HonestOpinion

I would definitely do a backup first and try reapplying the firmware and doing a factory reset and restore. Good luck with not having to do a repair, might still be worth doing if it comes to that. Especially if it turns out to be something less expensive.

Some of the benefits of the Helix: You get a microphone, Aux, and Variax, input in addition to Guitar. You get an L6 Link output if you want to be able to add and remotely control a PowerCab(+). Granted this can be done with more effort via MIDI. Extra pair of expression inputs. Scribble strips!!! Built-in expression pedal on the Helix. Lots more footswitches!!! Roughly twice the processing power allowing more complex signal chains with more amps and effects in a preset. You may eventually find you want both the Helix and the Stomp. For me, the Helix does the trick. One of my goals was getting away from a pedal board with a ton of pedals and all the cable and reordering hassles that come with it. I also constantly use an expression pedal for volume, whammy, and pitch so I like having one that is built in. No fuss, no muss. Anyway, the Helix is a so-called "all-in-one" solution although there is lots of I/O available for expansion. If cost is your primary consideration or the stuff in the above paragraphs, isn't that interesting to you maybe you might prefer the Stomp. If you are just looking to add some HX features/functions to your board and leverage your pedals, the Stomp might be a better fit. Either way you can get a great deal on the Native software. Make sure to check whether or not your used Helix comes with an unused/available Native license discount, so your expectations are set accordingly.

Interesting topic. I think you nailed it here. The arrangements will go a long way towards making a power trio work. There is going to be more "space" in the music with fewer players, so use it to good effect. Space in the right places can sound dramatic. Listen to some of the trios you think get a great full sound and do what they do (with or without an additional singer who doesn't play an instrument), e.g. ZZ Top, Budgie, Black Sabbath, The Who, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Cream, The Doors, etc. - your choices may differ. Sorry, all the three-piece bands that leapt to mind were old school. Might want to find some more recent acts that are taking advantage of newer tech. Work on the arrangements and the rest will follow. Just getting a big robust guitar tone is a great starting point. Recognizing that there won't be any other instrument to reinforce your sound other than bass & drums. Any effect that adds depth such as distortion, chorus, flanger, phaser, delay, reverb, etc., can thicken your sound. Anything that essentially spoofs another guitar as @theElevatorsmentioned such as doubler, octaver, harmonizer. Running them in stereo and panning the delayed or shifted sound to one side can give the illusion of two guitars. Jack White made a two-piece sound huge with nothing but hairy fuzz riffage and an octaver. Looping, freezing, pads, MIDI triggering can all provide another guitar/instrument part. Tapping in tempos can provide a sort of call and answer vibe. You might work your pickup selector, tone, and volume knobs on your guitar more frequently than you used to, for more variety in your tone. If you use a whammy, that can add motion as can other techniques on the fretboard. Although not necessary, anything that changes the tone, dynamics, tempo, or feel of the tune (you know, the obligatory reggae vamp), can keep things more interesting. Tell your lead singer to jump around more, you have less personnel to fill larger stages :-)

First and foremost, you may want to check if your Marshall's switching input is "short to sleeve". See warning from manual below. From the manual: IMPORTANT! Connect EXT AMP 1/2 only to amplifiers that utilize “short-to-sleeve” footswitch inputs. Connecting to any other sort of input could cause permanent damage to both your amp and Helix! If you’re not sure if your amp has short-to-sleeve inputs, contact the manufacturer According to the post on the link below, Marshall told this fellow the Marshall switching it "tip to sleeve". Don't know if that qualifies as "short to sleeve" but it sounds like it so maybe you can switch this amp with the LT. Proceed with caution and at your own risk. Would be a good idea to contact Marshall and ask first. https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/relay-switching-on-a-marshall-jcm-2000-dsl-100.145623/ Also, assuming your amp is safe to be switched by the LT, take a look at the "Ext Amp" parameters under the 'Command Center' section of the manual. You may need to modify these. For example the setting the 'Select' parameter equal to 'Tip to Sleeve'. Are you using a TS or TRS cable? That can sometimes make the difference and I know some users have even made custom TRS/TS cables to get their external amp switching working properly. Sounds like a TS cable might work for your purposes but not sure. Maybe someone else on the forum who has the JCM 2000 and gotten the switching to work will chime in. I do know that I had a similar problem with a different modeler and my old Boogie amp and ended up getting an RJM switcher to resolve the issue. The LT's Ext Amp switching is more flexible than the external amp settings available for that modeler were though.

Go to global settings Preferences --> 'Joystick Encoder' and change the setting. From the manual: "Joystick Encoder - Determines the joystick behavior when a block is selected within the Home screen - signal flow. For “Model” (the default), turning the joystick knob scrolls through available models for the selected block. For “Selection,” turning the joystick knob quickly navigates selecting blocks across the signal flow. SHORTCUT: Pressing while turning the joystick reverses the current joystick behavior"

Good point regarding the restore. The setlist that is currently failing to load when attempting to import, may well succeed upon a restore. @thedoctormoshould have a backup, particularly if the upgrade was done from within HX Edit, as it is part of the editor's upgrade process. Another possibility per the recommendation to do the factory reset, is that it may allow the import of the setlist, unless it is corrupt. @thedoctormoFollowing the release notes and just doing the backup, factory reset, and restore is the most trouble-free way to execute a firmware update. Winging it without a compelling reason has the potential to introduce complications. The factory/template setlists can always be unchecked during the restore to enable retention of the firmware version's new setlists/presets. Saving any presets in the current factory/template setlists the user wants to retain should be done before executing the factory preset.

Try following the instructions at this link to use the Line 6 Updater to reapply the firmware. I might try this using safe boot mode if regular boot mode doesn't work.

Have you upgraded to 3.50 firmware and 3.51 HX Edit/3.51 Native yet? Your initial post may be moot.

When you say "reset the global settings", do you mean you manually set them from "global setting notes", or you do you execute a factory reset? If you are not doing a factory reset after firmware upgrades - bad plan and it could easily be the cause of your issue. The factory reset needs to be part of your upgrade process.

Just scrolled up and also noticed that @datacommandohad already mentioned this. Compliments to him for posting on this much earlier. I would say "good catch" but that might sound self-congratulatory :-). Thanks for correcting it!

Did you do the backup, factory reset, and then restore, as instructed by the 3.50 upgrade release notes? If not, the issue may just be that your global settings have changed or are not working properly. Make sure you restore from a backup that is hopefully recent but had your old global settings. Also, unrelated (probably) to the snapshots issue, make sure you download and install the 3.51 version of HX Edit that was just released, either from within HX Edit or from the downloads page. If you already did the backup, factory reset, and then restore, you do NOT have to do it again.

This is without a doubt one of the most useful posts ever on the forum so believe me I am not nitpicking here. Under your first step "1)", thought you might want to correct the following text "1) Shut down HX Native" from "HX Native" to "HX Edit". Or I suppose you could mention not having either running. I don't think Native interferes with an upgrade but not a terrible idea to shut any running Native instances down. Anyway, thought you might have intended to put "HX Edit" there.

I get it. Human brains (zombie baiting) are big on pattern recognition. A useful survival mechanism since we crawled out of the primordial ooze. If two things occur in close proximity or time to each other, we often assume cause & effect or correlation. Sometimes confusing one for the other. But sometimes it is neither, just coincidence. Also typically, it is more difficult to prove a negative like "this firmware upgrade NEVER caused a hardware failure". Without more evidence I find it difficult to jump to the conclusion that this firmware upgrade caused a hardware failure. Particularly when it can't be remedied by either repeating the upgrade steps or rolling back to a previous version, as well as also lacking confirmation from Line 6. One possible exception perhaps would be a part/PCB that is so stressed already that just being reinitialized caused it to fail. In which case, it would have probably failed in short order under regular usage or perhaps the next time it was turned off/on. In other words, it wasn't the firmware update specifically that caused the failure, but more generally any action that addressed/stressed that part. I would think this to be an incredibly rare occurrence.

Good advice regarding working the parameters! Various reviews seem to demonstrate the Helix pitch blocks are excellent. I tend to use them infrequently. The question is, does this apply to bass as well as guitar? Are you using this with bass as @Aged_Cheddaris? Tracking for lower frequency notes has historically been more prone to latency or glitching for almost any transposition or synthesis effect, on any device, as the lower notes have a "slower" waveform. Maybe there is also more potential for glitching as there is lots of room for harmonics over the fundamental.

It occurs to me that I have not seen a single user report back here that downgrading their firmware fixed the problem with their knob not working. Four possibilities immediately occur to me. No one has rolled back to a previous firmware version and reported back. We have no evidence that rolling back fixes these reported hardware failures and therefore no cause and effect with the new firmware can be concluded. Rolling back does not fix the hardware issue. As stated above, no one has reported here after rolling back but if the rollback does not fix the issue, it is highly unlikely the problem is the 3.5 firmware. The upgrade either damages the switches/knobs, or leaves something in place that impacts the hardware that is persistent even after rolling back. This seems so unlikely to me as to verge on the absurd. I categorically reject it but thought I would mention it in a universe of infinite possibility. This topic risks becoming a magnet for users with purely coincidental hardware issues, conflating them with the new firmware rollout. To me this seems like the most likely scenario for the affected users. Coincidence seems to me to be the most likely explanation for these hardware failures, at least currently, until and if more evidence becomes available, such as confirmation from Line 6. There are very few reports on the forum of hardware failure reports after the firmware upgrade. If this were a problem caused by the firmware update, I would expect to see many more. So, in conclusion, I have to trot out the tired old car repair analogy. You get your car back from the shop after a repair, and much too your chagrin, you notice something else on the car is no longer working. The temptation to assume your mechanic "did it" is overwhelming but not necessarily true. The same might be going on here. As of now, the evidence seems compellingly to be pointing to coincidence, NOT the firmware upgrade. I say this, not to discount these users' conclusions, but just to spare them and other users with hardware problems, potentially spinning their wheels looking at the wrong cause. If anyone discovers differently, please report back. Anything is possible, if unlikely.

I truly appreciate the quote above! Would love to have had this at the ready every time I saw a comment to the effect of "only amateurs need gain reduction meters for a compressor". R.I.P. Bart Walsh!

Anyone had any luck treating the switches externally, without opening the device? Now that trick I want to know!

If you are talking about copying a snapshot from one preset to another, you can't do that. The blocks may be, and frequently are, different from preset to preset so that action is simply disallowed. Even if the target preset has exactly the same blocks.

Heads up. A new bugfix editor version HX Edit 3.51, and Native 3.51, are now available for download. There is no 3.51 firmware version (yet?), so you DON'T have to do a factory reset or restore. Just download and install HX Edit via the editor or the downloads page, and Native 3.51 via the downloads page (if you own it or want to trial it). Would recommend downloading and installing these, particularly if you have one of the issues listed in the 3.51 release notes.

Did you take a backup and do the factory reset and restore after your upgrade? If not, execute those steps. In the Input block do you have 'Variax Settings' = "Per Preset" on the second parameter page? Note: Once set in one preset it is set in all. Btw, the following is a known bug in the 3.50 release notes In some cases, the Input block's Variax Tone Knob setting is not recalled across preset changes

Nobody has access to emojis. They used to be available on the forum years ago but when they overhauled the forum, sadly :-( , they did away with them.

Pretty good article on the impact of cable length on tone below. It would be interesting, strictly from an inquiring mind would like to know perspective, as you requested, to see some graphs as to what impact different simulated cable lengths has on various instruments. I think the rule of thumb is though, the higher the setting, the more muted the highs and high-mids get, and I suppose, depending on how the 'Cable Tone (length)' emulation is implemented, other parts or the whole of the frequency spectrum. Long cable lengths in the physical world can also attenuate the signal's strength in addition to altering the frequency range. I suppose that could also be being emulated by the 'Cable Tone' setting. So, the cable length can essentially attenuate the signal and change the frequency range being transmitted as more capacitance is introduced. You can see where, depending on the signal strength and content of the source (e.g. acoustic vs. electric), your tone could be impacted quite differently by the digitally emulated setting (or in the physical world by the cable length). This would lead one to believe that always leaving the 'Cable Tone' setting set to minimum/shortest would be the way to go as this would provide the maximum, cleanest signal. However, if for example, you want a quick and easy way to diminish the brightness of your tone, you might opt for a higher 'Cable Tone' setting. Similar to the way some players find that they prefer not only a certain range of length, but also a certain brand of cable because of the tone they get from it. Probably due to different materials, jacks, shielding, etc.. Not that the cable is necessarily inherently better quality, just that they prefer its tone. https://gearaficionado.com/blog/does-guitar-cable-length-affect-your-tone/

The new amps are great! IMHO this topic focuses on entirely the wrong issue. It is the potential of provoking an anxiety attack via grammatical OCD brought on by the egregious use of so many orphaned close parentheses in the new model names that we should be concerned with! It's a slippery slope from here to amp names with stranded closed brackets or curly braces, or in an ever more dystopian descent, and I shudder even contemplating it, multiple umlauts ;-) #Märshäll800}}}}]]]]]

Definitely the least expensive I remember. Such a great piece of software. This is an absolute no-brainer for anyone who doesn't have Native yet, jump on it!

Don't own the XL so this is coming from a Helix-centric perspective. Create a backup and try a global reset. Maybe that will restore switch operation. Edit a few critical presets to use the footswitches that are working. Reorder your presets for your set so everything can be reached using bank down. If you do this than also keep a laptop available per the next bullet point in the event that you accidentally jump a preset. Keep a laptop available and connected at the gig with the editor up and running for things like bank switching or stomp activation. If you are feeling particularly intrepid you might try opening the case and seeing if maybe a ribbon cable (if the XL has 'em) got knocked loose or something equally obvious. Ask your sound tech to go buy you a new Stomp XL and restore a backup from your damaged unit to the new one ;-)