theElevators

You know what would be cool? If you could copy snapshots between presets. It wouldn't be too difficult to figure out what blocks need to be copied along with them. There also could be functionality to remove unused blocks. That way you can for example dial in your solo sound on one preset/snapshot, and then you can copy/paste that snapshot into another preset/snapshot. Not a show-stopper, but could be super convenient to build new presets in minutes, as opposed to recreating the whole thing from scratch or making a copy of the existing preset and making tweaks (which is what I do). There also seems to be an issue when you copy a block from an existing preset and paste it into a new one--the bypass and [parameters] don't work as expected. I typically have to re-add the block manually in these situations. https://line6.ideascale.com/c/idea/1044711

Hmm, maybe it's the guitar? What is your entire signal chain and absolutely everything you use, e.g. FRFR? Is there a wireless system? What about the power? All of those can theoretically glitch out.

Helix LT pedal was killing me with the squeaking, I used this product on it, just a few sprays and it hasn't squeaked in a year and a half: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007I9XUD0 dry graphite spray. It's very good, but can be messy if you spray all over the place. A friend of mine just got the Helix LT and it was squeaking exactly like mine out of the box. Yeah, I don't know about the expression pedal... I have a plastic expression pedal that came with my Nord Electro and I used it for a decade and it never failed me. Same with a Bad Horsie wah -- 14 years and zero issues, no squeaking, no alignment problems.

So I took apart the thing and came to a conclusion that there's not enough lubrication. What was happening is that the screw.... was loose and there was too much friction because there was not enough grease, so that made it appear like the screw was tight because the pedal was hard to move, while since the screw was loose the alignment was off..... lol there. I put some lithium grease and reassembled the whole thing and now everything aligns well and the action is smooth. The whole damn thing is only 2 years old with minimal use.

No, that's not how it works.... you can still click into EXP1... and then you're stuck in the EXP1 pedal mode that does nothing, while your Wah is at 100%... I wish the switching between EXP 1 / 2 could be disabled... as in the switch does nothing... and you are always in EXP 2.

But you can use the Command Center, where you can customize your buttons... So rather than having presets on the bottom you can go into your stomp mode. In Command Center you can customize the 5 lower buttons to correspond to the presets... complete with the desirable ring colors. This is an excellent video. Whenever I forget how to do stuff on the Helix, I re-watch his videos:

Bummer, yeah it's a hardware issue, but at the same time... I envy you.... I wish my switch would not work. I never ever click the expression pedal in. I only run my expression pedal in "EXP 2", and auto-engage the wah when needed, or enable it in the snapshot.... I wish there was a way to disable the button for my needs. I'm being completely serious....

If you purchase a bunch of presets, they will all behave differently and have different perceived loudness. The best you can do is to simply use your ears in a band context. However... My advice is to not to have radically different presets in your set. Even when you level them in terms of volume at home or even in the rehearsal, when you play live, they may be more bassy or trebly when running through the big PA and there will be volume discrepancies--it's unavoidable. Some PAs color your sounds in weird unexpected ways. Some PAs have more pronounced mids, some swallow up your reverbs and delay.... So chances are there will always be volume jumps if you switch between a Fender Deluxe to a Marshall between your presets. My advice is to come up with your basic sound, e.g. Classic Distortion, Marshall amp. In each preset, use that as the basis of your sound, and make adjustments/additions as needed. Just like you would play your traditional analog gear, use only one amp. I know the Edge has like 5 different amps, but he's the Edge and he has a dedicated sound guy to make sure his sound mix is consistent. For us bar band musicians, the easier it is, the better. My 2nd advice is to build your own presets. You can simply borrow some cool tricks that somebody else did, and incorporate those tricks, e.g. vibrato/reverb settings into your familiar tried and true consistent setup. As for the buzz -- you can always add a noise gate in the beginning of your chain--this can help with 60cycle hum when not playing. I have seen some blocks introduce almost unbearable whine/hiss, e.g. acoustic simulator. What's worse is that this noise becomes more prominent on certain guitars and is absent on the others. In those situations, I recommend taking a 10-band EQ, placing it after the noisy block and try to notch out that bad frequency. When I have to use acoustic simulator, I have to notch out different frequencies depending on if I'm on the neck or the bridge pickup--it's very very sensitive to the signal that is coming into the Helix.

Hi gang. Is there a website where I could order parts, in my case I need washers for the EXP pedal. This URL has the stuff I need, but it's currently out of stock. Is there anything else like that? https://www.fullcompass.com/prod/607336-line-6-97-001-0016-washer-kit-for-helix thanks in advance, d.

and now it's back to grinding against the left side. I took off the back cover and the design is so simple--just a simple big bolt and a nut. Anybody have the same issue where it gets out of alignment? This was also brought up a while ago here: Maybe the solution is to add a thin washer to re-align the pedal?

Hi peeps! Today I notice that the expression pedal was not aligned properly, and was actually scraping the left side of the gap in the metal. The whole pedal was slightly off kilter off center. I took the included hex key and loosened the bolt a little. Then I moved the pedal with my foot. Nothing helped. Until I pressed the pedal in (as in to switch between Exp 1 and Exp 2) and it re-aligned itself. I then tightened the bolt and it seems to be back to normal. So did I break it or is this normal? I barely use this particular Helix, only when I play gigs. thanks!

Yes, I filed a bug with support. Also, making changes to "behavior" on one preset affects other presets. I immediately downgraded to 3.11 as I need my Helix to be reliable and not get stuck with the wah on when I don't need it.

I guess one way to find out! If things appear out of nowhere right after upgrading, then it's 99.9% likely it's a software bug.

What I still don't understand to this day is: how come in the 21st century nobody figured out how to do sound switching without an audible gap prior to Kemper (I believe). What's funny is that old Digitech rack units had spillover delay way back in the early 90's and there were no audible gaps when you switched sounds. I think the driving factor for innovation was always portability. A grand piano or a Hammond B3 are huge and require several people to move, so there was a demand for making it more portable. Analog guitar rigs for your typical bar band musicians have always been and still are more manageable: guitar, a combo amp and a couple pedals is all you really need to play a gig... Keyboard manufacturers were always trying to make things more compact, if you think about it: Church organ -> Hammond B3 -> transistor organ -> small clonewheel organ that weighs 15 lbs -> computer plugins. Plus as a keyboard player you were expected to play a variety of keyboard instruments (piano, organ, synth, mellotron, etc) instruments that have keyboard, while the guitarist only plays... guitars. So that drove innovation: how can you consolidate a truckload of keyboard instruments into a small board. In terms of portability for me, Helix actually takes up more space than my old compact travel rig. Helix also weighs more. I used to fly in with 3 things: DS-1, Boss MS-3 (small digital processor for modulation/delay/eq, etc), Morley wah: all of them fit into my small backpack. At the venue, there'd be a rented amp waiting for me. Now with the Helix, I still play through a physical rented amp (well, through speaker of the amp rather). I bring my Helix and my compact power amp for stage volume because I want consistency. What's improved is the ridiculous amount of bells and whistles that I'm able to have: my sounds are all tailored to each song. I have CD-quality sounds with spillover delay, other fun gimmicks. I also go in stereo. The setup and sound check are a lot faster now than before. Before, I had to spend a long time fishing for the sweet spot on the amp so that it's not too boomy, not too trebly and not too distorted. Now all my sounds on stage just work out of the box, and the sound guy knows that he'll get the same familiar signal going to FOH.

It's all software, with bugs. IMO 3.15 has too many issues for the amount of new features that are introduced (new amp and the legacy synth sounds). When I saw the Helix misbehaving with the new "behavior" parameter for bypass, I immediately downgraded to 3.11. So, I would simply downgrade and keep making music.

Easiest to do it in hx edit. Go to control bypass. Delete everything for the wah left over for exp 1. Back to the block view. Then right click on wah percentage, right click on it and assign to exp 2. Same for bypass. You have all the parameters that can be controlled by whatever you want, in our case exp 2. Lots of videos how to do that. I’m not home now, so these are the general instructions. I like the wah to turn off when it’s less than 5 percent — the default setting you get when you assign the bypass function to the exp 2. Same for the time—I think it’s 300ms. One thing to note—there is a bug. Do not change anything I described above with the external pedal plugged in. Unplug it while you do this. Otherwise your internal pedal can get “stuck” in exp 1 or exp 2 mode between snapshots if you press the toe switch accidentally. You will get into exp 1 and your wah won’t work.

I would downgrade to 3.11 and wait for it to be fixed by Line 6.

Downgrade to 3.11. All these bugs are not worth having a new amp and synth sounds IMO. Unless those new features are crucial to you.

Because the expression pedal is so flimsy on the LT, I decided to set up all my presets to only use exp 2… so they could work with an external pedal as needed. Plus I always found switching the pedal too difficult. And I’ve always used an automatic wah like Bad Horsie in the past. If anything should happen to the pedal, I can simply plug in the 20-dollar external pedal, and everything will work the same way. External pedal always becomes exp 2 on the Helix LT/Floor. I basically don’t ever use the switch. I’m always on expression pedal 2. I have my wah engaged based on percentage of the pedal’s position. I also have the wah on/off in specific snapshots. If the wah is frequently turned on/off, I have it auto-engage in the entire preset. If it’s only needed in the solo, then I have it in one snapshot only. I also have a stereo wah (panning left/right) effect in some presets, that I turn on only in specific snapshots. If for example I want to have both wah and freeze in the same preset controlled by the expression pedal, I simply “dial out” the effect in respective snapshots. In other words I set the “mix” parameter at 0%—this means the effect cannot me heard. I have a big preset where I control 5 things by the same expression pedal 2: wah, delay, freeze, synth filter, vibrato. So it is possible to work out a way to not use the toe switch and get all those sounds.

Well, I would personally rather see more different/new effect types, useful functionality than more and more amps and more flavors of gain/delay/tremolo. So if they come up with a rare 1985 boss delay recreation, I will not bother checking it out — I have found all my sounds a long time ago. And with the acoustic sim in 3.0 I’m completely happy. However, I could see the use for the following: smart harmonizer where you can program the harmony notes, global input pad, portamento, synth sounds that I could use live. And my argument is that I can dial in my sound reasonably well with any gear. I’m sure that others can as well. Plus I find that the virtual representation often does not work like the real thing at all. For example, to me the Fender Twin amp did not behave the way I was used to, whereas it is normally my go-to amp. Or deez-1 did not work like DS-1 at all—it had a weird sag effect. So I tried another block and made it work. There are a ton of bugs as well. How about going through the backlog of these? To me 3.11 works great for what I do. I downgraded from 3.15 because it made it potentially unusable with the new bypass behavior weirdness that line 6 refused to even acknowledge at first.

Oh! hey butthead! You're back! yayyyyy!

I bought myself Pod Go as a backup for the Helix. The drawbacks about Pod Go is that you are stuck with a predetermined number of blocks and always have to have an amp/speaker block even if you don't plan on using it... The plus is that you have an entire rig-in-a-box setup to play any song you want. You have snapshots, you have a pretty big display where you can see what is engaged, etc. HX Effects is just effects, so it's not a complete package. If you use multiple presets, you should be fine in terms of being able to use many different effects on the Pod Go... for a wedding band type of a set--for sure. I am a Helix user, but if if Pod Go were available when I was shopping for a processor today, I'd just get the Pod Go. But with the Helix, I'm spoiled and I sometimes use every single snapshot in a preset, just because I can with various variations. So.... why not get a Helix instead? They are so inexpensive now. I bought my Helix LT for 750 USD lightly used.

I have 2 copies of all my presets in 2 folders, just in case I manage to screw something up accidentally I have a copy of everything.... Before the the show I rearrange all my presets in a desired order. In global settings I have my presets show up as numbers as opposed to 1A 1B 1C, etc... So if you know the order of the set, then you can simply rearrange all your presets in HX Edit. I use the "0" preset as my sound check preset where I test out various potentially problematic sounds like stereo delay etc, and off I go. It's also very easy to rearrange the presets on the Helix itself--you just go to a specific preset and using a knob move it up/down in the list.

Oh Jesus. How many amps do we need? Between preamps, amps, gain blocks, speaker cabs with adjustable microphones, IRs... Honestly there are way too many options already. I actually hate when there are so many options because you spend all your time A/B'ing things rather than playing. I was always a Fender amp guy, and went on the Helix with something that I assumed was an emulation of the Fender Twin Reverb -- Mail Order Twin. I started using it and 2 years later am still using it for every single electric guitar preset. Always liked how clean it sounded and that certain special twang it had. About a year ago I found out it's actually a recreation of Silvertone® 1484 amp. The amp that is famously NOT clean and certain garage-bands use for that crappy buzzy noisy sound. well oops... Back in the day, on early modellers you had 2-3 amp models and that's it. When I do play through physical amps, I can always find my signature sound with anything that does not have too many knobs and can be cleaned up enough.

Makes what unusable? When not using the Helix the USB cable left in your computer makes too much noise? -- I have that! If I have sound coming out of the headphone jack of my laptop, I have to un-plug the USB cable. Otherwise it starts introducing noise... But not right away after about 5--10 minutes.