malhavok

I have tried it. It gives me an identical sound at a different volume. I'm wondering if you accidentally have a mix param assigned to EXP or something.

If you want an overall up/down with no tonal changes, put it at the very end. Any perceived change in "sound" is psychoacoustic. If you recorded it with volume at all different sweep positions and put it up on a scope, it would be the same for every volume level.

I keep the pad OFF at all times. I have tons of guitars and each sounds different. I like them that way.

Sounds to me like it's probably the "ghost notes" or intermodulation distortion or whatever you want to call it (caused by the power amp's sag and exhibited by real amps as well). Vox-style amps (like the Matchless) are very prone to this sort of artifact.

Yes, absolutely. You can have your guitar presets set to 1/4" and your other presets on XLR! They will switch at the press of a button.

A patch and a preset are the same thing. 01A on your Helix is a patch/preset. 01B is a different patch/preset. Etc.

For sure. Yeah, the good ol' days. I still have my "Malhavok" site up with a few thousand free presets for the original red bean :)

You have no idea how hard I’ve tried!

I'll do my best!

Thanks, man! Taking requests is easy. It's fulfilling them that I probably don't have time for :( That said, what are you interested in?

Any reasonable modern mixer is going to not color the tone in any noticeable way. You don't even have any equipment in your house that could measure the scientific difference in sound. A small mixer is a great addition to every home studio or practice space. Go for it!

I am more stoked than is probably reasonable for the Pearce models.

I am a recovering SAW-family user. I was a die-hard for years. There was nothing else out there that could touch it. Alas, it did not keep up with the demands of the modern studio and is sorely lacking in many features. MIDI is one of those areas. If you are glued to SAW you are probably up the creek for set list selection via MIDI. When I couldn't deal with the extreme "1998 limitations" of SAW anymore, I researched and made the jump to REAPER. It is the modern equivalent of what SAW was for so many years. Extremely efficient (workflow- and CPU-wise) and is made with extreme care by a small group of dedicated engineers. Incidentally, it also has highly evolved everything including MIDI support. Definitely check it out if you are feeling the pinch of SAW. Sorry I don't have better news.

Of note, if you aren't using your loops then all four of the 1/4" returns can be set to instrument level and used as additional guitar inputs. I'd recommend that before falling back to the XLR.

The editor software makes it super easy to reorder groups of presets. On Helix itself, you can only move/reorder one at a time but it is so easy it might still be fine. There's no button pressing to reorder on the unit. In set list view, scroll to highlight the preset and scroll the dedicated reorder knob to move it to a new location.

The global EQ is primarily for quick corrections to unexpected room conditions. If you are in your home space it should be possible to tweak your presets to sound good in that environment. Global EQ comes in handy when you end up on stage in a really boomy room or something like that. As a workaround, global EQ is exactly the same as the Parametric EQ block. You can put that block on your preset and match the global EQ settings.

Browser-based and web-based are two different things. You could make a browser-based tool that interacts with local files much easier than a web-based tool. Since the preset files are JSON it makes a javascript tool quite achievable.

I haven't tried to work with any files other than the presets themselves because those are the only files I ever use.

I am also so annoyed by the master volume that I set it to max at all times. I am running into a mixer, though, so I have secondary gain adjustment available.

You'll have to use USB for this.

It's not really necessary. The patch file format is straight JSON and totally easy to understand. Crack one open in a text editor. Any engineer could easily read/parse it visually and just as easily write code to interact with it. I already made an open source utility for sorting patches by amp. It looks at a directory of presets and sorts them into sub directories with one dir per amp model. So you get all your Archon clean in this dir, all your Archon lead in that dir, all your Mark IV lead in that other dir, etc. I haven't used or updated it in awhile but it exists here http://www.benvesco.com/blog/vescos-helix-patch-sorter/ I originally did a lot more parsing and modeling of the data schema because I was building my own editor. Line 6 finished theirs first so I scrapped that plan. There's a bit of cruft in my schema modeling. Also, Line 6 keep changing the data schema and the way things are stored. This is fine, but makes it a pain for a one-man OSS team. The main point being that it is totally easy to reverse engineer the file format and write software against it. That patch sorter was probably an hours worth of work to get v1 up and running.

Some of my presets have an 'always on' delay and/or verb so those get trails turned off. Ostensibly, it frees a minor amount of DSP. I'd either be turning it on 50% of the time, or turn it off 50% of the time. Either default will not serve all the people all the time. Maybe they flipped a coin.

In the HD500 days and before (all the way back to original POD with Emagic SoundDiver) I used "offline" editing for two things: 1) To answer questions on forums. People are always asking about certain params, or how to route something, etc. It's so handy to be able to open the editor to answer those questions. Offline mode is important there because then you can have the editor installed in many locations and still answer when not at your computer. 2) To inspect downloaded presets. People post their latest youtube, soundcloud, etc. and say, "here is the preset file I used!" It's awesome to pop that sucker open and see what they did to get that awesome sound without having to turn on your unit or even be in the same physical location. It's fun stuff. For *my* purposes, an "offline" mode is about being able to open files or double-check my memory on something. It need not be able to guarantee there's enough DSP or any of that jazz.

I would love the heck out of an editor that can be run standalone. However, I wouldn't trade "other cool stuff" for it.

Yep, this rules.