mileskb

I appreciate it. I have tried hot rails, cool rails, the lil' JB and about 80% of the DiMarzio rail offerings in dozens of guitars (as a guitar tech - Im not that spoiled).  Most are very usable and kick the hum, but I haven't found one that sounds as good a a full-sized humbucker to me.

Richie has a DiMarzio ToneZone in the bridge position and a pair of Area 61's.  It sounds more fat than I expected.  Of course running it through a Helix helps.

And with the 24 frets I feel the same way.  I never reach for the 24th until i happen to pickup a 22 fret guitar and then, oh it's not there.

Seriously true...  If I could get the intonation right for the poles on the neck pickup that would be just golden !!!!  LOL

Hi i have looked at the powered speakers Yamaha to achieve 60 -20 big money and prefer a separate linear PA power amp and use the Rockman Eq for tone that way its direct & clean as intended more power and lower cost here JBl crazy money and the others you mention would have to be imported

I guess I missed where you are located.  

I would go with some of the more common... read proven...  speakers.  Alto TS , JBL EON, QSC K series etc..  for low cost powered PA speakers.

The pAudio ones might be fine, but they don't look powered so you'll need an amp, and..  as discussed, specs are going to be similar...  might just want to go with something that folks have actually used for the application.

 

The Standard also has a comfortable neck although this one was out for me right off the bat without a full humbucker in the bridge position. 

 

Just fyi... apparently swapping the bridge pickup to one of those single-coil sized humbuckers (Seymour Duncan) is pretty easy.  The results are pretty amazing on that front.  Richie Castellano (BOC) just did his and put out a few vid clips using it.  

For me the 24 frets are more of a the deal breaker.   22 are fine, but I just prefer 24... my hands seem to find their way better with 24.

Thanks.!!!

I don't have the 89F yet, but hope to soon.  I was listening to some reviews and have some questions..

1. Can we access the Graphtech peizo output unmodeled, just the clean piezo sound.
2. Has anyone been able to put a middle pickup in an 89F much like the Standard? 
3. I am a little torn between the 89F and the 59 and the Standard.  I have played the 89F and I know what a standard Wilkenson bridge feels like..  Frankly I'm a Kahler guy so either bridge is not my first chioce, but wondered if there was any other significant difference between the 89F and the 59 and the Standard other than color, pickups (which are replaceable) and bridge.  Build, quality, overall sound?  
4. Bottom line   JTV or Standard.. what's the pros/cons..  preferences. ??  

So many guitars, so little time.

Thanks in advance.

To my knowledge, if there is a sustainer circuit (which the XPR has) powered FRFR PA or FRFR monitor speakers should be fine.  

The Flat Response part of Full Range/Flat Response (FRFR) is what's important in all of this.  A quick search around will turn up that guitars generally operate from about 80hz and 1200hz with mostly harmonics and overtones up till about 8.5 kHz (8500 hz).   How much you chop off the top and bottom with EQ is subjective.  As the Rockman gear and most modelling gear using some sort of Cabinet Simulation, if the speaker response is flat between 80hz and 8500hz...  that's going to be fine.  In reality, most speakers have much wider range unless you introduce crossover circuits, so again... as long as it's flat so the Cab Simulator can do it's thing...  it will be fine.

Up until recently I had been running my ported 2 x 12, custom Genz Benz cab loaded with EV12L speakers.  Back in the day, if you wanted "Flat Response" speakers for guitar, these were the speakers.  Not full range, but flat.  Used this cab for years with Rockman gear, used it for about a year with the Helix powered by a QSC 100 watt stereo amp amp. Sounded great.

On a whim I got my NS10M Studio monitors out of storage and hooked up the same amp.  The extra wide frequency response of the full range NS10M (arguably not as flat as one would really like, but in that class).... the Helix shined.   Intead of being limited by the "guitar range" I can boost the upper-mids with clarity.  Additionally, I can play backing tracks through them at the same time.   So the big honk'n (heavy sucker) Genz Benz cab is in storage, and I just use the Studio Monitors.

YMMV but don't over think it.  JMHO but people put too much emphasis on "frequency range" when all the major brands of FRFR, and even the crap are about the same.  What sets one cab over another is quality of build, size of amp, any built in DSP, material of cabinet itself.   All that has more effect on sound than one cab having a 20hz to 20,000hz range and another having a 19hz to 19,000hz   range.   In fact it's not just FRFR..  As was noticed, the articles on those Rockman pages talk about speaker size.  Yep... most full range 15" speakers of a particular wattage have about the same range, most 5" speakers of a particular wattage have about the same range.  etc..  With everything else going on in the chain... a few HZ here (or hear) and there, doesn't mean whoop...  it's what enclosures you put those speakers in and what they are made out of that change the tone the most.

Again JMHO

So I got curious.

Article 18 talks about how to build the cabinets http://www.perfectsoundrockrefurbs.com/articles.html  but... you'll have to reverse engineer from this article and other articles on the page that just reference the "type" or model speaker, not the specs.  But you should look up the models.

But as I stated earlier, as there is a cab sim in the sustainer, as long as the speakers you use are somewhat flat response, and have a wider frequency response than a normal guitar sspeaker, you'll be fine.

Hi i am nowbuilding a stereo rig with a rockman xpr for home use what speakers does any one reccommend to get the full range make and size 8 ohm i hear 60 kz - 20 khz is a minimum requirement so will i need to basically build my own PA system say 50 watts a side for home use with a carver rack amp or a linear amp can any of you guys help? As this xp can basically make any tone clean to dirty as are genius hero Tom Sholtz intended

Any decent full range powered cabs will do.   The info on what the Rockman cabs had is at Rockman.fr or RockmanRefurb site.  I forget which.

You might need a little low and high cut on whatever you get...   

I know we've already got one solution to this (disconnect Helix from your computer), but I think your setup is overly complicated for the purpose of playing along with tunes on your PC. Your reason for using an external mixer seems to be to avoid 'dinking' with volumes in Helix. But even with the external mixer you still have to dink around with volumes either on the mixer channel for your PC or on the PC itself (perhaps even both) in order to balance levels between the Helix channel and your PC channel.

 

A simpler solution, in my view, is to leave the mixer out of your setup. Connect Helix to your PC using USB whereupon, as you already know, your PC audio is sent through the Helix outputs. Just balance the levels using your PC Volume control. Connect your speakers/monitors to the Helix outputs instead of your mixer outputs. Seems to me this involves less, not more, dinking around because your mixer is not involved.

Well for some reason that's working fine now.   Hmmm...  nevermind... nothing to see..   move along...  

Not sure I understand. The Multi input selects the Guitar, Aux, and Variax inputs simultaneously. It does not take the audio from your computer via USB as an input for processing. What I think you are describing is accurate - your computer audio is being doubled, once through your mixer and once through Helix output (unprocessed). So yes, you should disconnect the USB in that setup. But it actually has nothing to do with the Helix Input setting.

 

..... but again, I may be misunderstanding.

Yeah.... actually you are correct.   This happened a couple of weeks ago and I meant to post about then.  Ultimately I unplugged the USB, which kinda defeats the purpose of having the Helix hooked up to the PC when playing along and working out patches.   I couldn't find a way to keep the audio from going out the USB from my laptop, although I admit I didn't try that hard cause I just wanted to play and not spend the afternoon dinking with my laptop.

And for perspective... all I wanted to do was try out some presets that someone had made using 2.11 and some different IR's... sooo... already that day I had to spend a bunch of time updating the Helix, reloading IR's and setlists, etc etc..  all I wanted to do was jam a bit.

No argument here. The update process is klunky, overly manual and hence error prone. Line 6 is very aware and is working on streamlining it. But it will take time.

 

I'm asking myself this question, and I don't have my own answer yet. Would I prefer updates with new features sooner using the current update mechanism, or would I rather that Line 6 reallocate development resources to improving the update process before proceeding with any new updates?

I would like to see them work out the updates and IR management first so that follow on updates are less cumbersome, and they can be frequent or infrequent as they like moving forward.

I specifically held off doing the 2.10 update until the 2.11 because of the additional time I needed to organize my IR's and dink with reloading presets.  As complicated as a desktop is, or just desktop software... or even mobile software...    rarely does any device require more than a restart after the update and you're good to go (barring an actually update fail).

With the Helix...  not only do you have the added steps, but as we have seen...  and as one would expect, there are still the occasional fails on TOP of that making a cumbersome process even worse.  

Speaking of cumbersome processes...    Maybe I'm reading something wrong, but the whole "RESET" after update thing gets me every time.  The software automatically restarts the Helix..  so I have to wait for the whole "rebuilding" crap to take place, just to shut it off, and turn it back on again, to reset everything.  A completely wasted step.   Either it should reset on it's own, or the shutdown after update should be a shutdown, not a reboot.   It's just another of what seems like an eternity of waiting just to shut it off so I can reset it.   

Sorry... but the more I think about it.. the sillier it seems..

Back to your point silverhead, I think knocking out the update/ir management issues now would make the next hopefully many years of use go a lot smoother and be much more enjoyable.

I guess any product is as strong as it's weakest feature.   General "management" of the Helix is an epic fail, period.   There are PUBLISHED multiple ways to do updates, multiple options of what needs to be backed up or restored, none if it includes handling IR's which is another bag of beans and Globals are sometimes affected depending on if you are facing east or west on alternate days of the week while doing the backup or restore.

I deal with it, you deal with it, we all deal with it because we don't have a choice.   But it's lollipop poor and there is no way to defend it.  

There should be consistency.   I had been using the Line6 Updater with great success until this last update.  Previously it would update the editor and the firmware.  This time I only saw the firmware listed, so I aborted and followed the instructions on the web page.  I can't imagine what the "non-forum" folks do other than spend a lot of time talking on the phone with the nice folks at Line 6 support.   

Sorry for the rant...  just seems silly that a product with so many great features, designed to be updated often (more than once every few years), doesn't have a simple... "update" button.   In fact, based on how the presets are saved (it's just an xml formatted text file), "new" presets should be an option.   Update should be exactly that... an update.   You want to load the latest presets, "click here to load latest presets... previous presets will be backed up"   done...

While the inside (read guts) of the helix is a complicated and beautiful work of engineering art in my opinion...  the "management/maintenance" of the unit is embarrassing...

There... I said it... flame me if you wish...   It's how I feel.

I can't be the only one who's done this, and man is it annoying.

If you have your Helix hooked up to your computer, and for some reason the sound is "just not right" you might check to ensure your inpout is set to Guitar only and NOT Multi.  

In my case I play along with tunes on my PC for practice.   As I don't want to have to dink with the volumes on the Helix I use an external mixer.   PC in one stereo channel, Helix in another stereo channel.  However, in doing this I found my PC audio was ALSO coming in via the Helix from the USB cable which kinda made a mess of the sound in a subtle way.  Just everything sounded wrong, until I realize the input on the Helix was set to Multi.

I really wish there was a way to set certain things as "global" parameters.  99.9% of the time my input is going to be "guitar"..  yet I have to set it to guitar on every preset.  

Anyway... if things sound weird, and you are hooked up to a PC, even if you are NOT sending audio from the PC to the Helix, you might set the Helix input to be Guitar only.

Back to a previous comment...

Check your computer for OTHER copies of the setlists and check the file dates !!!     As someone mentioned you could be trying to restore an old setlist instead of the one you backed up before the update.  It's very easy to do.  

The stock cabs use less DSP than a 2048 sample IR - about half as much, actually - and offer the same resolution.

WOW...  ok.. that I did not know.  This is fact?  I don't mean to question, I just thought with offering mic placement and modeling and such that it seemed obvious to me (apparently incorrectly) that just loading a .wav file was much easier on overhead.

For a long time I used only stock cabs and they worked fine for me.  The only serious limitation I felt they had was the lack of mic cement options relative to the cone of the speaker.  In real life cabinet mic'ing that's always been a big deal for me.  But I could find ways to compensate.  Once I tried out the OwnHammer IR's with all their various options it sold me in spite of the additional use of DSP.  I rarely run into DSP problems in my patches...they just aren't that complex generally.  However using the right configuraition of IR with mic and mic placements has DRAMATICALLY reduced the amount of time I need to have to tweak the sound of a patch.

 

I'm don't think of myself as a tone Diva by any stretch of the imagination, but if I can get the tone I want with just an IR and no additional EQ blocks, I'm way ahead of the game.

I'm with you DunedinDragon on this.   My experience has also been the limitation of mic placement.  If I want the sound of a Celestion near the edge or at an angle, that just isn't going to happen with the stock cabs.  Regarding distance, it would actually be more useful to me if there were numbers higher than 12"  as well.  

Having said this...  I use 3Sigma and Ownhammer and some other IR's mainly because they are what someone who created a preset I am using is using... or   just because I can.  The internal ones I think are fine and sometimes they are spot on.  

It sure is nice to have lots of stellar choices.

One thing that I think is a big factor with IR's, and I could be wrong, is that I believe an IR uses less DSP than the built in Cabs so conceivably, a simple preset, with little effects, could be stellar with the built in Cabs but once you start adding lush reverbs and such... I think that's where 3rd Party IR's really start to shine.

And remember, besides Cab IR's there are also tone-matching IR's out there.  

I know this doesn't answer the specific question, but you should at least TRY the Sony MDR-7506 Headphones.  There is a reason they have been so popular in studios for so many years.  They are especially nice for the Helix because they can still articulate at high volume.  Not great for your ears at high volume but the overhead is there, which is nice.   

I'm not sure where this fits in if at all, but I decided to get my Yamaha NS10M (original ones) out of my storage unit and hear what the Helix sounded like though them.

Love'em or hate'em, most every album you can name was mixed through a pair of NS10M's at some point in it's recording/production process.  

I have been using my Full Range guitar cab (2 x 12 ported Genz Benz with EV 12L's) until now and it was fine, but took up a lot of space in the room I'm temporarily using until the studio is finished.  

Well the cab is in storage now.  I really didn't know what I was missing by not going FRFR.   Granted, just playing guitar without anything else it sounds "different" but once I bring up backing tracks to play with... WOW !!!   Whatever track I selected, when I started playing along, it was like I was re-mixing the track with MY guitar in it.    Just amazing.  

Lol try playing with a set of bagpipes. They pride themselves in how sharp their high A can be

 

Seriously though, let's make drummers all use electric kits to go FRFR with some matrix cans behind them because that's the sound a recorded drum kit makes and screw you drummers it's all about the audience

 

Then let's just all kill ourselves cause I genuinely don't want to live in that world!

I routinely mix a couple of bands that the drums are electronic kits.  The drummers LOVE it, the band loves it, the audience loves it.   So much control, so much clarity, a fraction of the gear... and frankly that "fraction of the gear" probably has the most impact.   Don't knock it until you've tried it.    To be fair...  this works best when the venue is smaller than 600-700 people.  Any larger and the stage monitors for the drums need to be up to high, or in-ears need to be up to high etc etc..  it just gets more complicated in larger spaces.  But average club stages... you can get such a huge, balanced sound that is nearly impossible with real drums where FOH is basically restricted to "just be louder than the drums"..   

I’ve noticed that in particular here in the Helix forum, there’s a huge amount of FRFR discussions, but there’s minimal discussions about players that don’t necessarily use FRFR.  

I'm surprised no one has brought this up before, but I think the main reason you see so much talk re: FRFR here vs the other brand sites is that FRFR is Helix's focus.  Granted there are LOTS of uses, and LOTS of different configurations available, but it's being sold, marketed, hyped, designed, as a device that reproduces the "mic'd" sound, and has routing capabilities and output options to use external amps and more.   AxeFX is designed more as a performance device that also has the ability to send the reproduced mic's sound, same for Kemper.    If you look back at a lot of the marketing, and youTube stuff for the other products, they are focusing on what amp/speaker combo is the best.   Helix has some of that obviously, but that isn't the primary intent, just one of the options. I think that plays out here.  

I think additionally, bang for buck, Helix hits to the two extremes of "type of musician" covered really well.   I'm not sure about the rest of us in the middle, but if you're a "bedroom rocker" the Helix is perfect.  You can even play backing tracks and just use headsets through it, and even add a mic and sing along if you want to.   If you're a touring musician with a band that plays around the world, again, perfect.   You bring the tone the audience expects from you no matter what crap gear the local venue has lined up.  While the other products out there "can" do those things....  I don't think it's as seamless to do as it is with the Helix.  ESPECIALLY if you set everything up with the "intent" of using it FRFR if live.   

I didn't notice at first glance and I will thoroughly later, but the only thing I think that needs to be added is when looking at compressors, beware of hype.

I don't mean this in the normal sales-pitch way, but rather noting the difference between "compression" and a "Compressor".  

Compression has Threshold and Ratio.. as you state along with Attack, Release and sustain. However...  Many "Compressors" also include "limiting" and "expansion" and this is where it gets rather confusing for the average consumer.  

What is also counter intuitive, is generally the "better" more expensive the compressor.... the LESS knobs, buttons, bells and whistles.    

https://www.attackmagazine.com/reviews/the-best/top-20-best-hardware-compressors-ever-made/

I too would love to see a detailed article like you are working on for ALL of the effects in the Helix.  I found myself overlooking really cool effects because I wasn't familiar with them IRL enough to appreciate what they did.   

What should the Helix sound like going FRFR?.... Like THIS !!!

https://www.facebook.com/ceecee.peterson.1/videos/10207707542669723/

I will have to throw this out there though... I believe the factory presets have been tweaked a bit in the latest firmware... scrolling through them tonight I am finding some of the old ones that I would not give the time of day sounding pretty sweet...

I spot checked about 20 presets from previous to current firmware (using a differ) and the only "changes" are the additional tracking for expression pedals. There were zero parameter tweaks.

While there may be zero parameter tweaks, Improvements in other area's of the device "could" have an effect on tone.  I noticed things sounded better after the 1st update last year...   I'm sure they are constantly tweaking the algorithms and such.

So I was thinking...  while completely unnecessary,  of combining back in some of the deleted Factory presets.   

I actually find scrolling through them inspiring.  

I guess my thinking is.. why not.   But it also begs the why were the taken out question.   It's not like there isn't enough room.  I thought some of the removed ones were kinda nice..

Discuss...???

FWIW, mine is plugged in all the time.   I don't think it's been unplugged in months except maybe to reconnect if the Laptop it's on goes to sleep.