HonestOpinion

LOL! There's one you don't want to back into by accident. With mad naming skeels like that you should be collaborating with Line6 (or Douglas Adams). Makes old school names like "Super-Overdrive" seem just a bit pedestrian.

I don't even care what these effects do as long as I can have a pedalboard full of names like "Subdecay Harmonic Antagonizer". I think they had one of those on a "Dr. Who" episode last week. Don't think those names will quite fit on the scribble strips though. :P

I like the Teemah as well as the Tube Screamer for a fairly transparent overdrive. I use a 3db boost on the Output block assigned to a footswitch for a straight volume boost because it has minimal impact on my tone as it is downstream from everything else. Any of the more subtle overdrives can work well to put a little hair on your amp sound by dialing the drive down and the volume up.

LOL, yeah, bring it!!! To be inevitably and swiftly followed by endless discussion on the forum regarding their authenticity and what was missed in the most recent update. Looking forward to the next firmware release with the usual anticipation and formless dread! ;)

If your monitors are similar to your FOH this is a great way to monitor the Helix and set up your presets. If you cannot get monitors that are the same or similar to your FOH speakers to sound good chances are you are not going to like the way your Helix is sounding through the FOH either. I would agree that an FRFR is not necessary and in fact if it is significantly different sounding than your PA speakers can actually result in you hearing quite a different sound on stage than the one being delivered to the FOH. Some people do prefer having an additional one or two monitors/FRFRs behind them to better mimic the sound of a guitar amp pushing air. Singers also sometimes prefer having a vocal monitor in front of them with less or no guitar coming out of it and a monitor(s) behind them with only guitar. This can help to keep the separation between vocals and guitar and make it easier to hear and control your voice, although if you have guitar coming out of the vocal monitor in front of you and also the guitar monitor behind this can result in some phase cancellation if you are not careful about how you angle the monitors. Again, this is just personal preference. I usually use my vocal monitor for both guitar and vocal although some gigs I bring an additional monitor for the Helix with me as well.

I agree, I prefer to get my presets individually EQ'd so as not to require a "blanket" EQ of all of them with Global EQ just to compensate for live volumes versus the volume I used to design my preset. With that said, as you point out sometimes the Global EQ can be the best option for compensating for a given room or PA without trying to go in and modify the presets individually on the fly at a gig.

+1 My reasoning exactly! Using something similar to a PA speaker gives me that warm fuzzy feeling that my presets will sound close to the same to the audience as they do to me. Whenever possible I design the presets near performance volumes otherwise the Fletcher-Munson curve will ensure that the sounds I designed at a lower volume will sound very different live no matter how similar the speakers I used to design them with were to the PA. I find practice with the band to be a good opportunity to make the final adjustments to my presets as I am usually closer to stage volume than the volume I generally use to initially setup my presets. My advice, get a good pair of relatively neutral earplugs for setting up presets close to stage volume. I understand for apartment dwellers and the like that may not be an option but you may or may not find yourself needing to make some last minute adjustments, potentially to the Global EQ, when you play out.

The section you are looking at in the manual "2 Into 1" is exactly what you want with the Input block on Path B set to "Mic". From your description it almost sounds like you have your guitar and mic on separate routes rather than separate paths. You should not need to move your Merge block down "more than one level". In fact you should not have to move the Merge block down any levels. These instructions assume your guitar path/input is on top and your mic path/input is on the bottom and you have created them within one Route. You do not need to move the Merge block off the top (guitar) path to the mic path. Leave the Merge block on the top path. It will combine the signal from your mic path and your guitar path automatically. Just use the Action button to move the Merge block to where you want it positioned on the top path just before the looper. Note: There is also a more complicated setup if you find you need more DSP for your guitar you can use the Super Serial routing strategy to run your guitar on Route 1 and also Route 2 and use Path B on Route 2 for your microphone using the same directions above to route it to a looper at the end of Path A on Route 2. I would recommend keeping it simple at first though and getting it working just using Route 1 to gain a better understanding of how the split and merge blocks work before you try a more complex Super Serial routing strategy.

I would say you were correct if the sole objective of a tuner was to show that a string's pitch fluctuates after it is picked. But that is not the objective of a good tuner. A good tuner should get us as close to the reference pitch as possible given the innate fluctuations inherent in a picked string. That means that ideally a moment is chosen fairly soon after the initial pick attack and the display freezes for long enough to see how close that is to the reference pitch. That enables us to get perhaps not in perfect tune but close. After the initial freeze the tuner is free to go back to hyper-granularity mode and show us what the string is really doing without a "false sense of tuning security", but that momentary freeze is what allows us to keep our sanity and get in tune. That is not what is happening on the Helix tuner. The Helix tuner is fluctuating fairly wildly, even on guitars that don't have any tuning problems. As has been expressed many times most of us are grateful for the increased granularity but there is a happy medium and a compromise to be had here. Increased granularity can be combined with tuner stability. Again all we need is a couple of moments where the display freezes long enough to show us where the initial pluck of the string is located. This discussion seems so pointless to me. To me the Helix tuner is not behaving like any other tuner I have seen on the market and I don't want to give up the excellent improvement it made in the last firmware upgrade. I would just like it to be easier to use for practical things like playing and recording and not be a science experiment that demonstrates how much the pitch actually moves around when you pick a string. Just looking for a compromise between granularity and usability here. I genuinely respect how sensitive the Helix tuner is (and its users). :) Btw, even if the Peterson Strobe app does exhibit the same exacting behavior as the Helix tuner there is no reason that can't be improved on.

I don't think your sentiments fall entirely on "deaf ears". Others on this forum have also asked for the new digital "virtual" amps that for example Line6 created on earlier MFX and the Vetta. Amps perhaps inspired by but not based on anything in the analog world. Imagination is pretty much the only limit with what one could create with entirely new digital effects. There is definitely great potential for creating entirely new sounds with all the benefits the digital universe can bring. I also think there is plenty of room for "classic" analog amps and pedals that were full of unique character that is still hard to authentically capture. Yes, sometimes that character came from aging capacitors, germanium chips, odd transistors, weak batteries, voltage fluctuations, worn speaker cones, and the like but they managed to get some really "warm" fantastic sounds. I don't think the new and the old are mutually exclusive and I am happy to see them both on the Helix.

There is an Idea in Ideascale for this you can vote for: http://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Snapshots-LED-colors-etc/831869-23508

Did you sell the invite or the Ax8 on eBay? Think I may have found that extra income I need. Three of those and its a free Ax8 ;)

I agree. I would just go direct using the PA system on the ship if possible, if you want your own monitor for practice or stage, maybe bring a small light 8" or 10" powered PA speaker (might be a step up from the cheap Marshall combo) and use the full power of the Helix modeling along with the effects. Perhaps bring something like a Sansamp pedal maybe even the Tech 21 Fly as a backup. Unless you are on some giant cruise ship that should be all you need. I think you will enjoy the modeled amp's sounds through the PA speaker much more than the cheap Marshall combo and you will have time to get proficient with programming the Helix. Of course, I would spend some time getting things dialed in before the cruise.

What are your favorite clean amps/cabs on the Helix?

Thanks for posting, glad to hear these are working so well for you, I may have to purchase some, interested in the same ones you chose (and most entertaining to end your post with a decades old quote from a Paul Simon tune).

I would not be at all surprised if there is some algorithm already that does some sort of roll-off instead of a hard cut-off but I have no idea what that slope or what the roll-off start and end-points are, and I would think it is fixed such that it is always the same. Thanks for this tidbit phil_m. I had not seen this mentioned before. There would be I think some great advantages to being having high/low cuts with the flexibility of tapered cuts as I think so many people would opt to use them rather than the more involved parametric and graphic EQ settings. And of course you could still use the PEQ and GEQ blocks with them if you wanted even more granular control.

I think you may well be right and they are "rolled off" to some extent but I have no idea how that is implemented without someone doing some diagnostics. I think it would be nice to have some control over it through a tapered cut with some settable parameters like the one I proposed on Ideascale. If L6 wants to chime in on how high/low cuts have been implemented on cabs and EQ blocks on the Helix I think a lot of people would be interested. I am curious what they think of this whole discussion. A lot of folks have been talking about this lately and a better understanding of how low/high cuts and EQ in general operates and intersect with amp, cabs, and IRs on the Helix might be really educational.

I love the Mutron II phaser pedal as well and voted for it but it is not the same as the Mutron Bi-Phase although it is a scaled down version with some of the same features and would also be an awesome addition to the Helix. My apologies if you already knew that. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1f/Mutron.gif/220px-Mutron.gif

Added an Idea to Ideascale to have tapered high/low cuts. Please vote it up here: http://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Tapered-high-low-cuts-for-more-realistic-amp-cab-modeling/840630-23508 "Guitar speakers like Celestions tend to DROP OFF but not CUT OFF at around 70hz on the low end and about 5khz on the high end. I would love to see Line6 add a TAPERED High/Low EQ cut that would mimic this behavior and make for a much more accurate representation of a guitar speaker's behavior. Would love to see a tapered low and high cut added, preferably with three options start point, end point, and slope. So, for example you would set the start point on your high cut at 5khz, set the endpoint at 20khz, and the slope at the degree of steepness you wanted the signal to drop off between these two points. Same basic idea for the low cut. Set the start point at 70hz, set the end point at 20hz, and set the slope again for the steepness of the cut you want. The three parameters - start point, end point, and slope would allow you to tailor the high and low cuts as you saw fit to emulate different speakers and to sync up with different presets. This would make it much easier to accurately emulate the EQ characteristics of real guitar amps and speaker cabs."

Added an Idea to add the Mutron Bi-Phase to the Helix. Please vote it up here http://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Mutron-Bi-Phase-pedal/840629-23508

Navigate towards Venus and avoid Uranus.

Not necessarily expecting polyphonic tracking although I think that the potential could be there with a properly designed Variax but I think many of us definitely did buy the Helix for the effects pedals as well as all of its other excellent features so by all means keep the effects coming and let's improve the ones that already exist if they need it (pitch and reverb effects leap to mind).

Would love to see them add a modeled Mutron Bi-Phase pedal. A great and unique phaser pedal. Essentially like two phasers in one. You can vote for it here http://line6.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Please-add-a-model-of-the-Mutron-Bi-Phase-pedal/840629-23508

I hear ya, the Kemper, Fractal, and Helix are all great devices and there is more to compare on them than just the amp sounds. And yes, I am more than happy with my Helix and don't spend my time lusting after its competitors (much). But... I still like the idea of a competition that would yield some epic presets and encourage all the companies involved to bring new features and improved models. Probably generate some buzz and sell a lot of merch in the process. Could be good for all parties involved. (or probably just a truly goofball idea that will never happen, just spitballin' here). Even if this just happened online it would be fun to see. I really appreciate the folks who put so much effort into these video comparisons but the videos just seem to have too many variables (some of which I pointed out in my post above) and require too much work for one person to truly demonstrate the best these units have to offer. Takes a village to get the best out of a complex MFX. Perhaps an "Olympic village"? :P

Grin, looks like we have a submission for our first event at the upcoming(first?) "MFX Olympics". Instead of a Bronze, Silver, and Gold, we can award say a "Clapton", "Morse", "Hendrix" (insert your favorite guitar players for consideration in whatever order you deem appropriate, I can easily think of 100 other worthy nominations for naming the trophies). When do we start the qualifying rounds for the programmers/musicians who make it on to the official representing teams?