willjrock

What? nobody has stormed in yet to say, "inspired by is WAY different than based on". at least thats the level of scrutiny im used to being held to. In all fairness he does say that its a 2.30 preset.

Im with silverhead, this is probably more a configurations issue than it has anything to do with helix itself. Though i was mistaken once back in 73 so dont take my word for it....but that would probably be the best place to start looking.

Try going right into the guitar input of your amp. Yes, most often this is just dumb, but ive actually heard a couple of descent sound like this, and for some people its just a better option for connection...even if it IS only temporary. The cheapest and quickest way to get the most enjoyment out of Helix is by picking yourself up an old set of cheap active(amplified) studio monitors. This will sound pretty good, the footprint is small, and it will buy you some time to figure out what system/set-up is right you. Sometimes this can take a while due to trial and error. Not only will this most likely be less expensive than raw power amp, but it will be FAR more versatile, allowing you to fully utilize all the amp modelling, cab modelling, ect. Id recommend 8 inch speakers but that is somewhat subjective. 6's or even 5's should be OK if you want to save even more space. I like 8s because i could take them to a gig, mic them, and/or use them as a stage monitoYou could prob do it with the smaller ones too, just seems like 8s would be more effective. FWIW - one of my favorite sounds was plugging my old POD 2.0 into any of my power amps (which is a little different than what youre doing but still asking it to do about the same thing ie: drive the power amp with a preamp model) and then i can drive a cab with that. I havent gotten the same sense of fulfillment with Helix. Everything just kinda sounds the same and overall doesnt thrill me the way it did with the POD. IMO your best Helix experience is going to come from an FRFR, studio monitors, headphones, respectively IMO. Good luck.

I dont know if the functionality is the same as the helix or not. I wish i could help you. I wonder...are they allowing these questions to be answered here because the units are so similar or should the fx have it own forum?

Thank YOU fellas. I hope you get some use out of it. Up!

Sorry guys no, should be a single block preset. I apologize for that. Let me investigate for a minute.

Just a preset for you gents in this here Helix forum, since the update was delayed. Maybe you will feel as if you got a new reverb that you never knew you had...and a VERY good one to boot. Copy it and paste it at the end of one of your presets and call it reverb. :D If youve never created a verb before in this manner, you should find it pretty refreshing. https://www.dropbox.com/s/359mvfek0ii3xvr/reverb.hlx?dl=0

Ive never had an issue with the tuner at all. Ive always used the top and bottom mechanism both. Ive never had to worry about setting the input block to guitar instead of multi - if that really even makes any difference. Ive never tried to intonate with the hlx tuner, but then i dont do much of that anyway. I havent used it a 5hit ton all in all, but it always did what i asked it to do, without giving me any grief.

No i wont argue with you. Dont have the keyboard energy for that. It just seems like the OP is wasting a lot of energy for no reason at all or possibly even to his detriment. Under the right circumstances, not under all circumstances. Your ears may be fantastic for all we know, but not everyone's monitoring, acoustic treatment, and conversion is on the same level. There are too many other variables at hand for the OP to overcomplicate his process, by sweating what interface he's using. I can assure him/you that will NOT be a critical factor in determining his end result. It sorta puts me in mind of all these guys that are constantly after the latest greatest plugins. After having 2, 3, or $4,000 tied up in all the very best plugins, at what point do you realize that software upgrades are going to do less to improve the sound of your music, than literally ANYTHING else you can do?

Wait! This Motu 896 is the interface that we are calling "top notch"?? This is one of the cheapest interfaces a person can get. Definitely use the Helix. You'll save yourself a bunch of headaches, and as Pete said the guitar will sound at least as good, if not better. Top notch 8 channel interfaces START just under $1000.

I guess it depends when ya bought it then because ive owned Helix for 2 years now and it certainly was NOT "supposed" to be a finished product when i was looking at it. I dont know if "gifts" is the appropriate word? Could you imagine? All the time, manpower, and money, Just to give its customer base a present every 6 months lol. THAT would be a first. No company i can think of, in the history of mankind, has ever done anything like that. No, L6 obviously feels as if their creation is unfinished or has not reached its full potential yet, Makes sense to continue to craft the Helix until that satisfaction is met, and at some point kick back and sell as many of them at $1500 as they can. Comments like this can make you sound ignorant and/or bitter. Im not saying that to be offensive. Thats just how it appears to people who DO know the difference. First off, theres not one amp on the UA menu that costs $299, so to say that is an exaggeration. Next if a person is desperate or (hate to say it) foolish enough to pay full price for UA plugins, thats their own fault. You wouldn't buy the Waves gold bundle for $800, would you? There is plenty of opportunity to get UA plugins for just a fraction of whats being advertised. Also when it comes to these amps, plugins, whatever, just because you cant hear a difference doesnt mean that other people cant, or that there isnt one. You have cheap monitors in an untreated room. Some of the things, in YOUR listening conditions, where you hear no difference, you would be wowed by here, where i have a professionally treated room and a large investment in monitoring.....assuming that your hearing is mostly "normal" Not even sure why you'd go there. Nobody charges for updates. Never have never will. This really has nothing to do with the quote, and probably not the appropriate protocol, but i noticed there are no EQs in the update.....unless we didnt get the full scope at the beginning of the "coming soon" thread. Man would you guys do the Boss GE-7? It probably couldnt be a more simple request and those frequencies are just so important for tone shaping. If the helix graphic were programmable that'd be one thing, but its not.

Thank you gentlemen. Valid points im sure.

I honestly hope this update never comes out because i really get some joy from reading all the whiny " wheres my update, I want it now, you promised!!!" posts, i would delay it myself if i could, but whats weird to me is - didnt L6 already release the new FX module with 2.50 installed? Seems weird to have a "buggy" version floating around out there for a brand new product, and now this. I dont know, maybe im mistaken in those comments. I sure cant make sense of it, but thats not saying a whole lot.

FWIW i agree with you. Wouldnt have been a big deal to put it in 2.51 if needed. I think you hit the nail on the head when you semi said people being worried that they may not get their free stuff NOW! It always amazed me how demanding people get over software updates. As if they couldnt live without it for a second longer. When you first started this thread i thought back to a time when i didnt understand what "legacy" stuff was. That term meant to me that it was a companys stuff that didnt sound as good, or their failed attempt...and if you think about it, in a way they ARE saying its their second tier software. I dont know, distortion is distortion. There shouldnt be a need to point out the time period it came from, or anything else they may be trying to elude to by using the term "legacy". What do we care?

Why are you deleting presets? There is absolutely no reason to do that. Save it and tweak it at a later date. There must have been SOMETHING you liked about it. Maybe all it needs is a different IR. Otherwise your time working on it was a total waste. Without bad presets you'd have no good presets and you need all kinds of presets to have your favorite preset. Deleting is pointless.

Plenty of users have also incorrectly reported improvement, and plenty of others have reported none at all. Im not saying the one reporting improvement are wrong, but It will be a reality when its something that can be proven. Until that time there is no audible difference. "under the hood improvements" could literally mean anything.

Yes, absolutely. Though it will limit your DSP to half. Sounds like you should be fine with half the available DSP anyway. Its DEFINITELY enough to dial a good guitar sound and still have effects. Craig's solution is a perfectly suitable one as well. Thats prob what id end up doing. Or use your interface to record everything else, and then when it comes time to record the guitars, switch over and use the Helix. All you have to do is select the Helix driver in your DAW. Youre wasting your time trying to pipe everything thru your interface because you are under the impression that its going to give you way better audio quality. If it were vocals or even drum overheads, it might make a bit of difference, but guitar sounds are fairly bandlimited in that 99% of the sound energy is from 125hz up to 4k, so they tend to be able to deal with a little bit of raunch better than some of the other mentioned instruments.

Def go with free ones for the time being. Some of my best sounds are with free IRs. Paid IRs arent going to give you a higher quality of sound. Study up on the sounds you like and go with those cabs. Theres no need to "wade thru 100s of IRs". If your fav player/sound uses V30s in a Bogner cab then start with those IRs. Buying the IR for a Diezel cab with H30s is probably a waste of your time, and will only lead to you "wading thru 100s of IRs" to find very few sounds you like. You never know though. Sometimes we luck into stuff. If youre willing to afford the time for experimentation then go for it. Live on the edge a bit. If you like Redwirez Bogner cab with T75s then id def suggest trying Ownhammers same cab, Tonics, and all the other Bogners with T75s because each companys take on the same cab will give you something different. Good luck

Been doing this for a long time, and have a lot of presets with multiple cabs tied to snapshots. Did it mostly for test purposes but never the less ran into some real challenges along the way. For instance, before the ability to create a back-up, exporting a preset meant you would have to go thru each snapshot in that preset and find each IR tied to it. Youd also have to export all the IRs along with it...sure not an issue if you have every IR in the same place and never move them, but id like to meet that guy. and then quite often adding more IRs means automating more EQ, whether it be on the amp itself or adding more blocks. If you decide you want to use a 2048 IR instead of a 1024 IR all your previously saved IRs will be erased. ...and then if the amp in that preset changes for whatever reason, often it makes the rest of the snapshot sounds obsolete, forcing you to run thru and reprogram them all. This works as the OP has described, but it can really become pretty messy.

Absolutely it can be done. Set the amp up in 4CM. It should be pretty evident from there. At that point you'll just have to decide for yourself whether you like the sound of the EQ pre or post preamp.

While its true that its not all THAT difficult to dial a useable sound with Helix cabs, though you will never get the quality of sounds achieved by an IR, nor will you get the range of tones available in an IR without a lot of effort.. This is why i use them, why every person dialing tones in my studio tends to choose them , why every pro ive seen using helix uses IRs, why any polls ive seen show more people tend to choose IRs, why you dont see posts here of people complaining about shrill and unsatisfactory high end when using IRs, ect. Its no accident.

i would not ignore IRs right off the bat. Helix is pretty uninspirational sounding without them. Unless your monitoring matches up with the onboard Helix cab sounds pretty well, you'll just be wasting your time trying to dial sounds that are hard or impossible to get, when the right IR will do the trick instantly and let you concentrate on the other aspects of Helix.You dont want to be fussing around trying to get good sound AND learning Helix. Just use an IR that sounds good and you wont have to worry about that part until youre ready to worry about it.

Would like to hear more about this. Im sure you have been over it 100 times and know exactly what you got on your hands, have all your workarounds, ect, but you should test this theory out, and see if it really sounds different or if its just in your brain, or if (what i feel and i'll explain below) helix has a hard time coping with different phase circumstances, and needs deeper phase editing tools on board. You could 1)record a clean DI track 2)set -up your path with the PRE amplifier split, and pipe the DI through it 3)Split your output blocks to channel 1& 2 (or left and right) and record them separately 4)run your DI track through everything again, but this time record your amps one at a time 5) null these two tracks against each other and if the result is silence then they are exactly the same I can give you more thorough instructions if you are unaware of what im talking about but im pretty certain thats not the case. The reason i feel its a phasing issue to some degree is even if you were to get rid of the split, and copy/paste your blocks to path 2 OR split the 2 input blocks of path 1, the sound doesnt change compared to the split you are describing. Technically there is still a split at the hard input. I also hear this at times with back end splits as well.

Also, a DI might be the thing here. That would allow greater flexibility on your end.

Which riff is "the main riff" exactly? There are a lot of "main riffs" in that tune, in my view.