obscurehifi

I didn't realize you wanted a middle pickup! That certainly changes the selection process. The issue I have on my Ibanez is the middle cavity isn't cut deep enough to lower the pickup enough. I really don't have the same issue with my strat but I think there's more space in between the middle and neck pickups. Yeah, not too many cons for the Schecter C1 SLS Elite, which is why it's one of my favorite guitars! You're right about the stiff neck. It's amazing how well it stays in tune with seasonal changes compared to my guitars that hang next to it on the same wall. The body doesn't specifically have a forearm cut out but it is an archtop, so I don't ever notice. Yep, I've seen Darrel Braun's review and he has pretty much the same opinion as me except his has a bit more authority in saying so lol.

Brilliant minds! LOL Actually, I probably said it confusing but I actually paired up the two Alnico Moderns in one guitar and both ceramics went in the other guitar. I find it better balances their timbre, sort of like how one matches speakers in a stereo system. It also helped give my two Schecters that are pretty similar, a different sound, rather than having the identical pickup setup.

Since the topic is Fishman Fluence, I think I have something to add since I now have 5 guitars equipped. I bought a used Schecter C1 SLS Elite that came with the Modern set of humbuckers. I then modded it quite a bit to take advantage of split sounds and dual voicings so I could have dual voicings in split or not-split, giving a huge range of sounds. I then went on to get the Tosin Abasi set for my Schecter Barotone then another modern set for my Schecter Hellraiser Hybrid. I later mis-matched the two sets of moderns, with both alnico pickups in one guitar and both ceramics in another guitar (the schecter's above). Honestly, that's how they should match them in the first place. Now onto my American Fenders. I outfitted my 2016 Stratocaster Elite Magnificent 7 (6 string...) with a set of the Fluence single coils and my American Tele Deluxe with the Tele set. Both sound quite amazing but I'm not entirely sure if they sound better or worse than the fender noiseless pickups they came with but it's cool having multiple voicings. Regardless, they sound amazing and are super versatile. Anyways, long story short, I'm a big fan of Fishman Fluence and they work great with Helix! All five of these guitars have tone controls and I find them very useful. I have an Ibanez Prestige RG HSS and while it sounds great, I can't stand the middle pickup in it as it always seems to get in the way of my pick. If you like the RG style of guitar, I'd highly suggest the Schecter C1 SLS Elite as it comes with Fishman, has a tone knob, stainless frets, carbon stringers in the neck, really nice neck and neck thru body. It's a crazy high end guitar for a reasonable price, especially if you bought it used like I did. With the modern pickups, they have a crazy amount of options available for sounds. Splits, voicings, low gain jumper, ceramic / alnico, and even a high frequency roll-off. I set the guitar up so that the one push pull is voice 1 and 2 and the other push pull is split / not-split. I was going to put Fluence into my other dual humbucker Ibanez RG 652LWFX but the controls cavity is really small with no option of anywhere to place the battery and the pot holes were too small for the fishman pots, so that's something to consider if you're looking for an Ibanez to swap the pickups into.

I have a pair of Cerwin Vega 5-1/4" component car speakers still. I had them in my first truck nearly 25 years ago. Sounded great then, still sound great now, although they are now in my car. Same pair, still going strong.

Hard to argue with that! More is more!

For my Helix Floor, I use a pair of Electrovoice ZLX-12P's in my "sound room," which is a large family room. I have them situated in a stereo fashion in front of me, from where I play. I absolutely love the sound, it's very wide and "surrounding." I replaced a Mesa Boogie Mark V and a 10" and 12" cabinet and a bunch of pedals. PA speakers are a good option because they offer much larger speakers than studio monitors, so can move air better, and produce encompassing bass. The EV speakers provide EQ on the back of them and I can set them between my Helix setting and a music setting. The helix setting, I set using room eq software to make the sound even, and dial out some bass. On the music setting, I use that when I run my phone's audio into my helix to play spotify, which is set to more of a music EQ setting. The EV is nice in this regard, allowing the various EQ settings, using my helix as a "hub" for both guitar and music. Also works well piping in my Digitech Trio + bass and drums. Love the sound. They also work well to give me a really wide sound stage for my guitar. It's like a wall of sound in front of me. I also get the added benefit of stereo effects sounding unreal. Highly recommend although two ZLX's can be a bit on the high side money wise.

@qwerty42 Thank you very much for the detailed explanation and write up. It helped me set up a test to confirm what you have said is accurate and also that my Helix appears to be functioning normally. Not sure why my initial test (in my first post) setting the impedance to 1M didn't work. I may have made a mistake or maybe the setting didn't take? Who knows. Anyways, this is the test that confirms everything seems to be working properly: Setup: Guitar-->Cable-->10k input Imp (or Auto Z if arb 1st in chain) -->arb fuzz -->Amp (Architype Clean)--->dual path of Ownhammer (r)Evolution IR's-->Merged--->delay-->reverb Result: This sounds wonderful. This may be the perfect fuzz amp, or at least the best on helix I've found so far. Set the gain near 8. Cleans up nice with guitar volume rolled down, just like the real fuzz face is supposed to do. Sounds best with passive low output pickups. Doesn't sound as good with active pickups or high gain pickups. Test 1 Bypassed Arb Fuzz 1st in Chain: SnapShot1) Guitar-->Cable-->10k input Imp -->bypassed arb fuzz -->Amp Result - Sounds muddled and terrible. SnapShot2) Guitar-->Cable-->1M input Imp -->bypassed arb fuzz -->Amp Result - Sounds fantastic. All highs back. Lot's of shimmer. Makes me smile. SnapShot3) Guitar-->Cable-->Auto input Imp -->bypassed arb fuzz -->Amp Result - Sounds muddled and terrible. Auto must be staying at 10k. Test 2 Deleted Arb Fuzz: SnapShot1) Guitar-->Cable-->10k input Imp --->Amp Result - Sounds muddled and terrible. SnapShot2) Guitar-->Cable-->1M input Imp --->Amp Result - Sounds fantastic. All highs back. Lot's of shimmer. Makes me smile. SnapShot3) Guitar-->Cable-->Auto input Imp --->Amp Result - Sounds fantastic. All highs back. Lot's of shimmer. Makes me smile. Test 3 Moved Bypassed Arb Fuzz after Amp: SnapShot1) Guitar-->Cable-->10k input Imp --->Amp-->bypassed arb fuzz Result - Sounds muddled and terrible. SnapShot2) Guitar-->Cable-->1M input Imp --->Amp-->bypassed arb fuzz Result - Sounds fantastic. All highs back. Lot's of shimmer. Makes me smile. SnapShot3) Guitar-->Cable-->Auto input Imp --->Amp-->bypassed arb fuzz Result - Sounds fantastic. All highs back. Lot's of shimmer. Makes me smile. Test 4 Simple EQ (no adjustments) 1st in Chain, Bypassed Arb Fuzz 2nd in Chain SnapShot1) Guitar-->Cable-->10k input Imp -->Simple EQ-->bypassed arb fuzz -->Amp Result - Sounds muddled and terrible. SnapShot2) Guitar-->Cable-->1M input Imp -->Simple EQ-->bypassed arb fuzz -->Amp Result - Sounds fantastic. All highs back. Lot's of shimmer. Makes me smile. SnapShot3) Guitar-->Cable-->Auto input Imp -->Simple EQ-->bypassed arb fuzz -->Amp Result - Sounds muddled and terrible. Auto must be staying at 10k. It's clear to me now that the first effect in the chain does in fact set the Auto impedance value. I think the tests also show that the bypassed fuzz when not first in chain doesn't affect the signal. It's unclear to me why this didn't work when I first tested. The only thing I did notice in this series of testing is that the Auto Z setting doesn't not automatically change sometimes, for example, if I have the bypassed-arb-fuzz and move it after an effect with a higher impedance, the Auto Z doesn't change automatically to match the newly positioned first in the chain, until something else is changed, such as switching the snapshot to another then back or actually adding an effect before the arb-fuzz. Those force it to change but it could be perceived as a sound quality issue if someone doesn't recognize the Auto Z wasn't forced to change. I think this only happens if the chain content isn't changed, such as just shuffling effects around, until it's forced to change. Anyways, thanks for all the responses everyone! It looks to me the best solution is using snapshots to manually change the impedance between 10k and 1M for the effect I used.

I think you're going to get that with Redwirez too. They say with each speaker, you get 14 microphones, 6 positions, and 9 distances. That alone is 756 files per speaker. They don't mention any custom equalizing like you get with (r)Evolution, or at least I didn't see it mentioned. What Redwirez gives you seems to be similar to the built in helix cabs, where you can change the microphones and distances. Same sort of tuning except you need a ton of files for each speaker and mic. That gets overwhelming to me actually. (r)Evolution does it differently and I'm glad they do. Rather than having to choose mic placement (center, edge, off axis) combined with distance in inches to find the sound you want; they give you eq'd mixes with descriptions. For example, this is what is in the Mic folder and you don't have to worry about distances. Under the Mix folder, you get the list I described earlier, brown, chunk, modern, etc. For each speaker, they also give you a really simple Summary folder with BRight, DarK, Midrange-, Midrange+, Soft Shelves, Tight1, Tight 2, and Summary. So for all 12 speakers, you can have 8 Summary files, make you only need to copy 96 files onto your helix. That's pretty simple actually.

I found the arb fuzz works well set to 10k. I'll give it another shot set to auto. Mind if I ask what settings you use on the fuzz, what amp you use, and amp settings? Have you tried the industrial fuzz with all the knobs set to zero other than drive and level? I find it also sounds pretty great that way too. You can add in a little of the other knobs to get some good spittiness too.

The other thing I should mention about the (r)Evolution pack is that they come with various folders in each speaker; 8 mic folders with , mixes, and summary. This allows you to really tailor the sound. I really like the Summary and Mixes folders. I started by pulling the "standard" file from each speakers Summary folder and uploading the files to my Helix Floor. I then used 8 snapshots to switch between the 8 main speakers while playing. This really allows you to hear the difference between them. Once I picked my two favorites, I then uploaded the Mixes folder contents to my helix. There's 60 in each, so can upload all of the mixes for two speakers. The mixes folder includes mixes that have different names eq's like; 599, all, balanced, beef, big, bold, brown, chunk, classic, cut, dense, earth, even, fat, fire, forward, full, grit, hair, hard, iron, lean modern, olde, paradox, pocket, rip, scoop, scream, smoke, thick, vintage, and warm. Some of them have up to four each, like modern1, modern2, and so on. The total amount of files is overkill for my purposes but I think picking your top two speakers and uploading the mixes folders for each could give most casual users like me everything they need to stay entertained.

I second the OwnHammer (r)Evolution pack. They don't really advertise how MANY files come with each speaker. When just looking at the mono 48kHz Left *.wav files, you get over 600 files. Factoring in the 12 speakers equates to 7200 files! I find they sound really good too. I had been using various free IR's but was a little overwhelmed keeping them all straight. This pack comes with a lot of files, but they are well organized and labeled, making it a little easier to find what you're looking for.

Thanks for creating the attached comparison. Well, I'm glad it's not just me hearing the muffled sound. The list of impedances of pedals that you attached really helped me understand what was going on. Before I posted my first post, I randomly selected several distortions and must have picked a bunch that were low by chance, thinking it was more widespread. I'm surprised I didn't notice this as much before but my presets must have been a bit different, so I didn't notice as much. Now that I created the preset that I made pictures of, I'm getting one of the best fuzz setups that I've ever had on the helix. I've set the imp. to 10hz before in front of fuzzes before but I just happened to combine the Arb Fuzz, the Madarin 80, and the OH DVRB+VVRB (r)evolution IR. The fuzz distortion knob has to be turned down to near zero. I was going to post the file here but I can't get a stock cab to sound the same, so not sure it's worth posting. As a side note, those Ownhammer (r)evolution impulses are incredible. I just downloaded them the other day and it finally got rid of this artificial "buzzy" sound (always at a different frequency based on speaker) I always noticed with most cabs and free impulses I've tried.

I did find a solution to my problem even though maybe it's just a way around an actual issue. Using the impedance switching advice from Rd2rk, I then created a second input path that includes non-distortion pedals and the main input path that only has the fuzz (or low impedance effect) and the Mixer is controlled by the snapshot too, blending in only the path with the path that I want on. The Non-Fuzz snapshot has the input set to 1M input impedance. When I bypass the Dhyana drive, the path sounds exactly as if there's nothing in front of the amp, like a true bypass should with a 1M impedance. The fuzz path is just the opposite.

Thanks for your help and comparison with your own equipment. I'll do that.

Also, I updated to 2.92 right after I submitted my first post. Same thing happens.

No, I literaly mean comparing these two scenarios, the second having the fuzz deleted. Scenario 1) Guitar-->Cable-->1M input Imp -->bypassed fuzz or distortion -->Amp Scenario 2) Guitar-->Cable-->1M input Imp --------------------------->Amp Scenario 2 sounds bright and chimey. Scenario 1 sounds muffled even with 1M input impedance. Sorry to not have explained what I meant by deleted effect, but I literally meant deleting the effect for comparison's sake.

Thank you @rd2rk. This is very helpful. It dawned on me to search for input impedance and found all the information I could ever need on the topic. I see you've commented quite a bit on it. I understand that if I leave the input impedance to Auto it will match the first effect on input/path 1A, whether it's enabled or disabled. I get that and I've played with input impedance before and understood that certain pedals, especially fuzzes, had lower impedances. This is why I set the input impedance to 1M as I described, to compare disabled and deleted states. I would have expected that to sound the same with the effect disabled as well as deleted. But they are very different. Unless there's another explanation, I still think this may be a bug in 2.91/2.92. I am wired straight into the helix with a cable and guitar only, btw. Am I wrong assuming the 1M setting should make disabled-effect and deleted-effect sound the same?

Hi all, I tried searching for this but couldn't find anything, so was hoping for some help. I am running 2.91 and never noticed this before so think it might be a bug? There are several distortion pedals that if they are in the chain before an amp, they muffle the amp sound really bad when they are disabled. Deleting the distortion pedal brings the clear/chimey sound of an amp back. I also noticed if I changed the input impedance from auto to 1M, the effect was reduced a little but not enough. Is this an impedance issue? Or is it a bug? I've never noticed such a muffled sound from an amp before on Helix. I noticed it with quite a few pedals and quite a few amps. Has anyone else experienced this? Thanks

Another thing that might help improve the sound is doing a room eq on your speaker solution. I have a pair of EV-ZLX12P's that sit in stereo from where I play. Initially, they were way to bass heavy, very boomy. I downloaded the free Room Eq Wizard software and ordered myself a reference microphone with phantom power so I could run it into my helix easily. I then connected my helix to my laptop via USB. The room eq software then used the microphone input over USB via helix. The software will play some sine waves and then show you if you have a flat eq or not. Turns out I was WAY bass heavy. The nice thing about my speakers is they have presets with different eq's I can set, so I was able to flatten out the room/speaker response. I set up presets called Helix and Music, although when I play music through my helix, the helix preset still sounds good. Anyways, now it sounds absolutely amazing! Bradsuth - this might allow you to move back into the other room you were in but it sounds like you had the opposite problem as I did, small speakers in a large room. Cheers.

Hello everyone, I use snapshots quite a bit and am looking to improve them a little for some amp models that don't have enough volume to match the other snapshots when the gain is backed down. A good example is the Revv amp, when the gain is backed all the way down, it loses too much volume to balance to other high gain setting snapshots. Actually, I can get them to match decently, if I back off the master and channel volume on the higher gain snapshots BUT I get a loud popping sound through the speakers when I switch from the high gain snapshot to low gain snapshot. I have also tried a gain block to increase gain on the low gain settings but still get popping. Same thing if I use the IR block to adjust gain. If I don't go so extreme on cleaning up the Revv amp, then the popping doesn't happen. This is unfortunate because this amp model actually has a decent clean-ish sound with gain at zero, channel volume and master at 10 - at least with the IR's I'm using. Has anyone else experienced this? What solutions have you come up with? I appreciate your thoughts and advice.

I have the Helix Floor, Spider V30, and Spider V60. This is what I did to explore sounds and amp models on the V60. I created one preset from scratch that sounded good to my ears with basically just the amp, speaker, reverb and a little delay. Then I copied that preset 60 or so times, however many amp models there are. I then only changed the amp model and it's settings and saved each. Why? I'm an engineer and like to change one thing at a time sometimes. This allowed me to dial in every amp individually to the speaker model I chose. I then dialed in the amp settings individually to make each preset sound the best to my ears in my room. Now, I'm able to switch through all the presets (which only change the amp) and I'm able to see which amps I like best. I'm interested in doing this with the classic speaker mode now but haven't done that yet. Overall, I really like the sound of the V30 in my small office and the V60 in my big living room. Do they sound as good as my Helix with my two EV ZLX 12P's in stereo? No. But they aren't meant to. I'm pretty happy with the Spider V's.

I just updated my Spider V30 and V60 both to 2.0, firmware and remote. The firmware updated fine. The spider remote 2.0 launches and adjusts settings without problems. Wish I could help more!

I updated my Helix Floor to 2.8 using my Windows 7 desktop. No issues.

I also had the BSOD recently but it was related to a version difference between HX Edit and Helix. I had previously updated my helix to 2.7x but my HX Edit was something like 2.6x. If I started HX Edit with the Helix's USB cable connected to my computer, instant BSOD. Happened three times in a row. I then updated to HX Edit 2.7x and eliminated the BSOD, and then I was able to do the backups suggested for upgrading to 2.8. Just my recent experience.

I noticed the same thing with the Grammatico about the "sag and bloom." I've noticed the same thing on a couple other amp models but forget which ones. On the Grammatico, I found that if I back off the master volume, say to 5 or 6, it gets rid of most of that sag. It also helps to reduce the sag. Once I did that, it actually sounded pretty great, especially with a drive pedal in front of it with the pre gains cranked. Cheers