zooey

2 Alesis Alpha 112s, like the similar Alto's, $400/pair new on eBay. My recording life has been largely dormant due to various factors.

There's action at both ends of the price spectrum. Insanely priced Gibson and "boutique" guitars, decent quality Fender and other brand instruments relatively cheap. Not to mention digital goodies for multiple orders of magnitude less than their vastly inferior counterparts from the 80s, if they existed at all.

Or for groups of 4 or 8 channels.

Thanks for the rundown Mitch, hope to make it next time. Like you, I'd love to hear my guitar and patches through some other FRFRs, I just have low budget Alesis ones. Cool that this is happening, and thanks to flyingscool for the legwork.

Ping Richie Castellano, he's in your neighborhood, kinda, I think, if he's not on the road. It'd be pretty cool having him come to your local meetup :)

Does that caveat apply to the surface pro too, or just surface book?

Numbers are no doubt going down for guitar, up for rapping, have been for a long time. Culture changes over time. But dang, there are some young-uns who can shred rings around me :)

So how'd it go? Roughly how many people? Any particular major events? Sorry I couldn't make it.

Yeah, can't change or add blocks in pedal edit mode, I think you're right. There's an Ideascale entry for this, vote it up!

^^^ this, except that there's a shortcut for doing that in the editor too. I don't use the editor enough to have it on the tip of my tongue, but I think you hold down shift or control or maybe both, or something, while adjusting the setting. Check back through the release notes, or maybe the most recent manual.

Not me, but from what I've seen, while some people do use them with modelers, most are happier with Yamaha, QSC, JBL, or Line 6 for FRFR use.

Thanks, I ran into one other one I can't recall. Both are not *that* cheap, more than an inexpensive but reasonable DI.

Me too, and DIs aren't bad to have along, but sending 1/4" to stage and XLR to FOH is a nice approach. Seems like a phantom blocker for the XLR side would be a better idea. More expensive though.

Hey guys, not that anyone super cares, but I'm not feeling well and probably won't make it today. Wish that wasn't so, would be great to see folks again, and see what everyone's got going on. Too bad these get-togethers are so far apart, but I know everyone's busy, myself included. Anyway, rock on!

When you save a patch, it does remember which snapshot was selected. That's good, it lets you control which snapshot comes up when you recall the patch. You do have to remember to select the snapshot you want to be in effect for that patch before you save it.

Not a gigging pro any more, just going to friends, meetups, etc, my gear in my car, and I got this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003ELQ2IQ/ It's fine for what it is, but not super padded. Definitely not for the back of a truck or checked baggage, and I wouldn't bet on it protecting against a serious drop on a hard surface. Helix might be fine, but that'd be on Helix, not the bag.

DD, what are you using for a phantom blocker?

That's pedal edit mode. Definitely your friend when you're auditioning IRs.

Yeah, my point was more not to worry about actually sounding like a clav, just do something cool. That riff is unmistakable, you could sound like SRV, JB, Metallica, anything, people will know the song, and groove if you do.

Two words: Jeff Beck

Sometimes calling them out helps, sometimes not...

The Alto is a perfectly reasonable and low cost FRFR option for stage monitoring. I use something similar at home, lots of users. But like others have said, mic'ing it or a keyboard amp with separate woof and tweet is unlikely to go well. Your FOH tones will be much better going direct, which shouldn't be a problem for the sound person if they're even slightly on the ball, or even just open to suggestion. However, there's been at least one other instance discussed here where neither of those were the case. An "experienced" guy, set in his ways, just wouldn't do it. I hope you don't hit that scenario, but if you anticipate the possibility, don't let it throw you, bring some sort of viable rig, and make the best of it, you'll be fine. Good luck, and let us know how it goes!

You probably know all this, and it is documented, but just in case... If you have presets and/or IRs that matter to you, be sure to back them up BEFORE updating. You should also record your global settings. All that stuff gets forgotten during the update cycle.

An important companion piece to this is longer IR names!!! Big libraries with lots of variations typically use composite names, indicating the cab, speaker(s), mic(s), mic distance, radial position, etc, and they end up long. Add a vendor prefix (OH, CP, RW, CIR, etc), and a three digit IR slot number, and there's no way to fit that in the current max length. Upshot is that I have multiple IRs that ended up with the same name in Helix (ignoring slot number of course), which wasn't the case in the file system. Very frustrating. Honestly, while I'd love better IR management tools (reorder while preserving usage in presets, slot-prefix-less backup and restore, preview from disk, show usages, show unused, etc), these two conceptually simple things -- more slots with longer names -- would go a LONG way towards making life with IRs less painful.

That one's scary to me. What would you be affecting? Could you find out?