firehawkkwah

I have a Standard. Use is practice, recording, and (hopefully eventually) live. It's great for practice and learning new songs since I can change tunings and models easily. For recording I generally will use a guitar tuned appropriately (not modeled), or else tune the Variax itself so that any artifacts don't show up. Recording use is mainly the acoustic and clean to slightly broken tones. For heavy distortion I prefer a real bridge humbucker since the palm muting is not great on the standard models (more on that later). I also prefer a neck HB for solos, so I use a different guitar for those recordings. The LP neck model sounds good, but it's just not as good as the real one I'll use for recording. The recordings for rhythm parts and for clean tones its great. Acoustic sounds convincing in a mix and is so much easier than mic'ing up. I've also used the sitar for a decent Rolling Stones cover. There's no latency that I can discern. I replaced the bridge pickup with a DiMarzio single-coil sized humbucker, essentially giving me a Strat HSS, and I like it much better. It was a big improvement for palm muting. I also use a silicone neck wrap (like one of those old Livestrong bracelet things). My palm muting position places my pick right on top of the middle pickup, so I lowered it far down and out of the way. Not to worry, though, since I just use the modeled middle pickup if I want that. If you're playing for a live online audience and want to change quickly then pairing Variax with Helix is probably just about the best tool you can have. You can change model, tuning, amp, etc all with one footswitch. You can also change those things with snapshots, which is great, too. I have one preset which uses the real magnetic humbucker with high gain for heavy rhythm parts, the modeled single coil for clean parts, an acoustic, and a LP neck pickup for solo. It's pretty sweet. And doesn't take up any DSP on the Helix, so I can have 2-3 amps in that monster preset. Like I said, for recording I'd change it up a bit, but for either live use or jamming or figuring out parts, it's fantastic.

Yes. I have one preset that if you go into stomp mode will show 4 stomp, 3 snaps, and even another preset. It's pretty cool to be able to set it up like that through command center.

I use 4 preset up top and 4 snaps on bottom. Then if I want I hit mode where I have the command center configured for a mix of snap and stomp. I even have it set to go to a particular other preset if I want. It's a really versatile flow for me since I have a preset for each song or at least "type", typically with 4 snaps per preset. But then if I want to have individual control that's easy too.

I've played around a little with the poly stuff, but not a ton. Seems like it handles small changes best, as does Variax. So with that in mind, if you wanted to go down to, say, "drop D" tuning but in C#, would it make most sense to use Variax to get you the drop D, and then poly to add in the additional half step down? I haven't done any combining of the effects yet in any real detail other than just quick messing around. Anyone have insight into combining them?

If I was a "big name"and had access to people to move rigs, do maintenance, keep settings in place, etc, then yeah, I'd go for for some classic tubes and cabs and effects. But since it's just be me, myself, and I...

I went with the black pickup, but wish I had chosen white! Which tuners did you use? Drop right in or any drilling? I'm thinking of doing the same.

If you're in hx edit and you click "check for update"... And there is one... And you click to install it... Why would any user think that's not going to work? When there's a Windows patch, or antivirus definitions, or a Reaper update, or phone firmware, or anything else, does any average user do anything other than click "update"? When you click to update the firmware, why isn't there a prompt to say "hey buddy, looks like your hx edit is a different version than your helix. You won't be able to use the new features unless you update Edit, too! Want to update HX Edit?" Seems easy enough, plus it's a big win for user experience to not be frustrated, and I can only imagine the number of complaint tickets coming in right now...

I restored to to the backup and everything worked fine. Then when I restarted the Helix it started updating automatically back to 3. Rebuilding the presets. Without any intervention from me. So now it's back to 3, even though I didn't try, and the Variax assignments through snapshots works. So I'm ok, but the whole thing was a little weird!

My Variax settings per snapshot seem to have disappeared. F/W 3.0 Edit version 3.0 Windows 7 Helix LT Variax Standard My presets have snapshots with different Variax models. Snap 1 is Spank3, Snap 2 is Lester5, Snap 3 is Magnetics, etc. Since updating to 3.0 none of the snapshots recall those settings. Now the all Snapshots (with Variax as input) just shows whatever the knobs on the variax show. ie, if I have the knobs on Variax set to T model 1, then all the snaps in that preset shot Tmodel 1 as the Variax input.

It's here! 3.0!

Yeah, I suppose. But then I'm in 10 stomp or 10 snap mode, right? Can have it in "4-snap; 4 Preset" mode? Just seems like an easy fix! "Enable Bank up/down LEDs to be on" !!

The Matchless and Placater are awesome clean to middling tones. I love the Achetype versions for middle to heavy. Then Mahadeva and Solo for heavy (and some Cali). Those 5 amps are my go-to for starting anything. So much so that I use amp switching and snapshots more than effects, or at least as much as effects (Minotaur and Teemah primarily).

I'm very happy with my pickup swap Using Helix I can have a preset use a model for one snapshot, then the new humbucker, then back to a model. It's really nice. The modification was fairly straightforward once I figured out which wires to solder, and which pickup to use. In retrospect perhaps a JTV 69 would have been the right call for me instead of a Standard and replacing the pickup. That said, I'm happy with the way it turned out. The palm muting/heavier sounds are so much clearer and tighter than the model. I do wish that L6 would release a HSS super-strat variax standard, but in the meantime this works very well. If you want HH, then going with a JTV59 is a better option IMO than modd'ing a Standard. Doing a HSH (with the single-sized humbucker) would be easy enough, though. I would just be wary of modifying things involving the switch, combined tones, etc. Unless you REALLY know what you're doing. otherwise, stick to drop-in replacements.

What about trying what silverhead suggested above? I just gave it a whirl and seems ok! For my setup I don't want a blend, but I might mess around with it later.

Nice, thanks. There's a few ways to do this, good to have some tricks. I hadn't thought about using the merge mix, that's a good way. Cleaner than using volume blocks. And the volume pedal with reversed volume to blend them is cool. Doesn't work for this preset but I'll keep that in mind. I also like the Variax volume knob method. So many ways to skin the cat. I've got snap 1 as a clean T model, 2 as Spank with some gain, 3 my hot rail bridge magnetic, then 4 Lester for lead. 1 and 2 go to Placater clean, 3 and 4 go to Soldano dual cab (L/R split). Pretty sweet too be able to do all that in one preset!