zooey

Broken record here re IR support... Did some more IR work today, and hit a misbehavior I I haven't seen before. I wanted to update all my IRs. In the file system, they all had a 3 digit sequential number then a space at the start, but Helix messed up their order anyway when I did them all at once. I had to drag them into the editor in groups or roughly 20 at a time. PITA. Also, the length limit on IR names really needs to be raised. You need a 3 character prefix for numbering, plus a space after, and at least 2 to abbreviate their source (I keep a text file on the abbreviations I use), plus a space after. So before you get to the original name of the file, you've used 7 chars. Besides the desirability of preserving the original name so you can tell which one it was, the original names typically call out the cab make, sometimes cab size, speaker make, speaker size and count, plus the mic used, mic distance, and position relative to the cone, so preserving all of that is really useful. Longer names, please!

FYI, DigiTech Vocalist Live is the MF SDOTD today, $99. I have no experience with it or any alternatives, just letting you know.

Haven't tried any of this, but I think Helix responds to MIDI program change msgs in the standard way, and I think it's in Omni receive mode by default (listens to all MIDI channels), so no setup should be needed. Don't think you can change setlists via MIDI, so program changes call the corresponding preset in the currently selected setlist.

Never looked at that manual before, and I've never used the original, but here's the full text of that paragraph in the TERC: I wonder if that's what Helix means to emulate, both at the same time?

I find the stock cabs and mics quite usable, and it's way easier to tweak them than to sift through a completely insane number of IRs. Bottom line for me is that both cabs and IRs are super useful, glad we have both options, but I certainly don't find the built-in cabs to be a huge sore point, and for those that do, you can load external IRs. It's the best of both worlds.

Well I wouldn't say I think it's coming necessarily, but IMO the elephant in the otherwise wondrous Helix room is IR management. Last night I spent a while setting up to check out a bunch of presets and IRs I've collected. Quite a pain. You first have to figure out which IRs you currently have loaded that are used by presets you're keeping. I did that by exporting all the individual presets I want to keep, then I wrote a tool to list out all the IR slots used by any preset file in a recursive set of directories, and which preset files use them. Then you need to reconcile all your IR developers' naming systems so you can know where they came from and what their original names were, then apply a 3 digit sequential prefix to them all so Helix loads them in a repeatable order. Once you've done that, you can load them in, then remap the IRs used by each preset to the new locations of any IRs you moved. Not all those steps are necessary in all cases, but the bottom line is that this is way not automatic or user friendly, and it's tedious and error prone at scale.

Fidelity of the Helix pitch effects probably won't make you happy on voices IMO.

Just to say it, metering...

I wonder if the best way to settle this might be global settings for tuner resolution and smoothing time. Let people choose how it should behave, instead of trying to please everyone with one apoptosis.

Not on a Mac, but FYI, I've received several emails from VST devs saying that their stuff isn't yet compatible and they're working on it.

@Rocco_Crocco, @bshaw92, if you're talking about room ambience, my apologies for misunderstanding when that was originally brought up. As you'd no doubt guess, like most of us, I'm not in a room that size, listening to whatever mix of headset mic, Axe direct, and room mic (is there one?) is on that clip. I'm in my little basement studio listening to a pair of Alesis Alpha 112s. But that doesn't mean we can't try to emulate aspects of the tone he's getting, right? And maybe I'm deluded, but the differences I'm interested in between most of the clips posted here so far and the Axe vid don't strike me like ambience, they're more about overdrive texture and frequency response. @roscoe5, like it :). Hope to get some time to try people's presets and IRs out, maybe tonight.

Listened to that a bit more when I wasn't so busy, and it really is quite cool. Different from the Axe clip but definitely ballsy. Hope to check out the patch and IR this evening, if the night doesn't get away from me.

Of course it's impossible, but IMO it's worth trying sometimes. It's like when you tell your band about your new song by singing out the parts -- doesn't sound like drums, bass, and keys, but hopefully it gets something useful across. Clearly it communicates more than not saying anything :)

Hah, that's cool, like it! Will check it next to the Axe one when I can. @cruisin: What, no mention of 'gonk'? :) It is hard to talk about this stuff in a way that communicates what about a tone strikes you as desirable and/or rare, especially when it's clear that different people hear or react to the same clips so differently. We do what we can...

Those AC/DC patches are definitely brighter than the Axe one, with less of the cool low-mid punchy gonk thing the Axe one has. Thought they had an immediateness to them that put them nicely in your face though.

Thanks, will check it out when I get a chance, maybe tonight if I can. Not at all the same as the video I posted about, but check out this guy's Helix patches based on the new AC/DC rig rundown, also Marshalls: AC/DC Rig Rundown + New HELIX Patches | The Gear Page Quite different, but pretty accurate and pretty cool I thought, with a sort-of-related raw punch and percussion to them.

Suggest you also download the PDF version of http://helixhelp.com/. There's a link to it below the main nav links at the top.

Interesting, thanks.

Just out of curiosity, what's that most-stable-tuning guitar you have?

Have his original Helix patches, not the newer snapshot ones. Any specific patches in mind?

Not trying to be difficult, but I pretty much always play guitar louder than I listen to YouTube, so that theory doesn't make much sense.

Don't think the PA getting pushed has anything to do with it. You would have heard it on his voice, and PAs don't distort nicely, would have sounded like lollipop.

Have you by any chance tried to cop that tone in AT yourself?

Thanks for your offer, but I haven't tried this, or anything else, in Amplitube since I got my Helix :) My playing time in kind of limited, and I just fall down the Helix rabbit hole every time. But I'll keep that possibility in mind if I do try it and come up with anything useful. I use the IR you made of an Amplitube dual cab rig of mine all the time, it's great.

Lots of romance to the name, and I really dig the Gretsch tones, but overall I don't care for how that amp breaks up, same with some of the vintage amps in Helix.