zooey

OT: I don't see anything at Rosen called a 'Legacy 4x12'. They have a bunch of Marshalls though, did you mean one of those?

Ah, the curse of having better hearing than everyone who doesn't agree with you :) There are other explanations though, like differences of opinion and personal preference.

When you save a preset. it remembers what snapshot it was on, and recalling it brings up that snap. So the direct answer to your question AFAIK is that you'd have to modify the destination preset so the snapshot you wanted was the default. You could maybe do that on the fly before the song or the set starts.

If there's nothing you want in your current User 1, you could save one of the empty setlists and restore it into User 1.

This!!!

Depends whether the setscrew goes all the way through to the shaft.

Just to say it, many people think the Kemper bypasses the fiddling urge somewhat, because you more or less just play the profile, not mess w it. If it still tickled your inner tinkerer, that may just be who you are ;)

^^^ this. Try everything you'd try in the real world, plus a million. You can't break it by plugging any block into any other one.

A modeler like Helix or AxeFX is more open-ended in one sense, and more closed in another. With the exception of presets that come with IRs, commercial Helix presets are made with the same tools your Helix has. No Secret Sauce but their maker's vision, ears, knowledge, and experience. Kemper profiles are a "sample" (poor choice of words) of some real-world amp that someone had in the room and profiled, presumably set up in some cool way. Unless you have that same gear, you couldn't have made them yourself, no matter how talented you are. I don't have a shed-full of boutique amps to profile, and don't like the idea that I have to buy new tones rather than make them myself, so on that level a modeler's a better choice for me than a Kemper. I might feel differently if I played a Kemper and flat-out loved a bunch of profiles I tried. All that may be different for you. There are an awful lot of profiles out there. If none of them float your boat, you might as well move on, and Helix is a great tool.

Different block orders sound different, true for every type of processing. Delay before distorted or pedal amp means the echoes pile up in the distortion, making more, and making the echos interact with the live playing, which is either cool or a mess or both. After amp but before reverb is cleaner, just repeats the amp's output.Echo between amp and speaker is similar to after the amp, but a bit different, again worth a listen. Echo after verb is unusual, kind of odd, but worth a try sometimes. Really, try everything! Why not! Plug the output of an amp into a pedal, or plug two amps into one cab. Unlike real gear, you won't hurt anything :)

Or their phones :)

Full backups are pretty big too, another reason why phones aren't a great real backup device. Might be handy in an emergency, but that's exactly when you want something really solid. The real shame to me is that the Helix can't read and write to a USB stick directly, but that ship has sailed, the hardware's the wrong gender.

Some amps are quieter than others, some more so when set really clean. Don't be afraid to add a gain block or EQ after the amp for more volume if needed. You can also turn up the output volume by patch, snapshot, or footswitch

Like what song(s)? I have lots of respect for him, but in the little bit of live video I've heard, his tone was way on the thin side of a Tele, not great.

Not distracted here, fully focused on fiddling w presets and IRs ;)

Also try making a new patch from scratch, maybe the one you're in is somehow corrupted. Or have you seen this in more than one patch?

And also on the Helix itself somehow. I didn't know you could do this.

Try posting on TGP, Ben Adrian watches there more than here, I think, ironically.

What brue58ski said :)

I have ancient and no longer really serviceable Big Muff and Rat pedals, and IMO, for me, they both s u c k it. The Muff is cool for for some long vowel-y stuff, say BS&T Love You More Than You'll Ever Know (which the Helix Muff also aces), but it's nothing like an overdriven amp. The real Rat's tone control ranges from super muffled to nasty but still without any real top end above that, with no stops in between at anything I care for. Wouldn't have it except somebody left it at the board in a club where I ran house sound sometimes, so after three weeks I took it home. I know that's sacriledge both, but like the man said, "well that's your opinion", of which I say, "yeah, whose did you expect me to have?" There are a bunch of drive pedals in Helix I dig way more than those, including most of the ones mentioned above.

Maybe, buta. I want to see it on the Helix too b. You'd still need to go through the thrash of creating the tag. I think there may be tools that can create tags from the file name, not positive, but in any case, it's an extra bit of fiddling about. c. I haven't checked 2.30/Hx Edit yet, but prior versions discarded all tags on export (including copyright and author info, not cool). And just to say it, this is obviously not a file system limitation, unless you mean the file system on the Helix itself, which we know nothing about, even if there is such a thing. The names that are too long for Helix already exist in the computer file system, or this wouldn't be an issue. This limitation just needs to be fixed, period.

Short generic names are fine if you've settled on a set of IRs you're going to use forever, and don't plan on getting any more. That's not me, and probably never will be, unless I decide I can't deal with IRs at all any more. I'm an explorer. That's one of the things I love about Helix,I can just pick some amp I've never heard of and couldn't buy if I tried, and check it out, from home, for $0. Just plain Whee, end of story. So one of the big reasons for real names is when you're checking out which mics and mixes and positions you like from a given maker. I don't have the time or inclination to play every mic and mix and position of every pack, so I try to pick a few for each IR maker, and at least start there for their stuff. I also care who made what, so I can check out more from whoever made ones I like. Same with mic, speaker, and cab types. Lots of folks here say to head for the cabs and speakers you like. That's much much easier if you know what you're listening to :)

I've found the multi-band comp very useful for clean sounds. Can be pretty natural but still controlled, articulate but not too peaky up top.

The filename of nearly half of the IRs I have are 31 characters or more long, too long for Helix to store*. HxEdit displays even fewer. Most of those IRs are from well-known commercial developers, not out-of-control oddballs. That's after a small amount of renaming: - Added a two letter (usually) "origin" prefex plus a space, for example 'OH ' (Ownhammer), 'CP ' (Celestion Plus), 'CI ' (CabIR.eu), mostly so I can tell where things came from, but also to make name collisions between different sources less likely. - Removed some obvious and unnecessary patterns, like ' Celestion' in all Celestion IRs. I think that's the only one I've done so far actually. To put it bluntly, this is a pretty rotten state of affairs. For instance, I loaded up all the multi-mic mixes for one Celestion cab, to audition them and pick favorites to keep on board, but I couldn't tell which one was which. 4 sets of duplicates in just those 10 files. All the Celestion packs are like that, give or take. Many packs from other makers too. So now what? Manually rename all these files, trying for unique names that aren't too long? Before I even know if I like them enough to care about them at all? Ugh. *I verified that 26 character + extension limit pre-2.30, not 100% positive what it is now. But I am sure that Helix itself doesn't show the full file names, as noted above, and that Hx Edit shows even less than Helix.

I've done a significant amount of work on a tool for analyzing IR usage in a 'backup' which at that time meant an organized collection of preset files and IRs as exported from the Helix app. An API like you're describing would have been enormously helpful, but my inquiries to various Line 6 folks about that were never responded to, no doubt for the reasons discussed above, and lack of desire to spend dev hours documenting and supporting such a thing if it exists, and creating it if not. When 2.30 came out, I took a step back on my project, because the new Backup functionality in the editor is so superior to previous strategies that it's no longer reasonable to work from individual preset and IR files (to the extent it ever was). A tool like that really needs to read actual backup files, among other reasons because rational users will stop using 3-digit prefixes on IR names to track IR locations, and that's the only way for an external app to know that info from an exported set of IR files. Unfortunately, 2.30 backups are binary files that I don't know how to read, yet, hopefully. Earlier versions appeared to be using gzip internally. I never got to the bottom of unpacking those, but I was willing to use the plain preset and numbered IR files instead. As of 2.30 I really think I need to read full backups, but there's no obvious evidence gzip is in play, and haven't had more than a few minutes to investigate. If anyone has figured out how to unpack post-2.30 backup files, ideally in Java or ColdFusion, please ping me. Once I know how to read that binary data, it should be relatively easy to migrate my app to work from there, assuming the internal structure of a preset hasn't radically changed. That wouldn't mean my app is "done", but it would be a great help. Of course the next step after analyzing IR usage is to let you reorder your IRs (like to get rid on unused ones and compact the used ones together to make room for new), while adjusting your existing presets for the new locations. Since preset files are simple JSON, that wouldn't be super hard for individual preset files, but post 2.30, it would require rewriting those binary backup files. No idea how hard that'd be until we know how to read them. Just to say it, analyzing backups is pretty risk free, worst you can do is be wrong. *Writing* backup or preset files is a whole other thing, since there's some risk of corrupting the data, and worst case, locking up a Helix. I don't mean to be FUD-ing here, just realistic. Examining the data is a necessary first step, then we can think about the risks of creating or modifying it.