givemeacent

It's true, I don't think this is something to be fixed. But definitely something more people should know about. I am happy that I was able to quickly find out what had happened to my sound and not become frustrated like I am sure other people would get.

I believe this has already been discussed in another form, however, today I would like to maybe bring it up as this might be something a new person that has not seen the other threads might be confused about. (The fuzz is always disabled by the way, not turned on when describing these symptoms)* I had a great chain on both paths a and b. Yesterday I decided to add a fuzz, Arbitrator fuzz, to mess with. I was using headphones, it wasn't obvious to me the sound had changed. I went to go play at church where I normally play, still didn't notice because I play really loud anyways to begin with. I went home to practice. I noticed how low my volume was on my practice amp, didn't think much of it. Then I thought about making a new signal chain to come up with new ideas. The moment I went to a new blank preset, all the clarity and volume came back. My amp sounded great again, good strong volume, very nice clean and clear signal. I began testing things between my old preset and new blank preset. I found out that, if I delete the fuzz, arbitrator fuzz, on my old preset, the volume comes back with all the shimmer and greatness on the amp. So then what I did was, on the new blank preset, I added that fuzz. The sound went dull and low. So then I remembered that old thread and I started messing with the guitar input block. With the fuzz still there, if I changed the setting on the input block from "low z" to a much higher "ohm" setting, basically the further to the right the slider went, the better the sound came back, up until 230 ohm, I have a strat, and at 1m ohm the sounded became to crisp and brittle. So based on that other thread I read, if you add a fuzz, you need to tweak this impedance setting on the input block if you don't want the sound going flat and dull.

I saw this topic in the morning and when I went to church today I tried your advice. I use a snark tuner, the SN-8 I think, "super tight" tuner. It was at the last moment before I had to start leading so I could compare, but it did seemed less jumpy. I'll have to wait again until Tuesday, it's at church.

Yeah! But it's not the regular squealing feedback. It's more of a technique to sustain your delay or reverb. Volume swell from one wave of pads to another. Sometimes the volume knob on my guitar doesn't travel the full path before I get to that tipping point where it will sustain by itself for as long as I want. The two amps really help, you have a bigger "sweet spot" where you need to stand for the pickups to start doing their thing.

I do this at church. I have a Vox AC30, the fawn hand-wired version with no tremolo or reverb with 2 alnico blues and a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe with the extension cabinet connected. I use both 1/4, left and right, outputs on the helix to send them to the amps. Amps are behind me in a stereo like format, but I don't really use much stereo effects. The Fenders are stacked on top of each other and the Vox on an amp stand, both facing the congregation and me at different angles. This gives a nice spread of sound, makes my Strat sustain longer and can make it feedback easily with my volume knob. I had both amps for a while but never thought to put them together. Wish I could have done it earlier. There is no amp or cab modeling on the helix, only effects going into the front of both amps.