zooey

Only one of the USB ports on the old laptop that I use for music works reliably w Helix, but the others work fine for everything else.

2 Alesis Alpha 112s here, $400 shipped for the pair new on eBay. For stands, got 2 Yorkville SKS02B, short ones, $38 @ Full Compass, but one was defective, popped a rivet first time I set it up, FC sent another. The 112s are good but not great IMO. A tad bright to my ear, and nowhere near the advertised SPL, which I mostly don't need. Still, pretty good, and very cost effective. Would love a pair of DXR10s, but money.

Lots of lefties, odd...

The Redwirez BigBox set is very economical, no other vendor has a comparable bundle anywhere near that price, afaik. As others have pointed out, they give you tons of options, which is both a positive and a negative. They also have a utility for mixing IRs, which I think is free w their big pack. There's also a free pack from Line 6, here: http://line6.com/allure/

Nice case, but shipping to the US is $75, ouch.

I'm sure it is (;-)

I think we're saying the same thing. You have to RECALL a preset to get it entered into Helix's "last preset" storage slot. Saving a preset doesn't do that. And I agree, that's not intuitive, and should be fixed. I've just learned to live with it, let Line 6 concentrate on stuff that's harder to work around.

If I'm not mistaken, on power-up, it goes to the last RECALLED preset, and Save As isn't a recall action. After a Save As, make sure you switch to another preset and back to the newly saved copy if that's where you want to be next time.

I got a pair of Alesis Alpha 112s, the slightly premium version of the similar Alto's, new off eBay for a bit under $400 shipped, and I've seen them for even less. They're decent, and the price was good, but I wouldn't say they're the very most awesome. I don't really gig these days, but the one jam-ish thing I did with them was in a pretty huge barn/show-riding space, only vocals and horns in the PA, and the 112s barely cut it, limiter lights on a fair amount of the time. They didn't sound messed up, just that was all there was. They're also a tad bright in the upper mids. If I'd had the cash, I would have done DXR10s or DBR10s, but for what I paid, if that's an issue, I doubt you can do better.

I thought Richie Castellano's video sounded quite good. Don't have a Variaxe so I didn't try his presets, but you might as well. http://line6.com/support/topic/26009-richie-castellano-variaxe-acoustic-presets/

Me too. The lack of IR management tools and the small number of available slots makes this a significant pain. I now have some Celestion IRs, plus the ones from Line 6 and a bunch of free stuff, that I haven't even tried. First, I have to inventory what my current patches use, then juggle everything around to create a bunch of ideally adjacent empty slots for new stuff, and manually remap my existing presets to the new locations. That's just to make room to TRY new stuff. Then I'd need to go through that all again once I figured out what to keep out of those, and probably do it again for additional audition rounds. I know these are first world problems, even relative to modelers -- at least Helix can do all this. But realistically, so far every time I get some playing time, I've chosen to actually play and/or work on sounds, rather than go through all that first.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di-_n05tppo

Nice work, both of you! Anyone want to take a shot at a no-overdubs live version, using Helix FX for the "multitrack"?

Can you describe the exact steps you're doing? I haven't heard about anything like that happening to others, or run into it myself.

Windows 7 here, no major issues with the editor or its interaction w Helix, just the few known hiccups in Helix itself.

What IS the deal with those big dollar models? I've never seen a Variaxe go for anywhere near that much. Not that I've been looking...

http://store.line6.com/factory-refurbished/guitars.html

Apologies for not remembering that. I guess we're all used to running a hot signal out.

I just don't consider stuff up there period.

Thanks for pursuing this Jim. Disappointing response from Line 6, I have to say. FWIW, I agree difference between IR processors should be subtle, not the obvious differences folks are reporting. It'd be great to show them frequency response plots from several processors alongside Helix. Based on the reports here, I'd expect a cluster of similar graphs, with Helix as the outlier. Of course it's unlikely anyone here is going to provide an improved IR rendering algorithm, so the only way I can see Line 6's response besides blind obstructionism is that we need an IdeaScale item saying that Helix should process IRs more like other software. I'd upvote that in a flash, with or without comparative response plots.

Wouldn't matching mic level make most sense coming out of the XLRs, with the XLR output level seeing set to mic? I can't see the point of lowering the internal patch levels down that far. Why would you want to do that, other than to have something as a consistent reference?

The unresponsive thing happened to me again this morning. No computer involved, just playing and tweaking, changed presets, to one I've used recently without problems, and suddenly no controls worked. Not mission critical since I was just in my basement, but it sure wouldn't be a happy thing on a gig.

Did you try the ground lift switch on your Helix?