zooey

IMO hosting VSTs is impractical, both because you'd have to provide a full OS emulation, and because there are eighty bazillion plugins in various states of disarray out there that you don't want to support. Providing an SDK for third parties to build "native" Helix blocks seems to me like a much better plan. Developers would have to do the work to port their stuff, but running on Helix would be a huge benefit to them, and the fact that Line 6 was able to go the other way, porting Helix code to Mac and Windows, is a hopeful sign that the translation isn't prohibitively hard. The work Line 6 would need to do for that would be to create a reasonably developer-friendly block loader, and provide documentation and developer support. They would NOT have to write a whole emulated environment that doesn't exist at all now. I know that's stll a lot, and neither the Helix ecosystem or Line 6 are exactly dying without it, so I don't expect it'll happen. But I do think it would benefit users, third party developers, and Line 6.

He probably didn't want to load the guitar with the impedence of both units, at least I wouldn't.

Did you end up getting this? If so, how did it work out? If not, what did you do instead?

Understood about the support liability. I don't think it's likely to happen, just wish it would.

Think you're missing the point. Great third party content isn't a boat anchor, it's a huge competive advantage, for instance for Kontakt, iPhone, even Kemper. The sounds in Helix are great, but so is the hardware and UI/OS. It's a great platform for hosting audio processors, particularly for live use, and it's got the guitar world's attention. If the process of porting computer based models to Helix is reasonable, which Helix Native sort of loosely implies, though in reverse, I bet lots of plugin devs would be interested. It'd be good for Line 6, third party devs, and customers.

Funky switch maybe?

Combo version?

Agree, the Litigator is awesome, really been digging it for a while now. Great amp.

Surely this sort of marketing maneuver isn't cause for complaint. Sometimes early adopters get a lower intro price, when the company's trying to attract attention to the new thing. Sometimes not, when they don't feel they need to, especially if production is in short supply, as Helix was for quite a while, when second hand (i.e. in stock) prices can be higher than retail. It's also common for prices to drop after something's been out for a while, when sales have leveled off and they're trying to gin up more interest. That more typically happens at retail I think, not that list price goes down, though that can happen too. Bottom line is that you always pay your money and take your chances, or wait for a better day, if you think one is coming and don't need/want it now. Getting bent out of shape because someone else got a better deal because they waited, or jumped in early, is a recipe for heartache, and not much more.

Agree, as I said :) But it would be super awesome... Next best would be for Line 6 to provide the resources needed for other developers to write software for Helix, specifically third party blocks. Not that L6 has been doing a bad job of it or anything, quite the opposite, but it sure would be cool if Helix could host say Scuffham amp modules, Valhalla verbs, etc.

One of us is misunderstanding the other I think. What I'm idly wishing for is that the Helix hardware could run PC and/or Mac plugins itself, with no computer required.

Not just annoying and tedious, though that is true, it makes it much harder to compare amps.

This ^^^ Same with amps and fx, where the same settings exist.

VST plugins running inside Helix itself means emulating the Mac or PC OS. That's not a reasonable thing to hope for unless it was designed that way from the start.

Not the same as a multiband compressor, but you may find a chain of EQ > compressor > EQ useful. Boosting a frequency before the comp and possibly cutting it after has the effect of compressing that frequency more.

What I'd prefer that Helix could run PC and/or Mac plugins itself, best of both worlds (;-) ...which we know isn't going to happen...

I've skipped a release because of reported problems, then done the next one, no issues. That's how it's speed to work I'm pretty certain.

I've sometimes put a rotary in parallel with a cab, to add back a bit of top end. I've also tried lowering the mix control very slightly instead, letting a tiny bit of the raw amp sound with no cab sim through. Obviously you don't want a lot of that, it's kind of a slight of hand thing, not an organically righteous way to go, but the rotary comes off pretty dull to me without some sort of treatment. The VST rotaries I have are the same, probably because they're like that in real life.

Copying snapshots across presets doesn't actually work very well. The blocks, rooting, everything could be completely different, how could it? I know that's true in principle, and it's what I've seen in practice, but it's possible it would work if all blocks were the same, with the same routing between them.

Snapshots inherently store the bypass state of every block, so fundamentally the answer to your question is no. However... -They can also control up to I think 64 parameter settings per patch. Those you have to opt into, per parameter. - There's a global setting whose name I don't remember that controls what happens when you change the bypass state of a block, switch snapshots, then come back to the first snap. Either all block states are always recalled as they were in each snap, or on the fly bypass changes persist in each snapshot. Neither of those directly or elegantly or completely addresses what you want to do I think, but they might be useful. Really, and I know this is a super First World answer, you kind of need two Helixes for two people.

Hmmm, I have a roughly unity gain buffer in my guitar, just so tone stays consistent when you turn down. It makes the guitar output low impedance, very much less affected by cable and amp capacitance. However, it does result in extended highs in relation to a guitar without one. I wonder if this box actually loads the guitar like a cable plus traditional guitar amp input, in which case it would have no effect on a buffered guitar. The other possibility is that it directly simulates the frequency response you'd get from that environment, which might be perfect for my situation. I've accepted the trade-off of extended top end in return for consistency, figuring I could deal with it in sim-land, but this might be a more elegant solution.

Particularly true for some parameters.

Sorry I wasn't clearer. Is the theory that the difference is truncated away by the conversion in Helix, so you don't end up with a higher quality version by starting with the longer ones?

I *think* I've heard it said that Helix Native will only be a plugin initially, so it will need to run inside a DAW or other plugin host, but that standalone version isn't out of the question at some point.

Any difference between the 200 and 500 ms versions of the Celestions, in sound or DSP?