Verne-Bunsen

Experiment with cab/IR high and low cuts, very powerful. I often have mine assigned to snapshots so they tighten up a bit as gain increases.

Interesting idea! The Helix looks for a 10k pot in an expression pedal, so if you made your box with a 10k resistor and a switch to bypass it maybe Helix would never know the difference? You could even have it toggle bypass states using the position based auto-on feature.

What a time to be alive, haha!

Congratulations to you, that's a phenomenal piece of gear! Can Helix change the H9 preset via MIDI?

I didn't read the whole thread so I'm not sure where we're at contextually overall, but I can contribute based on the last few comments. Helix was my first modeling unit and when I purchased it I was indeed under the mistaken impression that I would turn it on and it would be like sitting at Guitar Center plugging into all of these amps one after the other. The discovery that everything didn't sound awesome "out of the box" was initially disappointing, but only because of my own lack of understanding of the technology. I spent several months learning the machine, making banks of presets, learning in the process, deleting them all and starting over with the new knowledge, repeat ad nauseam. These days I'm able to get the sounds I hear in my head to come out of my speaker pretty faithfully and pretty quickly. It's the best piece of gear I ever owned, but it took some dedication to get there. Another thing I discovered was that I was FAR more critical of my Helix tones than I ever was of my tube amps. For instance I heard fizz in the Helix, more in some amp models than others, and was frustrated and disappointed at this "flaw". That is, until I went back and listened to my tube amps with new ears, and listened more critically to the guitars on my favorite recordings. Oh... Switching from tube amps to a modeling unit was a huge psychological hurdle for me, the mental aspect of acclimating to these devices can't be ignored. Like I said before though, having at last wrapped my head around it there's no part of me that wants to go back.

This represents a lot of work! I embarked on a similar mission a while back, but it took me too far down the rabbit hole and I lost my mind before completing it and had to go live in a remote jungle cave for a time. I'm back now and feeling much better and think it's commendable that you're sharing your work :)

Where are you getting the Vibrolux? Helix has a Bassman (Tweed Blues) with 4x10, Twin Reverb (US Double) with 2x12, Deluxe Reverb (US Deluxe) with 1x12 and Champ (Small Tweed) with 1x8, but no Vibrolux that I'm aware of.

Sounds mighty fine! I'm a Robin Trower fan myself, had the priviledge of seeing him play here in Tucson last year. Day of the Eagle was undoubtedly the highlight of the show for me. Nice work!

Cool tune man, and nice rundown of the presets. I've found Strat + Mandarin to be an unexpectedly good pairing as well.

Sounds interesting, I'll be giving it a whirl. Thanks!

According to this thread, which generally seems to know what it's talking about, it was a '58. http://line6.com/support/topic/19961-helix-amp-model-gallery-real-controls-vs-invented/

That's a thought provoking idea, thanks!

This. Can't cry everytime somebody gets something you don't. Seems like a good promotion.

When you say you're having trouble identifying them, do you mean finding one you like out of the mountain of files? With Ownhammer IRs, I go to the Quick Start folders and audition all of the OH1 and OH2 (and OH3 when it's there) mixes and I always find one or two that sound like what I'm looking for.

I un-ignored the guy out of morbid curiosity...

Open mouth, insert hat. That sounds really, really good.

The zbox looks like a rather elegant solution, and for the price it can't hurt to give it a whirl. Thanks for posting that!

That worked perfectly! You've also got to invert your bypass limit because, even though position indicator still shows 100% at toe down, it's thinking 0%. So for bypass at toe down, I've got the limit set at 0%. Still futzing with it, but its behavior makes way more sense now. Thanks! Interestingly, snapshots do not handle its bypass state the same as my other external expression pedal, which is weird. My other external controls a vibe and is bypassed at heel down. If it's on, it's on in all the snapshots. If it's off, it's off in all the snap shots. However the wah is not so. If I turn it on in one snapshot then it is still off in the others. It gets a bit messy if I switch snapshots in that state since the treadle is out of the bypass limit. Returning the treadle to toe down (bypass) then turns it ON. Taking it off of toe down then turns it OFF. You have to go back to the snapshot where it was turned on, turn it off, then you can go back and it will behave normally in the other snapshots. It's weird and if it was like that before I never noticed. Seems like I've read threads with odd behavior like that from the onboard expression pedal when being used as exp 1 and 2, but not with externals. I haven't gone back and un-did everything to see if it persists, but it's something I'll continue looking at.

It's not so much an issue with the onboard expression pedal as it is with external epression pedals, as the onboard has the integrated toe switch. Helix (at least the Floor version) can't receive bypass toggling input from an external pedals toe switch, so you have to either toggle the block you are controlling on/off with a Helix footswitch or take advantage of the auto-on. Or utilize a clever workaround like Spikey's.

I don't know about the MIDI aspect, but the problem I've run into is getting the second guitar to sound right without any input impedance. With two passive pickup equipped guitars, the Aux-In isn't much use so the second guitar ends up using a loop return as an input, and there is no impedance parameter there. Unless I've missed something, which is always possible...

Great input all around, thanks for the replies! Yeah, as it stands I can set the "wait" parameter to 1000ms and it toggles off as soon as it makes limits, then takes forever to come back on. Phil_M had some enlightening input on this below... I'd like to use the toe switch, but I'm not crazy about the way the onboard expression pedal "feels" for wah. I modded an old wah pedal to be an expression pedal and it feels much better to me. I love the onboard pedal for Whammy though and use it with the toe switch for that. The G-system auto engage sounds golden! I remember you posting this a while back and I tried it then. It's a clever approach! You might have nailed it. I like toe down to bypass for wah (didn't like how it sounded coming in and out at the bottom, ear is used to what it's used to I guess...) and I just manually toggled the bypass state of the block to get it working right. What you describe makes a lot of sense. I will try what you've recommended here. Thanks!

BUT their victory is rendered meaningless, because nobody will care!

I was initially very excited about the addition of the expression pedal position as a means of controlling block bypass state, but for wah specifically it has proven difficult to make work. I love it for vibe, I love it for tremolo, not loving it for wah. I've tried bypass at both heel-down and toe-down, I've set the span very narrow at 0% or 99%, but regardless when I get to rocking the wah it's just a constant on-off-on-off-on-off because it engages the bypass as soon as you meet the position limit. The "wait" parameter seems only to apply to turning the effect back on. Trying to never hit the toe-down or heel-down limit while you're actually using the wah is not really practical in my book. Beyond that, what have you guys come up with? I'm back to assigning a footswitch. For reference, my Helix is the floor version and I am using external expression pedals (homebrew).

Cheap Thrills was my point-of-entry. It's a hodge podge of all kinds of stuff, all of which is excellent. Then Absolutely Free.