robfawcett

An overpowered amp can be less of a risk to speakers than an underpowered amp, if you run your proposed rig sensibly you will be fine, but that Seymour Duncan amp clearly has the spec to be able to kill your speaker driver so there is 'a risk'. Frankly I think you'd be at little risk of blowing the speaker unless you act lunatic enough to deserve it: 60W RMS of guitar 1x12 is a lot of loud. Note that the impedance of your chosen cab will directly affect the power a given solid-state amp can deliver to it, and the efficiency of a given speaker driver has a significant effect on output volume. FWIW I'm currently getting on fine with a Harley Benton GPA-100, they are properly grounded, low noise and have a perfectly good 3-band EQ. Class D poweramps are simple circuits to deploy and needn’t be very expensive: the only significant variable is the quality of the power supply.

Can you not use the footswitch as LPF ON/OFF but in this case leave it on and use MIDI to set the parameter to specific values for individual patches? I don’t recall the parameter limits of the LPF, but presume that if you set it to the very highest frequency it will effectively be OFF even though active, then when you want it ON use MIDI to adjust the LPF frequency to give the effect you need.

IMO playing the Helix through a good *full range* powered speaker sounds pretty darn real, once you’ve tamed the high frequencies. I have an excellent tube amp, a couple of adequate tube amps, and have owned many more excellent tube amps in the past, but am very happy to gig the Helix when I want or need to travel light. To get over option paralysis, just choose a single Helix amp you kinda like and stick with dialling that in (just pretend it is 'your amp' rather than one among many): taking top end off cabs/IRs is my usual first step, then tweaking master, sag & bias settings to dial in whatever 'tube' feel I'm looking for. If you want to use your 1x12, get a cheap class D amplifier and turn off your Helix speaker IR/cab sim. The Harley Benton GPA-100 recommended above is absolutely fine. Even a cheap Chinese amp board in a spare box paired with a old laptop power supply would be enough to test the idea out, though you'd probably need to ground it to prevent hums and buzzes.

Thank you. I'm still not yet completely clear in my understanding, but I'm very new to this unit. For now I have put plastic 'switch topper' caps on the foot switches!

The options under firmware 3.50 are OFF, TOUCH, PRESS, BOTH. PRESS does not disable TOUCH, nor does OFF & that’s my problem!

I updated firmware to 3.50 using the latest Helix Edit & did factory reset before doing anything else!

New user (today!) - Helix Stomp. I would expect from the manual that to disable triggering anything when I simply touch a footswitch (e.g. without pressing it) I should configure: Global Settings ⇨ Footswitches ⇨ Stomp Select set to OFF or PRESS ONLY but in every/any setting of that parameter I'm still getting the 'Assign Block to FS' popup on the unit screen. I keep triggering it by accident when operating the unit and it’s frustrating. Have I misunderstood? Known issue? I'd be very grateful for help…