory is that it did), b) simply changing Snapshots and setting the bypass states for the blocks by using the BYPASS button still functions as normal, as I remember, c) it wouldn't make sense to do this because there's every reason to assume that someone would want a block controlled by a footswitch AND snapshots. Can someone please check their unit and confirm for me that the Snapshot Bypass parameter is no longer present? I'd like to know if this is an issue specific to my unit that requires a factory reset, re-flash, etc.

Y'know, I'm not even sure if I was aware that Split blocks could be bypassed at all. And ya, I checked it out and you can't disable Snapshot Bypass on Split blocks, but you can disable Snapshot Control. Wonder what the logic is there...

Why don't I get a weekly Ideascale email?! I've never had this kind of response to my ideas, regardless of timing. Lately?! You can thank me for "Snapshot Control", sir. ***Disclaimer: I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that the existence of "Snapshot Control" is the result of my unceasing griping on Ideascale, here, or on TGP. Having said that, I'm nonetheless entitled to my own beliefs.

I don't know why, but in the past 8 hours, a bunch of my Ideascale posts have been getting dozens of upvotes and a bunch of comments. Like, it's great to get the interest, if it's legit, but I'm not sure that it's real because it's never come at this frequency or intensity. Is hacking Ideascale a thing? All day I'm getting email notifications about activity on my posts and I've barely got one a week before.

I don't know how different the Stomp is to the LT as far as this particular feature goes, but my limited experience with using an external switch in the EXP2 jack of the LT has been dead simple. When I get home I'll take a look at what you're doing and see if I can reproduce the issue.

Price and size being essentially the same, I'd go with the LT (I did!). While the Whammy might offer all the pitch manipulation tools that the Helix does, the main difference is that the LT can call up any settings configuration of its pitch blocks, and any other block, at the touch of a footswitch, be it via presets, snapshots, or direct footswitch assignments. Unless you're going to just be using one setting and one setting only on the Whammy, the LT is clearly the way to go. And even if you do plan on just using one setting, the LT gives you the ability to experiment with other settings, and if you find something that's useful, you can just program it into another preset or snapshot and still have your regular settings there by just pushing a footswitch, instead of having to bend over and manually tweak a pedal.

I'm glad I could help XD

If I may sum up what @SaschaFranck is saying, is that 4CM is often not "plug and play". There are a lot of places where something can go wrong. I've been using 4CM for 15 years one way or another and I'm still not sure I got it right. @SaschaFranckmentioned some stuff about the topology of Fender amps - don't just breeze by this concept - a deep understanding about the signal flow from the front panel input, through the preamp, out the Preamp Out, back into the Power Amp In, and along to the power amp are essential to knowing what settings you need to use, and what control does what. On my Mesa Boogie .50 Caliber Plus, for example, the Master Volume is post-FX Return (Power Amp In), so that's the control I use to set my level, which is the opposite of Fender amps, where the Master Volume is pre-FX Return, so your Helix Volume control will be what you use to set your level. There are dozens of little idiosyncrasies of each amp that make using it in a 4CM configuration different than another amp, so the first thing to do is to start developing a deep understanding of just how your amp works, where signal goes, what the controls do. Another thing to keep in mind is impedance, which affects both the interface with the front panel input of your amp and the FX loop. Incorrect impedance settings in both cases are sometimes a bigger problem than incorrect level settings. Both impedance and course signal levels for the loop are set by the Global Settings > Ins/Outs > Send/Return 1/2 options, with a finer level control being on the Loop and/or Send and Return blocks themselves. It's hard to know what loop impedance setting is right for each amp, but in my experience with my amp, there's more noise with one setting and less with the other, so I chose the one with less noise. Input impedance is also important - part of what gives an amp its tone is how it interacts with a guitar's pickups - the lower the input impedance, the more it "loads" a guitar's pickups, sucking out high frequency content and giving it a "looser" feel. This is part of what gives some amps their "warm" character. Placing a buffered device like the Helix in between your guitar and the front panel input of your amp breaks this interaction between your amp and your guitar. Your guitar's pickups will now be "loaded" by the input of the Helix - fortunately, the input of the Helix has a variable input impedance feature, which can be controlled via "Guitar In-Z" option on the Input block. On my .50 Cal+, the default setting of 1M tends to make my amp sound more "screamy" than when I'm plugged into the amp on its own. I tested my amp's input impedance and found that it's around 470k. The closest setting that the variable impedance feature on the Helix offers is 230k, and that seems to work best - it sounds much closer to what I'm used to than the 1M setting. I suspect that your amp probably needs an even lower setting, being a Fender. It's not necessary to test and find the actual input impedance of your amp - just experiment with the "Guitar In-Z" option and find the setting that sounds and feels the closest to your amp, and don't be afraid to use a different setting that gives you a sound that you like that's different from what you're used to from your amp - it's impossible to cause damage with an input impedance setting. Anyway, like @SaschaFrancksuggested, break it down to small pieces and troubleshoot one thing at a time. Once you've figured out how each part of the signal flow is supposed to work, you can put it all together and it should work out fine.

OK so this is a scenario where TPS is the solution because 1/2 the processing is enough for each "sound", but full processing power isn't enough for all three sounds?

I sent the guy an email and he's working on making it able to process entire setlists.