gsmanon

On the other side of the coin, there's players like Guthrie Govan and Mattias IA Eklundh who seem to be able to emulate just about any sound and mimic just about any guitarist with little more than the right technique, the right adjustment of the volume and tone knobs, and activating the right effects, and very basic straight forward gear. It therefore seems less impressive and frankly gimicky when people feel the need to let digital tricks do all that work for them. Most guitarists are one trick ponies who are happy that way, and anyone who is not is presumably already talented enough to do it by themselves without needing a special guitar.

These tests are pointless. I know you're doing it primarily to promote your music, but tbh this is not the place for that. You can no more tell that a fully mixed song was done using helix vs amplitude than you can tell that a Les Paul or a PRS guitar was used.

Amps are designed for instrument-level input signals, not line-level, so I wouldn't recommend that sort of signal chain, even with the cabs off. Also yes, amps sound different from amp modellers, you're comparing apples and oranges. Amp modellers are not trying to sound like an amp in the room, they're trying to sound like what a guitar amp sounds like when it's miced up and wired into a pre-amp and then sent to a FRFR speaker, probably a studio monitor in a studio control room several tens of metres away from the cab in an isolated room. Most guitarists recording your favourite ever guitar tones were in a control room nowhere near the cab when they dialled in the tone and tracked it all. If you want to really drive that point home, watch this awesome video (you won't regret it) I bet if you stuck a microphone in front of that "3D" amp sound and listened to it back in your DAW it would sound just as "2D" as using Helix Native exclusively. And also sound a lot worse than the Helix tonally.

Never done it, but it shouldn't be a problem, as long as you have an audio interface that has a couple of spare line outputs, because line-level inputs is what the Powercab expects. The only downside to doing that compared to using a hardware helix is you can't use the L6 LINK, AES/EBU connection which transfer digital audio and allows preset switching on the Powercab controlled from the Helix. But you can still set up something similar via midi.

Helix does not have automatic gain control built in to my knowledge, so that can't be what's happening. It either has to be the input gate or a dynamics block (e.g. a compressor) that would be responsible for that sort of effect. 10C on my unit is "BAS: Cali 400 Ch1" in Factory 1 setlist, and "Low E Sludge" in Factory 2 setlist. Which one is it? If it's the Bass patch, the input gate is not on by default, but there is a compressor in the patch, so that's the only real possible culprit for any sort of dynamics phenomena. Since it is a bass patch, and you're talking about "strumming a guitar chord", it could simply be that this compressor in the patch has been dialled in to expect a bass, and you're putting a guitar through it, so the effect of the compressor is not as intended. If it's the Low E Sludge patch, that does have the input gate on by default, and no other dynamics blocks in the patch, so it must be the gate threshold/decay settings which don't work well for your guitar, or the level coming from your guitar is not as expected. Try fiddling with these and see if it changes anything, or turn the gate off if you can get away with it. Also bear in mind that "Low E Sludge" would indicate to me a tone that's been crafted to work will with single string lines and power chords, so again "strumming a chord" through a patch that's been configured for a different style of play could be the reason you're getting unintended dynamics effects. You could also check your input impedance settings and see if that makes a difference, though unlikely.

What happens if you put the FX Loop block between the amp and the cab instead of after the cab? This would more closely emulate what happens in a real amp's FX loop.

Unfortunately, many people are that naive, especially in the modern amp-modelling world. We have thousands of YouTube videos of people getting great tones and sharing their settings, with viewers studying them closely and copying them on their own units, we've got Line 6 Custom Tone where people upload patches claiming to sound like x, y, z, and we have a guitar-gear industry in general that's constantly promising people that if they buy product A and follow tutorial B they can sound like artist C, etc, so you can forgive people for thinking that you can take a set-and-forget approach to guitar tone and that the holy grail of guitar tone is all about the precise values of your Helix parameters. The Helix is an amp modeler, so all the settings that you would tweak on the real tube amp are replicated in the Helix, and those are the main ones to focus on. As I said earlier, there's a reason Line 6 added a button that takes you directly to the amp settings and they placed that button right next to the home button - because, as with real amps, those are the settings you most likely want to tweak. I would encourage all Helix users to approach the Helix in a similar way you would a real amp+pedalboard setup, and try not to get too side-tracked with all the extra functionality that the Helix can offer. The one thing that Helix offers over the real world that I maybe WOULD tweak is the cab selection. Any given guitar tone is probably at least 80% down to the cab, with the amp itself having much less importance, so if my tone really sucked in rehearsal, I might first try scanning through cabs to see if there's something that just sounds better. If tweaking just those doesn't get you were you need to be tonally, then I'd be throwing an EQ in after the cab and tweaking that. Probably something like the 5-band EQ or the 10-band EQ, since it's simple enough to adjust on the fly, but also highly effective (I also like the Cali IV amps which have the 5-band EQ built into the amp settings). But I'd also be aware that having a tone-shaping EQ in your chain is quite rare in the analogue world, so I wouldn't get too down in the weeds over the EQ and would prefer to do without it if I can get close enough with just the amp settings. And then apart from that, I'd just be keeping my ear out for any FX which have a negative effect on tone and tweaking the mix/level on those effects if they are too much.

There is not much difference in the curves between 80 dB and 90 dB, so there's no real benefit going to 90-95 dB, so might as well save your hearing. Plus by the time we start comparing the 80 dB and 90 dB curves, the effect of variance from person to person becomes more significant anyway. Suffice to say, once you're in the ballpark of 80 dBA, you're probably hearing loud enough to judge frequencies with the least amount of psychoacoustic colouration.

The idea is not to use an EQ to get closer to the curve. The idea is that you craft the sound at 80 dBSPL at your years because that's where the curve tells us we get the flattest subjective experience of the harmonic information.

Just turn around and walk forwards instead.

Your friend seems to be under the impression that the buttons on his Helix somehow magically know when they're in a studio and cease to work inside the rehearsal room boundary. This is not the case. The buttons still work in the studio and they should be tweaked at the studio while playing to optimise the sound for that particular live environment. Even before the days of amp-modelling, it would have been insane to set up an amplifier at home and then drag it into a studio and expect it to sound great in a band context. For 99% of band rehearsals ever, you walk into a room with an amp you've never seen or played with before, you turn it on, plug in, start jamming, and fiddle the knobs until you get a tone that can actually be heard above drums and bass. If you kicked on a delay pedal and you realised your sound disappeared in the middle of a solo, you'd quickly dive to the floor and, while playing, adjust the delay settings so your sound came back. Rehearsing isn't just about playing the right notes and getting tight as a band, it's also rehearsing your SOUND and coming up with a sound that actually works as a live band. And even then, it will have to be tweaked again by the band and/or most likely the sound tech at any live gigs, because what works in the rehearsal room might not work from one venue to the next. So, in short, my advice to your friend is to treat the Helix the way he would an amp in the room. Go in with a preset that has all the amp settings dialled at noon, and have him craft the amp tone while playing with the band. There is a reason the Helix has those 6 little knobs under the screen and a big button that takes you straight to the essential amp settings. This is the reason. He can probably keep all his FX and stomp boxes at similar settings that he uses at home, but he may have to dive to the floor and adjust the mix % or output level on a particular effect if it's too much in the live context, particularly for reverbs or delays. Or he can plan ahead and assign the mix % to a pedal so he can adjust it on the fly and land on the setting that works best in context. All sound is relative to the environment it's played in, and therefore this entire philosophy among modern digital guitarists that you can set and forget a guitar sound is utter bunk. Playing guitar is just not a set-and-forget type of activity. The knobs on your amp and your fx should be dynamic.

Go to your local university library/printing service and ask them for a quote. They are regularly printing PhD/Masters theses of several hundred pages without charging insane commercial prices for it. Also to cut costs, I would split the pdf in two - one with the pages you absolutely need in colour, one with the pages you are fine to have b&w, ask for a printout of both, take it home and organise the pages into the correct order, then bring it back to them for binding. There's a lot of colour in the book, but I'd say the majority of it is not necessary in print.

Yes, there is a difference. The XLR inputs of your interface expect a mic-level signal, and the signal is passed through the inbuilt microphone pre-amplifier of your interface, and the XLR inputs are subject to phantom power when it's turned on. The jack input expects a line-level signal, does not pass it through a pre-amp and simply converts the signal directly from analogue to digital, and phantom power is never applied. So, if you have a budget-level interface that might not have the best mic-preamps in the world, and has global phantom power that you can't turn on/off for individual inputs, it makes more sense imo to use the jack and not the XLR inputs. That way the signal is not affected by the quality of the interface's preamps and more closely resembles what was supposed to come out of the Helix, and you avoid applying phantom power to your helix. You can configure the helix so that its XLR outputs give out EITHER line-level or mic level, so if you're going XLR-XLR, make sure your helix is set for mic level, if you're going jack to jack, or XLR to jack, then make sure your helix is set for line-level. Maybe you have this set incorrectly at the moment which is the cause of your "not enabled" guitar sound. If you're only using two outputs from the helix, I recommend using the 1/4" outputs instead of the XLRs. If you are using more than 2 and therefore need to use the XLRs in addition, I recommend configuring them for line-level and getting an XLR-jack cable, so you can bypass the preamps and avoid phantom. Try to use balanced TRS cables, especially if you're doing long cable runs.

The manual for the helix does explicitly say "IMPORTANT! Never connect the Helix device's XLR outputs to a device whose XLR inputs have 48V phantom power enabled!". It does not, however, tell us what negative consequences we could expect if we do this. Could be a degradation in sound, or could be that they think it's at least possible that doing so could damage the unit. In my opinion, since there's absolutely no benefit or need to plug a Helix into an XLR with Phantom Power, it would be wise to heed the instructions. If you want to use the XLR outputs on your Helix, I recommend buying cables which are XLR on one end and 1/4" jack on the other. Although we normally associate XLR cables with mic-level signals, the XLR outputs on the Helix can be configured to be line-level, so it makes more sense to convert to 1/4" and input it into the line-input of your interface. That way, your Helix is never exposed to phantom power if you need to have it on to power another device into your interface (like a condenser microphone).

I'm not sure you can do it with the hardware unit - I'm pretty use midi control over the helix hardware is limited to things like changing global parameters/patch changes/tempo changes/etc, but not to the level of controlling individual parameters on blocks - although would be very happy to be proved wrong on that. I'll have a watch of the video. I'm using PreSonus Studio One, which has ControlLink, but I'm having a hard time getting the same knob to control multiple plugins simultaneously. I have reaper instaleld but never messed around with it - might be worth having a look, thanks!