theElevators

UPDATE: as I secretly suspected, the LED is now working fine -- it was indeed over-soaked with deOxIT or some other contact cleaner... took about 7 hours. I will wait for a few more days to report back, whether the problematic LED is 100% back to normal. However, it seems like whatever "stuff" was there is drying out and the LED has been gradually working better and better. Initially, the whole side was not working, then blue/green started working. Then finally red. Now it's back to its former red glow.

Hi gang.... yet again lol! So I took my Helix to be repaired (for the glitchy switches that don't always engage). Well, the switches now engage just fine, but one of the FS now is glitching with the LED color ring. It's great, isn't it? Fix one thing, break another? It seems like the right side of the ring doesn't work with red colors. Blue colors are fine. For white, I have the right side as blue, while the left side is white. And the default red just looks dim on one side. I'm pretty sure the person used too much contact cleaner... the LED is not completely dead. So my question is: could somebody point me to the part on fullcompass, so I could order it? Much appreciated. thanks! d

So, I played a gig overseas in Israel, and it went pretty good, except exactly 2 times when my snapshot #4 button did not work... only one song... I doubt anybody noticed... Weirdly, it worked without a hitch for the remainder of the show. It's my "lead" snapshot button, as it is for most people I suspect as well. Anyway, dropped it off at a repair shop the day after I returned home. Let's see if they fix it. Good thing I have a backup Helix. And again, unacceptable to have a Helix that I deliberately bought to only use for gigs, and not subject to home rehearsing... the Helix that stays in its case most of the time to have this happen to.

Once you move the wah back and forth, does the percentage work as expected? Just want to make sure you are not describing how your wah position was saved on a specific preset. If you enter that preset, even regardless of where your expression pedal is right now, it will show "25%" because that's how you saved your preset? If it's that, then there are different ways for your expression 1/2 to behave -- have it be per snapshot, preset or global, meaning that as you change your preset, the wah stays the same as where you physical pedal is now.

Expression pedal can control the parameter(s) of your choice. In your case you can set how loud the reverb is: toe is loud reverb, heel is no reverb. However you cannot change the "maximum" value of the mix parameter between snapshots. That maximum value is specified when you add the block and cannot be changed depending on snapshots. So if you expect to have "toe down" to be 9.6, 5.3, 2.4 in each of the 3 snapshots respectively, that won't work. If you want to have that behavior, then you'd need to add additional reverb blocks, and bypass unneeded reverbs. But if that is not an issue, and you simply want the reverb to be adjustable as you please, but be defaulted to specific settings, then rd2rk explains how to set this up. I personally have my expression pedal position persist between snapshots, because that's what fits my workflow. I want the wah to be where I leave it, while I add delay/reverb when I select different snapshots....

Well, I can say that my "like new" Helix LT cost me 750 dollars in December of 2019. So roughly twice the price. However, yeah it costs about the same as the Helix floor, plus you need to get a gig bag and Expression pedal for it....

Turn on the Helix, do this momentary plugging of something into the right side. It will be fine while the Helix is on. Meaning if you re-boot your Helix, you will need to do it again.

Well, if you plug in a dummy cable to the right, you'll be getting only the left side out. If that's what you want, then sure. But I think the quote you provided means that the summation of left+right into left does not work a 100% and has weird artifacts. The author recommends connecting both left and right to your amp.... meaning you should use a splitter cable to combine two signals: PS: there is a bug where left/mono always sends the left side only, until you temporarily plug something into the right side. I bet you the person whose quote this is is suffering from it without knowing it. https://line6.com/support/topic/64139-why-is-lmono-outputting-left-not-mono/

I think the Helix sounds just as great as FM9, or Kemper. The reason people still have doubts is IMHO: 1. Past reputation of Line 6, the various Spider models, the people who tended to use those amps and the type of crappy music those people used to make with those amps. It's like Subaru Imprezza -- it's a great reliable car and actually pretty safe, however it's driven by people who are predominantly d-bags, so it gets that reputation of a d-bag car. (it also gets crashed a lot more than other cars because of the street racing, inspired by Fast and the Furious). 2. Great difficulty to get your familiar tone and feel out of the box. My setup was basically a DS-1 and a Fender amp in the analog world. I could not find a decent distortion block that would interact with my volume knob the same way as the real thing for about a week. Once I dialed in my basic sound, the rest was very easy. I now have 60 presets that I have dialed in. In reality Line 6 gear has been used on countless recording sessions and live performances. Even going back to Pod HD-500 being used by Steve Howe as far back as 2013. Good enough for him, good enough for me. From several review videos, it is evident that FM9's stuff sounds great out of the box, compared to the Helix. Their blocks just work right away the way they should. I bet you if I take a DS-1 emulation and drag it into my chain on FM9, it'll sound exactly like the real thing. On the Helix, the "Deez-1" sounded and felt absolutely nothing like the real thing: it had weird sag, it did not clean up with the volume knob, it had hiss. I've watched Steve Sterlacci's videos about Fractal vs. Helix, and Fractal's "scenes" are way more complicated to set up than what the Helix offers with snapshots, for example. But in terms of tone, multiple people said that everything just works, factory presets are great and all that. I think Line 6 can learn a thing or two from them. I love the sound options of the Helix, what worries me a little is the build quality as I've had an issue with the volume pedal, etc. But then again, I've seen people complained about the USB jack dying on their FM9. Everything is cheap Chinese printed circuit board stuff nowadays. I have my Nord Electro 2 from 2006 for example -- still works absolutely great, nothing is misfiring, all switches work just fine.

I'm curious, what exactly you are missing in the firmware? At this point, except very few esoteric specific delays, amps, the Helix has everything. I would rather they spend time fixing bugs, and audio glitches, like the popping noises when you switch your amp on/off for example.

I opened a ticket for this, as I need to have two sounds, 2 snapshots: 1. -> distortion -> amp -> delay 2. -> volume boost (gain block) + 8 db -> reverb -> amp So I alternate between having a distortion on, gain block off to... distortion off, gain block on. + some reverb/delay. The 2nd sound needs to be a lot louder than 1, hence the need for the gain block. If I bypass my distortion pedal, the way I have my signal chain, the sound level gets cut in half, so I need to boost the signal back up. The awful popping noise happens when I switch between "2" and "1". Also curiously the trails of the reverb are not heard when I switch between 2 and 1, despite them being "on". I've isolated this issue down to the gain block. With the block in the chain, the popping is extremely loud, but ONLY if I play something on the guitar in the middle of switching.

This transmitter/receiver has 0 latency. You can connect it to the outdoor speaker if you want. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B097PCY5X4/

thanks! Yeah, I've seen this video. Just want to understand if the switches tend to all slowly fail one-by-one, or if they can somehow "break in" and become more dependable? My older LT (that I bought used) has all the buttons working just fine. I use it a lot more than the Floor, which I got specifically for the gigs, in order to not have it abused unnecessarily. Other than the cracked plastic ring that I glued, absolutely no issues with the LT. It also feels more smooth when I press the buttons, whereas on the Floor there's more scratchy/squeaky sounds when you press the buttons. As of right now, If I wear my Vans sneakers, and press buttons normally, everything is fine on the Floor. If I wear flip-flops that I wear at home, sometimes the switch does not occur. Like it clicks, but the engagement does not happen. I'm aware that the clicking does not mean the actuator was actually triggered. So, now what?... I can't send it to Line 6, because it all works 99% of the time NOW... Unless I use my hand and slowly press it, then there are times when the button fails to engage completely. They will look at it and say there is no issue, or better yet say they fixed it without doing anything to it. This is such a weird thing, as I spent a significant sum of money on 2 Helixes, hoping to have them be.. dependable, and not have a fear of equipment failure in the middle of the show. Why can't we have things just work for god's sake.... arrrrr

Just a word of caution: do not loosen it all the way, you may need to take the back plate off to fix the bolt if you do. Just loosen it by a hair.

Phew! Hey gang: So I started noticing the dreaded FS flakiness on my Helix. I don't know if this is considered "normal", but if I press a foot switch very SLOWLY, the switch does not occur. This is happening on the Helix Floor. I think I seem to remember that on my Helix LT, there were some times where the switch did not occur right away, but that problem seemingly went away. I took liquid DeoxIT and applied it to all the foot switches, and rotated the buttons as if to clean the contacts. I don't think it helped the problem. So any suggestions, besides opening a ticket with Line 6, etc? PS: and of course as with all these problems, now all my foot switches are again working fine. Maybe DeoxIT helped after pressing them multiple times... FML thanks, d.

Well, you will see brackets around all your parameters that can change in snapshots. Also you will see a list of things that can be changed in snapshots by going to "Bypass/control assign" section of your HX Edit. There you will se a list of all the parameters that are controlled by snapshots. So if a block has a parameter in that list, then that block is what you are looking for.

In my case, my Helix is connected to the monitors via 1/4" outs. The USB cable is connected to the laptop. Music can be played on the computer, and you will hear it through the Helix, coming out of the monitors. On your Mac, once you connect the Helix with the USB, you can select audio input/output and Helix will be available. So basically Helix becomes an external sound card for the Mac. I also have my monitors connected to the computer. Then I have a switch where I can select the input source for the monitors. I have a very simple a/b box with variable volume control for that. Basically I can combine the Helix sound with what's coming out of the commuter with this little a/b box/mixer. But this way, I don't even need to bother with the USB cable, and can mix the 2 signals however I want.

Instead, try this legacy effect. I place it after the amp/cab. The best thing about this block is that it doesn't need to be "reset" between notes. This setting works for me for distorted sound, for long-ish notes.

I added it as the 2nd last thing in the chain. The last block is a delay. But again, please check how it sounds in mono for you -- meaning you have a stereo preset where you add this effect to, but check how your entire rig sounds in mono. I always check all my presets in mono and instereo, to make sure, that should I ever need to play a gig where there is no option for stereo, the balance would not be screwed up. I ran the stereo block with default settings, except I turned down the "SLOP' to 0 or 1. I did an A/B test: added the stereo block, and enabled/disabled it, when I had: a) 2 monitors connected to the Helix, enabling/disabling the block had no noticeable volume jumps. Pretty much just made the sound "wider" and in stereo. b) Left only the left/mono monitor connected. When the same stereo block was engaged, the perceived volume dropped by around 5 db. So somehow this block is behaving differently when the rig is in mono vs. stereo. I suspect that the 2 stereo channels when mixed down cancel each other out in mono, due to phasing.

If you have 1/2 the power of a Helix, you will need to learn to make certain compromises. You can consolidate things, and get rid of blocks you can replace with something else. Rather than using a distortion pedal, and an EQ pedal, you can change the settings on the amplifier block--that way you just saved some DSP. Every parameter of a block is assignable to snapshots. That means that when you change your snapshot, you can conjure different sounds out of the same amp block. The best thing is that one amp block can produce many different sounds, e.g. clean, clean lead, dirty, dirty lead. You can change the parameters of any bock in the snapshots, in our example, you can change the gain, volume, and lows/mids/highs of the amp within the same preset, for different snapshots.

Modulation / Double Take. This is supposed to sound like 2 guitar tracks for the same track, or 3 or 4, etc. I like the way it sounds, but there's a caveat: with stereo doubler, when you mix down to mono, there are phasing issues! To the point of the sound losing decibels.

I just added "double take" in stereo to my chain, and that made the acoustic sound more 3d and sustain-y. I think I'm happy now.

Unrelated to your question, but I struggled with the auto-swell block. It's quite awful in my experience. I needed to have loud volume swells on long notes without using a volume pedal, or volume knob. Auto-swell just was too finicky and unreliable. The main issue is that no matter what I did it just would not release the note properly, and it would get sort-of stuck, unless I made sure to really mute the first note with my hand before playing the second one. I tried every single combination of the settings, and nothing worked as I needed it to. What I found works extremely well instead is delay/Legacy/Auto-volume Echo. Somebody from this forum suggested that actually. Here are the settings that I use. I place this block after the the amp/cab.

I never use noise gate... but the one that is "built in" into the input block with default settings works flawlessly. Give it a try. I use single coils, but never ever had a reason to use the noise gate to date.... I use Burns TriSonic, maybe they are not as noisy as what you have.

I practice at home and at home I have 2 studio monitors plugged into left and right. Every once in a while I check whether the bug comes back by leaving only left/mono plugged in and rebooting my Helix. After a few days/weeks the issue resurfaces. If I do a system restore, it goes away. The problem is clearly with my Global Settings that I have, and those are pretty standard and nothing out of the ordinary. If this were a hardware problem, then this problem would always be there. However, the problem only comes back after a week when I recreate my specific Global Settings and simply use my Helix like people normally do. So let's please stop referring to it as a mechanical problem -- it clearly is not. Unless well.... a mechanical problem somehow corrupts my Global Settings ... it still would be a software bug. 2 Helixes I own, one was brand-new, Line 6 support recreated it a few years back. So bug bug bug. I bet you a lot of people have the same exact issue, they just don't know they have it. Heck, I only realized it 17!! songs into my set that I was only hearing my left side on stage at a gig. And only because of the prominent ping-pong delay that was simply not there.