zappazapper

Oh, your amp has midi, so no problem.

Oh ya baby, two more upvotes!! Democracy at work!! "Ask not what your Helix can do for you. Ask what you can do for your Helix." - Jay Efkay

You could, but be aware that not every amp works with the EXT AMP function on the Helix. For example, my amp's 5-band equalizer doesn't fully disengage when switched from the Helix (I know, it sounds weird, and I can't explain it either). That's why I bought the AMT FS2-MIDI. The benefit with this unit is that it gives me two dedicated buttons for my amp's channel and EQ functions, can be controlled by the Helix via MIDI and can control the Helix via MIDI. I use Instant Commands on every preset to select my amp's channel and whether the EQ is on or off, and then when I use Snapshots I can use those same Instant Commands to switch channels or turn the EQ on or off PER SNAPSHOT.

Sorry, I didn't catch on to the fact that you were going to use a separate amp modeling pedal. I think that would be a shame, since I doubt the models would be as good as the Helix models. Are your presets so DSP heavy that having an AMP&CAB block not being used would prevent you from doing all the other things you want? Because here's what I would do. I run 4CM myself and I use an external footswitch to switch amp channels that actually sends and receives MIDI, so typically my presets will have a distortion pedal that is activated whenever I switch to my lead channel. My approach to presets is to try and cover as much as possible with each preset so I often do this trick to be able to have 2 different distortions that I can choose from. Both are activated at the same time I switch to the lead channel but they run in parallel with each other using a Split A/B controlled with a Helix footswitch that controls the Route To parameter to select which distortion i want to use. So you could run the Loop and an AMP&CAB block in parallel using a Split A/B and just assign a Helix footswitch to select which one to use. If you're changing presets during the same song and you're not using an external expression pedal, most people don't know that you can plug a standard footswitch into the expression pedal jack, and it will toggle between values of 0 and 127, and most importantly it will maintain its status between patches. So you could set it to control the Route To parameter to select either the Loop or the AMP&CAB block and it will maintain that selection between presets. There might be an option in Preferences that needs to be set to operate based on the status of the expression pedal jack and not the value the preset was saved with. Anyway, assuming it works (not at my Helix to check), that's probably how I would solve that problem.

But somehow you can still hear the high end... And fair enough, I can't make a credible objective argument against the very credible objective argument you made, but just anecdotally, I'm sitting in a bar right now, and the people sitting at the other end of the bar just don't have as much low end content in their voice as the guy sitting beside me, whose voice isn't particularly bassy. You might be right that he also has more high-end also, but as we're talking about a "solo boost", my thinking is that I don't really want to touch the high-end of my tone because I don't want to mess with a tone I already like, and because I'm playing a solo, adding a bit of low end is just kind of adding a bit more thump, as opposed to if I added 6 dB of low end to distorted rhythm guitar. My advice is to try it in a full volume performance or rehearsal situation. I'm willing to accept the facts you pointed out as correct, as I don't have a credible counter argument, but it's been the most successful "solo boost" strategy I've tried, to my own ears.

That would certainly work. Shorter the better.

I remember the X3L worked like that. The manual proudly stated that the unit was "smart" enough to detect if there was nothing plugged into the loop and bypass it. I'm assuming that the jacks were the kind where connecting a plug broke an internally wired connection from the send jack to the return jack. It's my feeling that this probably doesn't exist on the Helix because of the multiple loops, and I don't recall ever reading anything in the manual about it, and I've used 4CM from the day I bought my Helix so I've never tried to insert a Loop block without having anything connected. Maybe someone who's not sitting in a bar inhaling stouts will test it out and chime in.

Well then our ears must work like cardioid microphones, because if I play music through a set of earbuds and stand 10 feet away from them, all I can hear is the cymbals, but somehow the further I jam them in my ear, the more bass content they seem to produce. At any rate, that's what I use for a solo boost and to me it sounds more "up front" without necessarily sounding louder, which is what I want.

Then I consider it my job to champion nifty controller arrangements, to convince "most users" that the effects they want would be far more powerful with a more convenient way to control them.

Ya I posted it months ago. That's OK. Being annoyed at L6 for their priorities hasn't succeeded in getting anything changed. Let's just try to keep the thread near the top of the forum so it might pique someone's curiosity enough to read it and maybe we can get enough upvotes to get it noticed.

Mmm... probably not... I played my first gig in a year and a half on Saturday and I planned to record it but, to make a long story short, COVID restrictions made it impossible. But I can say anecdotally that it worked great. The thing is my tone doesn't really have a lot of "mud" to begin with. The cabinet I use is pretty tight in the low end and seems to be able to handle as much bass as I can throw at it without flubbing out. And yes, I imagine that it is subject to some frequency smearing from the bass guitar but I'm also not really trying to make it sound more "bassy", just closer. Also, I've never agreed with the concept of trying to make it "cut through" by adding mids or highs or whatever people do. I already like my tone for lead work and I already like my volume for lead work. I just want it to be more "out front". From a psychoacoustic perspective, to me that means a little more low frequency content.

I actually boost low frequencies for my solo boost. The logic is that I'm not necessarily trying to make it sound louder, but closer, and so I'm using the same concept as the proximity effect in microphones, where the closer you get to the mic, the more bass content it has. Cali Q block with 80 Hz set to +6 and 240 Hz set to +3. Seems to work.

I'm posting this here because Ideascale is the best way to get L6's attention, and in order for the changes that are important for me to become a reality, I need support from the rest of the community. https://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Controller-Assign-independent-of-Snapshots/1000019-23508 There are some other changes that I'd also like to see happen, and one that is actually more useful to me, but this is the one with the most votes so far, so I'll start here. In case the wording I used in the Ideascale post is confusing, I'll try to make it more clear. I'm just trying to extend the Snapshot Bypass option to the Controller Assign function. In case you're not familiar with Snapshot Bypass, it's an option to have the bypass state of a block ignore Snapshots. So, for example, you could have a preset where a Distortion block, a Modulation block, and a Reverb block are turned on and off in different combinations using Snapshots. But let's say you have a Poly Capo block that you want on for some songs and off for others, and you don't want that block to be controlled by Snapshots. To do this, you would highlight the Poly Capo block, hit ACTION, and the option to disable Snapshot Bypass will be on the bottom right. Now when you select different Snapshots, the Poly Capo block ignores them. My idea extends this ability to Controllers. In case you're not familiar with Controllers, it's a function that allows you to assign a single parameter of a block to a footswitch or an expression pedal. So, for example, you could have the gain parameter of a Distortion block assigned to a footswitch to give you a little more gain during solos. But if you then select a different Snapshot in the middle of your solo, Helix will ignore your assigned Controller and set the gain back to whatever it was set to when you created the Snapshot. It's possible that this is exactly what you want to happen, but I also think it's possible that you'd like that gain parameter to just be controlled by the footswitch and ignore the Snapshots, just like we can with bypass states. It's my feeling that, just like Snapshot Bypass, being able to have individual parameters ignore Snapshots actually makes the Snapshot function more powerful and useful, not less. If this makes sense to you, please upvote it on Ideascale. If it makes sense but you disagree, feel free to downvote it, but I'd love the opportunity to convince you otherwise, so please comment. If this doesn't make any sense to you and you'd like a better explanation, feel free to ask questions and I'll do my best to answer.

See for me it's kind of the opposite problem, where I can't stand guitar coming from anything but speakers designed for guitar when playing live. Part of it is the type of music - when playing punk rock or metal or something like that, I'm not really going for a "studio quality" sound. Quality is less important than intensity and there's something about actual guitar speakers that I've never been able to replicate. In fact, on Saturday I brought a second Marshall 4x12 to put on the other side of the stage so the bassist could hear me better, but I didn't end up using it because the owner of the bar had the genius idea that the two bands' tables should go ON THE STAGE for social distancing reasons and I just didn't have the room to set it up. But ever since I learned of the Greatful Dead "Wall of Sound" PA, which was basically a separate PA system for every instrument, I've always thought that the only way to do sound properly for guitar is to take a line off the amp, to a channel on the mixer that's not being fed to the main PA speakers, direct or submit out to dedicated power amps designed for guitar, and into guitar cabinets flown like PA speakers. Which is part of why I find the Powercab thing so interesting, because it's attempting to model JUST speakers without being miked. Imagine flying half a dozen of those babies and linking them up to the Helix.

Ya I have the combo. It's great but I find the 1x12 to be too directional. Have to turn it up too loud to be heard, and then if you find yourself in the crosshairs it'll kill you. It needs the 4x12 to be usable, especially for the kind of music we played the other night. The only other gripe I have is the lack of a separate gain control for the lead channel. There really isn't a setting that works for both channels unless you're playing blues (master volume at 10, set the clean level with the gain control, set lead volume to balance). But I'm far past the days of using the amp on its own anyway, and the Helix is the prefect tool to make the .50 Cal preamp work on its own, even if all you're doing is using it to set different FX send levels between channels.

I played my first gig in a year and a half on Saturday. It was an unpaid gig to help out my favorite local BBQ joint scare up some much needed customers. Me and my girlfriend play 90s rock tunes with a couple friends of ours just for fun (we're all in other bands) and we never planned to do gigs with this band but it was a good opportunity to help out a business that is really hurting because of the pandemic restrictions. We played well, lots of people showed up, everybody had fun and the bar made a ton of money, but most importantly... MY GUITAR TONE WAS INCREDIBLE!! 90s rock is a lot of fun to play because you get to have vicious heavy metal tone but you don't have to play heavy metal, which is convenient since I'm not that good. Here's my rig: Helix LT Mesa Boogie .50 Caliber Plus Avatar 4x12 cabinet with Vintage 30s So a little about the Boogie. It's kind of one of those great amps that nobody really knows about. It's basically a poor man's Mark III. Same basic controls except none of the push/pull pots on the tone controls, no separate gain control for the lead channel, and just a straight 50-watt 6L6 power amp instead of the Simul-Class thing. Mark IIIs are going for $2k+ on Reverb while you can still get a .50 Cal+ for under a grand, which is a better value IMHO. There aren't many better amps for heavy distorted tones, and while its sister amp the Studio .22 might be more suited to blues and country players with its pair of EL84s, its preamp is versatile enough to get me close. About the preamp. About Mark-series preamps in general. Everybody who's ever played a Mark-series amp for the first time has the same problem - "I can't make it sound good". The tone controls don't do the same thing as most amps. They aren't for equalization. That's what the 5-band equalizer is for. The tone stack on a Mark-series is like having 3 frequency-dependant gain controls, since they are pre-gain. Depending on how you set them, you can get anything to super tight metal tones to crunchy rock tones to thick blues tones to fat fuzz-box tones. Then you can use the 5-band to add bass content or scoop the mids or make it sizzle with high-end or whatever you want. It's an incredibly versatile design and I recommend that everybody here delve into the Mark IV model on their Helixes just to get a feel for this very unique preamp design because the model is very close to how my amp works. I use it in 4-cable method with my Helix LT. 4CM has until recently been a source of frustration for me. It's my own fault, due to my own lack of understanding of the electronic relationship between all the elements in my rig. When I first tried 4CM, I was using an X3L. At first I was blown away by the ability to put certain effects before the .50 Cal preamp and some after, but after a while I started to notice that it didn't sound the same. It had a "screaminess" to it that wasn't there when I just plugged straight in. I tried to research what was going on and found out about impedance. Impedance WAS the issue but my understanding of it was off. The FX SEND of the X3L was line-level, and my amp expected an instrument-level signal, so that must be it. So I got a reamp box and put it in between my X3L and my amp's input. In one way it solved the problem, in that the screaminess was gone, but it wasn't until I got the Helix that I realized that I was thinking of the issue incorrectly. Like many of you, I read the manual thoroughly before buying the Helix, and was excited to see that there was an option to have the FX Loop operate in either line- or instrument-level. It seemed to me that L6 had acknowledged an issue and addressed it. Well, they had, just not the problem I was having. It didn't matter what setting I used, my amp still sounded "screamy" to me, so I went back to using the reamp box. But I kept thinking that I must have something wrong, so I started asking questions on this forum about impedance and thankfully some users who are much more knowledgeable than me chimed in. In short, the issue wasn't with the impedance between the multi-fx and my amp, but between my guitar and my multi-fx. Guitar pickups are inductive, and as such are affected by the impedance of the device they're plugged into. In the interest of compatibility, the X3L was designed with a 1M input impedance, whereas my amp's input impedance is somewhere around 400k. I'm still not sure how the reamp box was affecting the interaction between the multi-fx and my amp, whether it was risking damage or not, but the point is that whatever it was doing to dull out the screaminess of my guitar signal, it was also doing that to any effects I was putting before the loop. On the X3L, it might have been the only solution, but the Helix has variable input impedance, and setting it to 230k (next step down from 1M) immediately solved the problem. My tone doesn't sound screamy when I'm using just the Loop block, and when I put effects before the loop I'm not having to crank the tone control to compensate for the reamp box dulling it out. Plus it's one less piece of gear to carry and one less cable I need. Now, because of the pandemic, this 90s rock band hadn't jammed in almost 10 months. When we were jamming regularly, I was trying to build presets that mimicked the actual rigs of the artists we were playing, so most of the time I was using models. Really, the only time I used the .50 Cal preamp was for the Nirvana stuff: Kurt's live rig, and the main amp for Nevermind, was a Boogie Studio Preamp into a PA power amp. The Studio Preamp, like my amp, is a simplified version of the Mark III concept. So the .50 Cal preamp was set to what I could find were Kurt's settings on his amp, with a Deez One Vintage in front of it. And all my other presets used amp models. It was a lot of fun researching the gear these guys used and trying to mimick their rigs and tones, but I knew that trying to navigate 20+ presets after 10 months with no rehearsal would complicate things and potentially cause a catastrophe, so I decided to simplify. I did the whole show with 4 presets, all using the .50 Cal preamp. I should mention that the secret weapon in all this is an AMT FS2-MIDI. It's a 2-button footswitch that both sends and receives MIDI CC messages. See, the EXT AMP feature of the Helix doesn't work with my amp. It only half defeats the 5-band. Anyway, it allows me to control the amp with my Helix, gives me 2 additional dedicated buttons to control my amp without taking up Helix footswitches, and also allows me to also engage certain blocks when I switch to the lead channel on my amp, which really helps with not having a separate gain control for the lead channel on the .50 Cal. I set the gain control at 3 to get a nice clean tone, but setting the gain at 3 doesn't give me nearly the amount of gain I needed for the distorted tones, so I used Distortion blocks and set them to be engaged when I engaged the lead channel on the .50 Cal. By using different pedal types I was able to approximate the tones of the songs we were playing without having to use the exact rigs. I had one preset for the Nirvana stuff. Deez One Vintage and Cali Q for the basic tone (yes, it's a model of the same 5-band equalizer I have on my amp, but Kurt set his EQ in a particular way that isn't particularly compatible with anybody else's sound, not to mention I didn't have to worry about the sliders on my amp getting knocked out of place during transport). The Snapshot feature really helped. I was trying to emulate the sound of the albums, not necessarily their live sound, and I was surprised at the number of combinations of clean, distortion, chorus, and reverb there were and how quick the transitions were. Without Snapshots I would never have been able to turn off the distortion and engage the chorus and reverb between the intro and verse of Smells Like Teen Spirit, and if you watch them live, Kurt never could either. He needed a Helix!! Oh, and also I had a Poly Capo set to -2 for Come As You Are, Lithium, and Drain You, as those songs were all tuned to D Standard on the album and made them easier to sing. My second preset was for Smashing Pumpkins stuff. Bighorn Fuzz. Actually I had two distortions running in parallel using a Split A/B on a switch so I could go to something that approximated Billy's straight JCM800 tone, like in the chorus of Cherub Rock. For the solo I used a Simple Pitch to emulate an octave pedal and used an Octavia and a flanger. Then for the solo for Zero I used a Whammy with a +6 pitch shift at 50% mix. We discussed using Poly Capo again to tune to Eb (bassist has a Helix Stomp) but decided that would complicate things unnecessarily. The third preset was for Guns and Roses stuff. I felt like the guitar tone was distinctive enough to warrant its own preset. I think I just used a Tube Screamer to get the gain I needed, and a Cali Q to get that mid honk. Poly Capo set at -12 and 25% mix for the intro to You Could Be Mine. The fourth preset was my "everything else" preset. Parallel distortions on a Split A/B on a switch depending on whether I needed thick fuzzy tone or tight palm muting. A wah (Man In The Box) and a whammy (Killing In The Name Of) also in parallel on a Split A/B on a switch so I could select which one to engage with the expression pedal toe switch. A switch to disengage the Cali Q for that middy honk of Big Bang Baby. The other thing that really helped the show go smoothly was that I could set the clean/dirty balance using the volume controls on the amp during the show rather than try and guess while building the patches in my living room. As long as my distortion tones were somewhat consistent between presets, and same for the clean tones, I could quickly adjust the balance between them during the show in a way that would apply to all presets. Apart from all the convenience and simplicity of using only 4 presets and just using one preamp for the whole show, one thing I will say is that it had a definite benefit on tone in general. I'm not one of these guys that thinks digital modeling is inferior to real circuits: I use my Boogie because it's the amp I have and when I wanted to simplify my rig, I decided to go with the Boogie preamp because it's the one I know the best and I just had to reach over and grab a knob if there were problems. It would have sounded just as good had I used an amp model. But it was limiting myself to the settings on the Boogie and using distortion pedals to color the tone that was an eye opener. I'm not one for distortion pedals much - I use tube screamers all the time to increase gain and attack, but beyond that, I'm generally looking to get my tone from an amp or a model of an amp. And so putting high-gain distortion pedals into a sort of lower-gain lead channel setting is not something I've really ever done, and boy is it cool. I was getting the kind of compression that I associate with power amp distortion (like the electronics are buckling) at bedroom levels, and then when it was time to play and the amp volume was at 8, things got really nuts. Even when I used settings to give me really tight palm muting attack, there was an underlying fuzziness that I would have never thought could work with that kind of tone, and again, the sound of the volume dipping ever so slightly every time I hit a chord was addictive. And the funny thing is that everybody in the room said they thought it wasn't as loud as they figured it would be. But to me it felt monstrous. I don't know if I won't go back to having more presets in the future, but I definitely have to reconsider being so rigid about emulating the exact rigs used in the songs, because even if it sounded closer to the record when I did that, I didn't sound as good. Sorry for the long post. Thanks for reading. Comments welcome.

No, I'm saying do a null test and then you can analyze the difference. Humans are terrible at detecting differences in audio, but have boundless talent for claiming that they can. Doing a null test and posting a response curve would set the record straight.

null test?

OK, I have to apologize. My thinking on this subject has been too linear. Our use of the signal may travel in one direction, but signal and its associated phenomenon are bi-directional. When I was thinking that the problem was between the Helix FX Send and my amp, I should have been thinking more about the interface between my guitar and whatever it's plugged into. The impedance of my amp's front panel input is irrelevant as far as the Helix FX Send is concerned. All I'm doing by using a reamp box is incorrectly loading the signal coming from the Helix - not only does this not load the pickups on my guitar correctly, but it incorrectly affects the signal coming from any blocks I place before the Loop (not to mention that there is at least a remote possibility of damaging either my Helix or my amp). It was suggested on this thread to experiment with the input impedance setting on the Helix, and I quickly dismissed it - "that's not the problem!!" Part of the reason is that there was no option to select input impedance on my X3L, and using a reamp box was the next best thing to accepting the "screamy" tone I would get in 4CM, and so it was hard to let go of the interface between the Helix Loop and my amp being the source of the problem. I tested the front panel input on my amp using a range of test-tone frequencies. The results vary but it's safe to say that it's far below 1M. If I had to pick an average I'd say it's around 400k. The next highest option to 1M for "Guitar In-Z" is 230k. With the Loop set to "Instrument" and the "Guitar In-Z" set to 230k, it definitely sounds as close to plugging straight into the front panel as I've ever heard with a reamp box. So I consider this issue to be resolved to my satisfaction, and again I'd like to apologize for being so dismissive and difficult, if that's the impression I was giving. Further to that, I was considering the implications to input impedance and the "first active block" option. If I have to set my input impedance to 230k to get my amp to sound right, then I am no longer able to take advantage of the variable impedance of the Auto setting. I had an idea that there could be a setting on the Loop blocks that would tell the Helix what impedance it should use when the Loop is the first active block and "Guitar In-Z" is set to auto. I plan on posting an IdeaScale article soon. Now that 3.1 is on the books, I feel compelled to embark on a lobbying campaign to have a few of my IdeaScale ideas at least be considered for 3.2, and this is near the top of the list. Thanks again for all the patience you had with me.

Ya, phase cancelation.

If I may. I was having issues with running the preamp of my amp in 4CM in parallel with a Helix amp model and the issue was latency of the FX Loop. After some testing with a correlation detection plugin in Reaper, I figured out the round trip latency of the FX Loop was around 1.8 ms. Not claiming this as indisputable objective fact, but putting two Simple Delay blocks (one at 1 ms, the other 0.8, since 1.8 ms is not a delay time that exists on any delay block) on the path with the amp model solved the problem completely, at least subjectively. Not sure if the rest of the I/O has the same latency characteristics, but I'm also not sure why they wouldn't.

I was looking at this: https://amtelectronics.com/new/amt-incinerator-ng-1/ It's a noise gate with a loop. It uses the level at the input for its detector, and then applies the gain reduction to the signal coming back into the return jack. AFAIK, none of the gates included in the Helix work this way (we all know that L6 doesn't provide a ton of information on the individual effects; Helix Help doesn't mention anything about it either). I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on this, whether anybody has used a gate like this, whether they work better than a "normal" gate, whether it's got any appeal to Helix users besides me, or whether I should just shut up and buy one of these and put it in one of the loops.

Every Preset has an output volume. Turn it up. Different blocks have a different effect on volume. It's not a glitch. That's why there is a per-Preset volume control.

It took me a while to get the testing rig together. I bought a 1M pot, soldered everything together, then realized my multimeter's AC voltage setting options are limited to 750v and 200v. So I had to get a different multimeter and they've put restrictions on stores here in Ontario that sent me on a little bit of a wild goose chase. By the time I got everything together today I only managed to test the front panel input and the effects return on my amp before I had to meet with my girlfriend for dinner. Front panel input - 370k Effects return - 41k I did the tests with a 1 kHz tone. I don't know what kind of effect frequency has on this test and didn't have time to experiment. Maybe someone can chime in on the subject. Also, I don't pretend that these are definitive numbers since I haven't done the test enough to fully accept the numbers myself. Just wanted to put them up here and see what reactions they get.

There definitely is a difference in signal level but even when you turn the Send Level down to a point where it's now noticeably lower than plugging straight in, you still hear it. And then you plug the reamp box in and it's just right, except like I said in a subsequent post, I did end up noticing that there was a little bit less gain with the reamp box, but turning the Send Level up to +6.0 fixed that.