zooey

That On-Stage thing looks great, pretty much purpose-built for stuff like this. More money than I wish, but so's Helix, and you definitely want it taken care of... OTOH, maybe I won't do anything right now if that's what it costs, not feeling super flush ATM. Thanks for all the feedback everyone.

Interesting, but a bit low to edit standing up I'd think.

Funny diversion in this thread... 63 here. Apropos of keepin' on keepin', one of the (many) bands I was in in high school is having a reunion later this month! Everyone who's still above ground is coming, from all over the country. I haven't played with or for people in decades, but I've been playing quite a bit lately (by not-pro-any-more standards anyway), really having a blast, and Helix has been a big part of that. Several guys picked it up again just for this, for the first time since graduating from HS. Only one has been doing music professionally all along. Should be fun, maybe even start some momentum for me to dig up some other folks to play with, see how that feels. I'm not done yet, not by a long shot!

Definitely true. Guess the question is, is there one that would work well for that, and if not, what else?

Has anyone tried a fairly heavy duty music stand to raise your Helix up to standing edit height? Seems easily transportable, height and tilt adjustable, but maybe not strong or stable enough, Helix isn't super light. Guess it depends on the particular one you're looking at. There's one on sale at GC for some number of hours more. Any other ideas? Mine's currently on a cheapo rolling plastic drawers thingy, but I'd like to move Helix into the middle of the room, at least sometimes, and maybe take it some places out of the house too, but not on that.

Man, you gotta chill, I can't keep up ;) I get your stuff imported into my Helix, then next thing I know I need to make room for more. Bummer! Seriously though, thanks very much for all your IRs and investigations.

This!

I don't remember the original from back in the day well enough to say anything real, (yeah, I'm that old...), but I remember liking it, and I'm very very sure it didn't sound like the Helix version. Subjectivity aside, that preset and that stomp are seriously pretty bad. arislaf, try what I did, put EQs both before and after, and drop the gain of the one before the fuzz by something like 18db, then do whatever you want with the actual EQ curves. I ended up w something pretty cool, actually. I wasn't trying to imitate the original, or anything else specific, just looking for something interesting, and got happy. I think. Need to check it in the light of a new day this evening...

I've always applied the prefix in the file system, sorted by name, then dragged the IRs I wanted from the file system into the editor, starting at the desired location. I haven't had problems with the actual order in Helix, as I recall, but we're saying the same thing about the name prefix getting discarded. Don't know where the idea that "it's supposed to" came from. More directly, I don't know if Line 6 considers that a bug or a feature, but it makes absolutely no sense to me. I need the prefixes in Helix, so they're there when I export them and want to import them again, and so it's easy to see what's on my computer vs what's in Helix. I don't use IRs that often, yet, but it's clearly a huge extension point for Helix, and there are a lot of them out there that people like, so I'm trying to have a handle on how to manage them. This behavior sure doesn't help, and I hope it gets revisited soon. There's an Ideascale item suggesting automatic numbering, but it doesn't seem complete to me, unless I misunderstood. Take a look, vote and/or suggest there. Really hope something like that happens, or at least stop stripping an existing filename prefix.

Hmmm, not my experience. In the file system in my computer, I bulk prefixed the filenames of all the IRs I wanted to load, which came from several different sources, and the only ones that DIDN'T have the prefix when they landed in Helix were roscoe5's. All the others did. Not sure if this behavior has changed historically or what.

Hmmm, interesting. What would actually be great, besides fixing that bug, is the ability to download a directory or search result listing as a single zip.

I've done this, and unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. Helix ignores the file system filename in some situations. I wish I could be more positive as to exactly when and more importantly, how to work around it, but no yet. I know that happens for instance with all of roscoe5's (great) IRs that I've tried. My best guess at this point is that if it's ever been imported into Helix, named there, then exported, the name is embedded in the file content, and the file system name gets ignored. It's a shame, quite inconvenient, means you have to do the numbering in Helix itself, which has no bulk renaming tools. So try a renaming tool for sure, but make sure to check what actually happened on import -- whether your IRs are in the same order in Helix that they were in the file system, and if they still have their numbered prefixes. If not, only solution I know of is to reorder them lke you want in Helix, number them manually there, then export them. The export files should have the names you gave them in Helix. I hope all of this improves with future updates. Not sure if it's an editor thing,the firmware itself. or maybe both, but we need a better way to manage this.

I don't say this often, about anything, but I AM sure. Try it yourself around the 11th fret instead of the 12th, see if you can get a harmonic to ring out from that very inexact (not actually an) octave location. The string just won't do that, or rather, has very little energy when you force a non-multiple spot on it not to vibrate. Google "guitar string harmonics picture" for some examples that might be clear on a gut level, like this one: http://www.justinguitar.com/images/TE_images/Harmonics.gif See how the string is actually not moving at those even divisions of the full string length? That's what makes a harmonic ring. Touching the string at for instance the 12th fret, means it can't vibrate at its full length, like fig 1 (you stopped that halfway point from moving), but it will vibrate on octave higher, like fig 2, because that exact halfway point is actually not moving when it does that, like the picture shows. So in a tuning context, you don't have to worry that a 12th fret harmonic might not be an exact octave if the guitar isn't intonated correctly. It simply has to be. Note that that applies only to even octaves, like 12th, 15th, and 24th fret harmonics. Fifths and other non-octave harmonics get involved with tempered tuning, which is inherently an inexact compromise. That's the reason the 5/7 harmonics tuning method is flat-out wrong. But for octaves, you're good, says Physics.

When you do a 12th fret harmonic, you're just touching the string there, not pushing it down on the fret. That makes the place you touched not vibrate much, creating a non-moving node there, effectively dividing the string at that point in terms of how it vibrates. At the 12th fret you're dividing it in two, string vibrates at half its length, i.e. twice the frequency, i.e. an octave up. Note that none of that has anything whatsoever to do with the position of the fret, which neither you nor the string are touching. If the fret is off slightly, or even hugely, the half-length harmonic is still exactly an octave up, has to be. Note also that if you touch the string say a quarter tone flat of the 12th fret, it either won't vibrate much at all, or it'll do the half-length thing. You're in no danger of getting note that's an out of tune octave up. By all means intonate your guitar, because IRL you are actually going to use the frets (unless you play really weirdly), so the bridge (the part you can adjust) should be positioned so the frets are in as well-tempered positions as possible. But that has zero effect on tuning the open strings correctly.

After doing the 201 update, I was randomly cruising through some factory presets again, and if memory serves, #2 is an Essex with an Arbitrator. The Essex itself is cool, but I simply can't believe anyone thought that fuzz, with gain on 10 no less!, was a good way to show off Helix. It's just ridiculously overdriven, even with gain on 0, and on 10, well sheesh, nothankyou. Who on earth would use that for anything ever? I put EQs before and after it, dropped the level of the pre- one like 18 db, then tailored both EQs to my liking, and got something I actually dig pretty much out of it. Zero resemblance to what it sounds like out of the box. Poorly conceived fuzz, even worse factory preset, weird that either one made is past a basic sniff test.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but harmonics don't involve the frets, just perfect mathematical divisions of the string length, so they're not subject to imperfect intonation. It is true that a note fretted at the 12th fret might not be in tune with that harmonic if the intonation's off. However, the harmonic is inherently an exact octave higher than the open string, so if whatever tuner you have is happier reading that harmonic than the open string, it's valid to use it. I'd never tune a guitar using any fretted notes. Fret and bridge positions are compromises, even on a well-intonated guitar, because the whole concept of a well-tempered scale is.

Think it's been said, but neck pickup, tone control all the way down, 12th fret harmonic, and the display is pretty stable. Not perfectly so, but seem to me like that's Physics, and it's definitely usable. The high-res upper readout is helpful to me too.

Just as a YMMV, my 201 upgrade went completely smoothly, unlike my 20 :). I used the same USB port that I finally learned worked better during the 2.0 upgrade, and for once, everything happened just like it's supposed to..Yay!

Does it actually save DSP? I hadn't checked. Separate blocks do give you a bit more flexibility, like to put processing between them. Don't do that a lot, but I fairly often do put the amp in the top chain and the cab in the bottom one, to split up the DSP load.

What he said.

Personally, I do wish that each snapshot had a setting to determine whether it should control bypass states or not. I want that for several reasons: - You can't freely mix snapshot and stomp footswitches, so if like me, you happen to want 3 snapshots plus a generic volume boost in the bottom row (assuming you're in stomp/snap mode), that's not possible. If one snapshot could do just the boost parameter change(s), without affecting which blocks are enabled, that'd be perfect. It's a generic function that should work regardless of which blocks are on or off, so snapshots as they currently work won't do it. (Just for the record, what I think I really want is the 10 Switches version of this, with 5 snapshots in the bottom row, one of which is boost, and 5 stomp switches in the top row.) - Snapshots can control up to 64 parameters, where stomp footswitches can only do 8. It's not common that I want more than that, but it definitely does happen. My most common use case is a More switch, which turns up appropriate parameters of a bunch of existing blocks, so they each have two states, effectively giving you nearly twice the number of stomps. In real life though, 8 parameters isn't enough to do everything I want that to do, so some blocks still only have one state. It'd be great if you could use a snapshot instead, with its 64 available parameter changes.

Sean's just great, sounds and playing both. PITA downloading all his presets from custom tone. Download links in list view don't work, so you have to open each one individually, then download it from there.

Mine did that too, failing to restart after updating, essentially bricked after that. What worked for me was using a different USB port. Sounds like like voodoo troubleshooting, but I'm not the only one that worked for, worth a try if you haven't already.

Sorry to be thick, but I didn't hear a definitive answer ot my question about whether you're directly processing IR .wav files with Mic Room, or starting with a recording of something playing back through an IR, an processing that. It hadn't occurred to me to process IRs directly, and it doesn't seem like that'd work, like at all, just wondering if that was a bogus assumption.

When you say it powered back up, it didn't do that by itself, did it? You mean that for a while, it wouldn't come back on when you turned it on manually, then after a little time it did, right?