zooey

I've been thinking about this, and here's how I think copying a block with parameters controlled by snapshots should work: - Basic version: Copying copies only the settings from the current snapshot, and pasting pastes those settings into the current snapshot. Simple and super clear. - Advanced version: Offers the choice of the basic version, or copying and pasting settings from all defined snapshots in the source preset into the same number snapshots in the destination. This option should only be available if the same number of snapshots are defined in both presets. The advanced version is just a convenience feature. You could accomplish the same thing by manually copying and pasting from and to all the snaps you cared about, with the added flexibility of pasting into different snapshots if you wanted. That said, it would be a major convenience if your snapshots were functionally similar in both presets. I hope we get at least the basic version in an update not too long from now.

I wish the low and high cuts had a Resonance control, to vary the amount of the peak before the roll-off kicks in. Some peaking is a super common characteristic of physical systems like speakers and pickups, would be a nice addition.

No offense to anyone who posted patches or ideas, but nothing here so far is very close IMO. I spent a while on this myself last night, and got some tones I like a lot starting from his recipe -- great amp! -- but nothing with the bark and authority of that video. For those with ideas on how easy it is, post a clip and/or an actual patch, and we'll talk :) (Just so people don't file me under Axe-fans/Helix-dissers, I love my Helix, and I've never played a Fractal anything. Helix has a bunch of obvious strengths. and tons of sounds that feel great to me. None of that's in question. I'm just trying to get somewhere near the particular texture he demonstrates, if possible.)

I've been thinking about this too. Not promising anything, but stay tuned...

Ditto. I also sometimes use a parametric's low and/or high cuts, which seem to be steeper. Do that especially when there's already one there, which there often is.

Hmmm, interesting that you folks had such a different reaction than I did. I heard a raw but polished thing that struck me as kind of unique and interesting, but maybe I'm just crazy. Guess I'll try the two Helix JCMs using similar settings when I have a chance this weekend, see what I think.

Love my Helix, not trying to be provocative, and I'm not in front of my Helix now, but dang, not sure I've heard it do this: It's an Axe-FX II workshop by Scott Peterson. It should queue up at about 29:00, where he's just starting to dial in a JCM800 tone, loads a custom IR, works on it; keep listening for a bit. [EDIT] Looks like the forum software strips the time out of the URL that's actually in this post. Start it and click to open it in YouTube, or right-click to copy the video URL and paste into your address bar, then add '&t=29m0s' (w/o the quotes) on the end of the URL, should do the right thing. To me, that has tons of non-cheesy, grown-up aggression, character, and punch to it, zero bedroom-warrior vibe. I actually prefer it before he adds the screamer, and maybe even with the factory IR, but overall, pretty cool, I thought. Anybody feel like their Helix does that? Want to point me towards how, maybe some audio? It's not where I want to be in general, but it'd be a great thing to have in your kit. (He does have a Suhr something up there too, not sure what his full chain is, but I get the clear impression he bulk of that tone is the Axe. Nice guitar too, but nothing super exotic.)

Don't think so currently. Banks aren't pointers to presets that exist separately, they contain the actual preset data. Same is true for setlists, they also contain the actual preset data, not, as the name 'setlist' somewhat implies, an ordered list of independently defined actual presets. Would be nice, but more complex to manage in some senses -- changing a preset would change it everywhere it's used, for better and worse.

If my electric bass could actually sound like an upright, that'd be pretty awesome. Seems like pretty different envelope though, might be weird, but I'd certainly check it out and hope for the best.

Well, cruisin' actually described my guitar exactly - one piece bolt-on maple neck - and that style's susceptibility to temperature issues was news to me. So zombie thread or not, that particular post was useful to me, addressed my question exactly. So NOW, feel free to stake it for real :)

Thanks roscoe5, but I didn't take your post that way, just as some things you thought might be worthwhile from amongst the rather large set of factory stuff. OT: I always get frustrated w 10-band EQs. They rarely have the actual frequency I really want to tweak, nor are they specific purpose-built cool choices like the Mesa. Getting comfortable w a parametric will get you a lot further IMO. It's also educational, since you can explore the effect of different changes a lot more directly, and with fewer limitations.

Well for starters, my main guitar is a one-off, so clearly I'm on my own on that level. What I'm really getting at is that I find high gain tones the hardest to work with. I was hoping these might provide some inspiration, and maybe some examples, of both sounds and techniques. I can come up with nice cleans all day, and even more so, somewhat driven ones, but really gainy stuff is much harder for me to feel good about. They most often just don't remind me of the masters of that stuff. If these factory presets don't float my high-gain boat, but others find them useful, how do I tell what other offerings might make sense for me? For example, Fremen's stuff has been pretty universally acclaimed, but does that actually mean anything, to me? In general I'm not a big buyer or downloader of other peoples' patches. I really enjoy building my own (for synths too), and to me it's an important part of playing music. But I do look for ideas from other sources, when that makes sense.

Don't know if this is a useful train of thought, but it's my actual reaction, so here goes... I am interested in high-gain stuff, and I have lots of respect for roscoe5, so I was interested to check these out. What I found was that several of them had a ton more top end than I typically have on anything. More to the point, playing them next to my more usual presets makes them both sound weird and unpleasant - my "standard" stuff sounds muffled, and these sound buzzy and overprocessed. Anyone else feel the same? Clearly all tones are relative. For better and worse, ears accommodate to what's happening around them. "Too much high end", like "too loud", isn't an absolute statement. A big part of what we do when we're building our universe of tones is switch back and forth between them and adjust tone, volume, wetness, etc. not so they're the same, but so they have intentional relationships to each other. That's not a Helix or modeler thing, it's just reality in a multi-sound world. Does my reaction mean my "main-stream" tones are way off base? Don't really buy that; they seemed pretty much like I intended the one time I've played them with other people, I didn't get laughed or grimaced at there (quite the opposite actually, many compliments, from musicians and not), and I dig 'em when I go downstairs and play by myself. (Which I know is different from a live or recorded full band.) Does it mean you have to pick a universe and stay there? Well maybe, but I and others do in fact have and want sounds that are pretty different from each other. Anyway, net of all this is confusion. Doesn't change the sounds I've been working on, but it does make me mistrust, um, something, though I'm not quite sure what. (Just to be clear, no criticism of L6's patch makers, Helix, or roscoe5 is meant here, just talking about how different sounds relate to each other.)

Don't know the band, but that's Guthrie Govan, who's pretty much awesome. Totally not the formulaic riffing you hear in some places.

Some of those weren't too bad I thought. That's mag pickups only? Out of curiosity, what gauge strings are on that guitar? Especially with some pickup choices, they sounded like they were implausibly light for an acoustic. Not that that's actually true, just gave (me) that impression.

Didn't care for any of those, honestly, but I'm not sure what it's reasonable to expect. A solid body electric just isn't going to sound like my 1970's D35, no matter what.

Have you tried them with straight mag pickups on an electric? Unlikely to be gorgeous, just wondering...

I didn't mean to be (quite) so dismissive of the musical value of having that sort of technique available to you, I sometimes wish I could do that stuff too. But listening to a bunch of it in a row, a million guys (all guys so far I think) with that same sensibility, it just starts to feel pretty hollow, like a copout covering up bigger insecurities. The universally applied massive distortion doesn't help either, though maybe it's required to fit with that backing track. Maybe.

Yes of course tuning is affected by temperature, so changes in temperature change your tuning, that's not really debatable. My question for myself was wether that's happening to a greater extent because of some flaw(s) in my guitar. More to the point, is there anything I can do to improve matters, other than stabilizing the temp in that room, which is hard and/or expensive?

Don't know if anyone here is into this sort of thing, but there's a contest to make a short video of a guitar solo over backing tracks they provide. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1875968385964183/ There's some amazing riffing there already. Honestly, seems like every kid on every block has just crazy tapping and picking technique. Would be nice to hear something that wasn't quite so concerned about hitting the maximum number of notes in that amount of time though...

This, but without the precision guitars :). The temperature in my basement "studio" isn't very well controlled, often cold when I first go down there, can get pretty hot after a while of playing. My main guitar is always sharp when it's cold, then drops as it and the room heat up. I've been wondering if that's a flaw in the guitar, or as I suspect, and is somewhat confirmed by your post, just the realities of physics.

If you don't want to change sounds during a song, presets are a fine way to go. But if you do, then there are several things that make snapshots more powerful than individual stomp switches: - Parameters can be (really, always are) controlled by all snapshots if they're controlled by snapshots at all, where they can only be controlled by one footswitch at a time. In some cases you can work around that by having different switches control different but kind-of-equivalent parameters, like mix vs bypass, but snapshots are a clean and direct, and not-a-special-case way to do that. - Selecting one snapshot turns the others off, handy if you have more than two alternatives for something, like drive levels for instance - Up to 64 controllable parameters, rather than 8 per switch - As already mentioned, no audio dropout when you change snapshots Also: - You can still use stomps for ad hoc combinations of fx. I use 4 snaps/4 stomps mode, best of both worlds, and one switch-press away from access to all 10 stomps or all of the bank's presets. - In terms of how many close-at-hand tone alternatives you have available, snapshots provide another degree of freedom -- you can change either to a different preset or a different snapshot - I like the mental model of a preset as a cohesive bag of quickly accessible alternatives. Closest thing without snapshots is banks, which you still have with snaps, but IMO it's less likely you'll want to make entire banks into that kind of unit, among other reasons because it takes up a lot of preset "real estate". When snapshots first appeared, I didn't think I could use them without losing flexibility I already had with stomps, because there just aren't enough footswitches to have the equivalent of 10 switches mode. In the end though, I've pretty much made the transition, and it's way easier to deal with IMO. If changing to highest gain mode should also change a bunch of other things, I don't have to worry that something else is already controlling any of them, I can just make the change directly, for that snapshot only.

And good luck on your trip! It may seem kind of daunting getting everything set up like you want it, but you have some time, and I bet you'll like it when it's all together. Helix makes a great controller, and a lot more.

Having just been super unhelpful in another thread, spouting wrong info about features I haven't used, I don't want to try to really answer you, since I haven't done this. That said, check the 'Snapshots > Command Center' section on page 36 of the Helix 2.0 Owner's Manual. (That page number is for the Rev D version.) It specifically says: ...which sounds like it should be able to do what you want. With the big caveat that I haven't worked with this feature, I'm not sure what Global Settings you're referring to, or why they'd be relevant. My understanding is that a snapshot can store and send a continuous controller msg, either a fixed value, or controlled by an expression pedal or Variax knob. Specifics about that are in the 'Command Center' section on page 45, referred to in the Snapshots section. HTH. EDIT: Everything in the above is for the floor version, my apologies, that's the info I have. I'd think that functionality should be the same, but as above, I shouldn't be talking about stuff I haven't actually done, and page numbers are probably wrong for the Rack manual.

Thanks Jim. Is this the same preset as the one in the Ultimate John Mayer preset thread? Or if not, do they both use the same IR? Or if not, do you have the IR that goes with the John Mayer one? Thanks again.