zooey

Hah, people sure are different :) Personally, nothing else, no offense to anyone, I always hated the Rockman sound. No bottom, no top, super compressed and artificial, designed to take up a very specific frequency range in a mix, only. In my circles, "sounds like a Rockman" was a mortal insult. Great records, and obviously his sounds worked in really well in that context, but I never in a million years aspired to play through anything like that, unless you were doing Boston covers. I still have his MIDI-driven-relays footswitcher thingy, haven't used it in years.

Try clearing your cookies for the site in the browser that doesn't work. If that doesn't help, try a different browser. If you're still stuck, at least you'll have solid info for tech support.

I'm with you in theory, but in practice, I typically have multiple drive levels set up per preset, each of which may be some combination of amp settings, a drive stomp, and possibly pre and/or post EQ. There's just no way to turn one of those setups on and the rest off using just switches, but it's trivial w snapshots. That said, I did my first sort-of-a-gig with Helix over the weekend, mostly with snap presets, but also one with only stomp switches, and both were workable. There were a couple of times I had to hit more than one footswitch between song sections, not great, but that wasn't the case most of the time.

I'm logged in fine on both.

You can't switch cab models, but you can switch mics.

Seems inherent to me. Rapid changes to delay time when there's already signal in the buffer have to cause pitch changes. What else could happen? That's not really a snapshot thing. You get the same result changing delay time directly with a footswitch or pedal, or setting it in musical divisions and using the Tap switch to change the tempo. If it bothers you enough in your context, using two delay blocks and alternating them might be your best shot.

Hah, foo on me if that's all it was. Makes sense, I did have my Helix output way higher than I ever had before, and it does seem like that much power should be able to get louder than I'd ever want to be anywhere near, big barn or not. So there isn't any way to know if the output is actually clipping then?

Oddly enough, one of the bands I was in in high school just had a reunion, 45 years after most of us had last seen each other. (Yes I'm that old!) I played professionally for decades after we all graduated, then did a long time as a sound guy, and I've been playing quite a lot lately, but haven't played WITH anyone since the last band I was a player in, a really long time ago. I used my Helix and two Alesis Alpha 112 "1000 Wat" FRFRs for the reunion, and short story, it was awesome. It felt organic, funky, responsive, and powerful, great sounds doing super clean, semi-clean, driven, or pretty pushed. Between my weirdo guitar wiring (76 unique coil combinations from 3 humbuckers!) and just 3 Helix presets with snaps and stomps, there was plenty of variety, covered everything I wanted to do very appropriately. Many compliments from band members and "audience" (wives, GFs, and long-time friends of the band). I really couldn't have been happier tone-wise. It felt like me, like home, 'nuff said. I could stop there, but here's some random observations, for the benefit of whoever... Our rigs were behind us like traditional back-line. When we first started, people thought the guitar wasn't loud enough when it sounded right to me, so I moved the speakers further back away from me, which was much better. My presets were programmed through the same speakers i was using, and that worked out well. I brightened up one snapshot a little as soon as I heard it in context, and turned up the delay mix in another where it was kind of featured, but everything else was good where I'd left it. My Helix logistics were only medium great, but it wasn't really a show, so I had some time between songs and it was fine. There wasn't anything super tricky or complex I needed to do, but OTOH, I wasn't that familiar with either using Helix live, or the songs. I made notes beforehand on which pickup combos and Helix setups to use for each song, mostly stayed with those, but not completely. I had two presets set up for snapshots, and one that wasn't, both styles were workable. They all had different drive levels and a collection of stomps available. I mostly used snapshots as-is, but for one song I toggled a stomp and a boost stomp during the song. For another, it worked really well to turn on a couple of different stomps in each of two snapshots before the song started, and have them just be there when I went to those snaps. Took a minute to set that up before the song, but from there it was instant and easy and just the sounds I wanted. I was standing pretty much in the stereo sweet spot for my cabs, and as cool as that stuff is in my small quiet studio, in a live band context, I think it really doesn't matter much. One thing that was a surprise was the lack of headroom in the 112s, which had their Signal Limit lights on a fair amount when I went round back to look. Guitar was loud enough, and I didn't hear any gross limiting or clipping, but 1000 Watts sounds like you wouldn't want to be in the same county with it cranked, and in practice, I probably used pretty much all there was in two of them. Band wasn't that loud either -- bass, pretty light-handed drummer, two horns, singer, keys on one day out of two, and me on guitar. Vocals and horns were mic'd, nothing else, and the PA was pointed back at us, not trying to really cover the room. Music was mostly stuff we did back then - Paul Butterfield, early BS&T, Electric Flag, James Brown, early Steve Miller, etc, nothing super hard or heavy, but definitely not cocktail lounge at all. Everybody brought earplugs, but nobody used them, with no aftereffects, at least for me. OTOH, it was a pretty big room in one guy's barn, about 180' x 90', wood floor, high ceiling, really nice sounding, but that's a lot of cubic feet, whether you mean to fill it or not. Score: Helix +1000. I'm happy.

Doesn't have to be a snapshot I think, can be any controller, so footswitches can do the same. (IR select pedal, anyone?!? Haven't tried it, but I doubt very much they'd load fast enough to be useful.) For the internal cabs, you can also control which mic is used the same ways. All very cool.

For anyone who's interested, I've ended up like this: - Preset Mode Switches: Stomps/Snaps - Snapshot Edits: Recall - Tempo settings per preset, delay times in bar units, not ms The 4 snaps are typically different drive levels. One stomp switch is generic Boost, the 3 others are my most commonly switched fx, like chorus, delay, etc. Less commonly used fx are assigned to footswitches that aren't visible in Stomp/Snap mode. - Provides instant access to any of those 4 drive snaps, those 3 common fx, and boost - Pressing a Bank button lets me recall a different preset, not something I typically do during a song - Pressing Mode shows all 10 stomp switches, for access to less commonly used fx - Delay times are programmable on the fly with the Tap button If I want some optional fx on for a particular drive level, just recall a snap, hit Mode, and turn those fx on, effectively temporarily programming that snap on the fly without actualy going into edit mode. Snapshot Edits: Recall means those fx are there for that snap, only, when I come back to it, until I turn them off manually, or load a different preset. You do end up a lot of pushing of different buttons to set this up, but it's a great option to have. So far this seems like a good combination of quick and flexible. Big Kudos to Line 6 for the all thought that's obviously gone into the Helix design, awesome piece of kit. Big picture, 4 stomps and 4 snaps really isn't enough, and the multi-step Mode switch idea from the other thread still strikes me as really straightforward and useful, but the setup above is how I think I'm going to work with Helix in its current state for now.

So what we all really need is a second Helix. In normal use it's that extended MIDI controller with scribble strips that the footswitch-starved among us have been craving, and worst case, it's an awesome backup rig. On that note, wish Helix could back up and restore directly to and from a USB stick.

Kind of surprised this didn't spark any interest. Within your budget I think (actually no clue about AUD), really cool stereo projection from what folks say. Read the reviews.

Apologies for the drive-by comments stephane, not enough time in my days lately to pay attention to the things I want to. Inerzia, I actually don't think the core logic is that hard to build, and some extent I actually know, because I just did it, in Javascript though, not Shark DSP code. To me the bigger problem is that you and I seem to be the only people who aren't put off by its seeming complexity. Even having the default behavior be pretty much what we have today didn't help, the existence of the other options was enough to spoil it. Thanks for your feedback, it lets me know I'm not comopletely off in the weeds here. I'm hoping Line 6 sees this, and some aspects of it make it into a future Helix design, but with their great sense of simplification and accessibility applied. I did this before posting it to Ideascale, in the off chance it might get improved on my the community first, but I'll try to put it up there over the weekend as-is if something further develops here. We'll see.

If you're talking about live use (didn't read back to check if you said), a decent MIDI foot controller would be preferable to a computer IMO. Something like an FCB1010, with or without the UNO mod, depending on exactly what you're doing. Those do a lot, especially for the money.

Pair of Alesis Alpha 112s here, very much like the Altos above. Reasonably light, decent sounding, fairly loud (though I haven't tried them with a live drummer yet), under $400 for the pair on eBay a while ago. I'd love to try the Center Point Spacestation, but never have, you should if you think it might make sense for you. Probably not as loud as some other solutions.

OK, the reactions so far that it's too complicated for users are pretty much what I expected, thanks for looking. (Just to be clear, I'm not trying to shut down further reactions, not at all, keep 'em comping.) I've modified that mockup so the initial settings are closer to today's Helix -- Mode toggles between stomps and whatever setup you chose for Preset mode switches, and selecting presets or snaps leaves the footswitches unchanged. (Actually, in real Helix that depends on whether Snapshot mode footswitches are set to Auto Return or not, but No Change is clearer here.) Navigate to the page again, via the link or otherwise, to see that change. Doing Reload probably won't do it, because browsers typically remember the state of most form fields in that case. klangmaler is right that we're kind of out of switches now that there are snapshots. Yes an external MIDI controller would help, but it's another piece to carry, set up, and have malfunction, and more importantly, unless it has scribble strips that are automatically in sync with an attached Helix -- hello Line 6 :) -- it's a bit of a drag. Both logically and from the reactions, I gather there's some interest in the idea of the Mode switch being more than a two-position toggle. I honestly don't think the loop-of-switch-setups idea itself is complex at all. Neither is the idea of choosing what you want to see after recalling presets and snaps. And the Preset mode switches setting actually has fewer choices in it than today, since you can choose all-of-anything directly. So then, Logical Me says "hey, it's not actually complicated", but Software Developer Me says, "yeah right, that's not what users think, you're a programmer, your usability opinions mean less than zero". Ideally, we figure out what to do with the core ideas that's powerful enough for most users, and obvious to your 10 year old shredder neighbor. I considered posting this with no configuration at all, just a fixed loop of Mixed, Stomps, Snapshots, basically a slightly extended version of what we have now. But the nice thing about this as-is is that you can set it up better than that for how you actually work, whether you that's using one preset permanently (Snapshots, Stomps), you don't use snaps at all (Presets, Stomps), etc. If anyone has any other ideas on how to configure that loop flexibly but in a less intimidating way, I'm all ears. Or some whole other concept? Thing is, every night when I go downstairs and play, I have a blast, but I still don't know how I should set up Helix for optimum cool. It's a question I can't make go away.

Not sure I'd want a hard metal object as heavy as Helix sharing a case with my guitar, unless the case was rigid and designed for it.

Amid the various talk about different ways of setting Helix up for optimal access to presets, snapshots, and stomps, I can't help feeling that the fundamental problem is that you can't get to all of all of those quickly. The Mode switch lets you switch between two footswitch configurations, which was fine when we were only dealing with presets and stomps, but now that snapshots are in the mix, you can either split the available switches between your choice of two different functions, which doesn't give you enough of either of them, or you're stepping on two switches simultaneously to get to snaps. Line 6 has proven that they're usually way out ahead of us in coming up with interface ideas and making them clear and easy to use, so there's a good chance they'll knock this one out of the park too, but I thought I put a proposal out there for comments. The basic idea is that the Mode switch isn't inherently a two-state toggle. It's a configurable loop of footswitch setups, and hitting Mode goes to the next one. For example, if it's configured to do Presets, Snapshots, and Stomps, and presets are showing now, pressing it once gets you snaps, again gets you stomps, and again gets you back to presets. In addition, in place of the Snapshot Mode Footswitches Auto Return option, you can explicitly configure what shows after recalling a preset, and after recalling a snapshot. Those settings plus the existing Preset mode switches really give you a lot of navigation flexibility. As I thought about this, I really want to see how it actually felt in use, but I don't have the knowledge to modify the Helix firmware (yet!), so I built an HTML mockup you can try. The top section imitates the relevant global settings, and the bottom section simulates the resulting footswitches, with Preset, Snapshot and individual Stomp indicators. There's a minimal explanation next to each of the global settings. This may be more complex than people want, and of course there's no perfect world, but I'm interested in what folks think of it. Please let me know if how it works is confusing, and I'll either try to explain better here, or if you have ideas on how to make the thing itself clearer, I can do that when I get a chance. (Just to say it, use a recent mainstream browser. This isn't commercial software, and near zero effort has gone into cross-platform testing, it's just to get the ideas into peoples' hands. That said, it works ok with several of my desktop browsers, and on my phone.)

So you have the global Snapshot Edits preference set to Recall, right? You can switch to a snapshot, turn on a stomp, and that stomp stays active in that snapshot, even when you recall other snapshots where it's off, until you recall another preset? Pretty cool actually. Having stomps stay active after using them, even when you pull up other snapshots and come back, has always seemed too chaotic to me. Reading this though, I can definitely see the usefulness, in that it lets you customize a snapshot's fx on the fly, potentially even before you're actually going to use it. Really interesting how different people are making use of Helix's options around all this. And pretty cool the Helix *has* all these open-ended options so they can!

Played with this, like it a lot. Only thing is, I really like having my Boost stomp right at hand. Trade-offs...

I like this! Am I right that from that Presets/Snapshots setup you can just hit Mode and you're in 10 Switches stomps mode? I've been concentrating so much on quick access to snaps and stomps that the idea of leaving stomps as a sort of secondary mode hadn't really occurred to me. Will check this out.

@Steevo, I think there's a germ of an idea in there, with hashing IRs to provide some kind of globally unique identifier for them. Ideally there would be some infrastructure to make it user friendly though. Even if Helix understood that a given IR that's already loaded is the one referenced by some preset(s), that doesn't help much with IR management outside of Helix -- which file in the file system is that, which ones do I need to load for this bank of presets, how can I talk to people about which IR that is -- the whole human-readable side. Maybe the Helix app should keep a local database of all the IRs it has ever loaded, with their hash, original filename, Helix filename if different, and original path. I haven't thought through what the UI should be, but at least then it could tell you where to find the IR that goes with a given preset, if you've ever loaded one into it. Crude ideas, fleshing out and related notions are most welcome.

So what case is it?

Hmmm, I could see that as a theoretical possibility, but needing separate snaps for clean with delay, crunch with delay, and lead with delay (for example) feels impractical, especially coming from my prior 10-switches life. Do I also gather that you don't have anything like a generic Boost, to just turn whatever sound you're on up louder, like for solos or other featured stuff? To expand on what I said in the earlier snapshot conversion thread, in 10 switches mode, I had clean + 3 overdrive settings and Boost in the bottom row, then various fx that could be applied to any OD setting in the top row -- chorus, delay, etc.. 4 snapshots for clean + 3 drive levels works great, but already doesn't leave room for Boost, which wouldn't work anyway since it needs to be usable with any snapshot. So I've stolen a stomp for it, leaving only 3 stomp fx instead of 5, which in practice is a drag. General purpose chorus and delay take 2, so you get a grand total of 1 more special-purpose effect. Not that fx are necessary just to get out of bed in the morning, but still, makes me feel like I'm using the same stuff all the time unless I change presets, which like you, I'd rather not do during a song.

True that, but my pocketbook's still hurting from Helix, which I did anyway, and love, and my sanity's MIA in general.