theElevators

I found this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B097PCY5X4 . Pretty good reviews. I just ordered it. The thing I like about this system is that it's in stereo. I will update if I have any issues.

The main thing about "not cutting it" is the feel on stage. When your sound is coming out of a hefty guitar speaker, it sounds nice and powerful and familiar. The same cannot be said about having your sound coming out of an FRFR, or a wedge monitor. To me those sound like your sound is coming from far away, like it's played on the stereo. If you don't feel like you have enough b*lls on stage, you start picking harder, and not having a good time. My solution to your problems is to use an actual guitar speaker. My highly recommended approach is to take your sound out of your Helix exactly as is, run it through a power amp and into a 1x12 speaker. To me it's the perfect amount of oomf, and clarity. I don't bother with having any IRs, disabling/enabling them for FOH or personal mix... it all sounds passable... The simpler, the better. My power amp of choice is Mooer Baby Bomb. I bought it on a whim and cannot be happier. Here's an example of what my cover band sounds like. In this recording it's just my guitar -> Helix -> Mooer Baby Bomb -> Orange 112 cab. This is a small bar gig. Normally, my sound goes to the FOH in stereo, as I explained. There was no need here, because it's a tiny space. cheers.

I think you should be fine with just running Left/Mono to your monitor. I don't envision any issues. As for how you pan your mix, best thing you can do is simply check the left channel and the right channel in isolation at home. Plug in the 1/4 into the left and the right, but only connect one at a time to your monitor/amp, etc. If they both sound fine by themselves, e.g. you don't have the main signal on the left, and silence on the right, then you're good to go. With the 50% L/R, you still risk not having the main unaltered signal not come through the center. So just check it at home, and rock on.

Here's how our sound guy does the panning: basically everything is in the center in terms of the stereo picture. Different voices are slightly panned left/right to have them better separate themselves, nothing hard-panned. We have a trombone and a trumpet player, they are very very slightly panned left/right. The stereo sound for guitar is more of a special effect, and should be used sparingly to avoid favoring one side of the auditorium. In terms of what I run in stereo on the Helix... some of the songs have subtle ping-pong delay. The main signal goes in the center, and then is dressed up with subtle left/right bouncing. So if somebody is on the right side, they still have an adequate sound. I achieve that by adding my delay in parallel: the middle always comes through on both channels equally. When I stop playing, you hear left/right echos. I have a few song sections where I have exaggerated delay, but still run the delay in parallel. One song has the chorus where I play a chord, it comes across in the center, then repeats on the left, then on the right. So again, nobody in the audience is deprived of the notes I'm playing. I also have one freakout ending of a song, where I use a chopper effect with a panner: but it's for special effects. In terms of the personal monitor mix, I use the 1/4" out to my power amp + speaker. But there's a pesky bug that Line 6 refuses to acknowlege. 2 of my Helixes develop it after doing back up / restore: the Left/Mono does not sum both sides, it's only the left side. Workaround: plug in the 1/4" into the Right side, then the Left / Mono side and it works correctly. I need to do this after I power on the Helix EVERY time.

Yeah, most likely the 1/4" jack broke. But if anything, you have so many other alternatives to use as guitar input: Return 1, 2... etc.

What some pro guitarists do is they have separate outputs of their "wet" and "dry" mixes. If you have a sound guy who regularly works with you, they can add more "dry" sound to your mix, if it's too washy... I think it was Bon Jovi's guitarists who did that, based on the Rig Rundown.

I play violin. Don't know about your electric violin, but for my Fishman pickup on an acoustic, my tricks are: 1. EQ to take off all the highs 2. wah 3. compressor 4. Octave down/harmonizer 5. Fender-type amp 6. Delay The main thing for me has always been the shrillness of sound. Once I tamed it with the EQ, it works like a guitar, same effects work for it... Distortion made my acoustic violin squeal though, so I used it sparingly.

I got a lot of flack for this several months ago, but my approach that works for me is to have an additional distortion block in my chain, and engage it in a snapshot. When there is a lot of distortion, you get feedback at low volumes. I use that trick at home, during a rehearsal, or on stage and it always works and sounds consistent. You would think that on stage with that much distortion it would sound like garbage, but actually it works out great. For your Hendrix freakout moments, or at the end of a solo, etc. The trick is to match the snapshot with extra distortion to your regular sound, so that it has the same tonal qualities. The audience should not hear any difference, or be able to tell that you switch to your special "feedback" snapshot. Here's a little video, if you want to see. Cheers.

I have never had any issue with tap tempo on the Helix. Maybe you are tapping in whole notes rather than quarter notes? What exactly seems to be the issue? But yeah, I have several songs where I tapped in the tempo by ear and then realized later I was almost spot-on to the actual metronome tempo of the track, within 1--2 BPMs.

On the Helix we have presets, snapshot mode, and stomp mode. Presets can have multiple snapshots inside them (they are like presets within presets). Stomp mode allows you to turn on or off one or more blocks within your preset in momentary or latching mode. Normal usage of the Helix is that you have multiple presets. It's pretty smart to have each song have its own dedicated preset, that way you can scroll through your presets, like your set list. No more of those unsightly paper set lists -- you simply scroll through your presets that are organized in a specific order prior to the gig. I have one musical project where I created one "kitchen sink" preset that has every single sound I'd ever need to play those 20 songs. We often swap songs in and out, so to me that was an easier approach. Anyway.... With the advent of snapshots, typically people set up their Helix so that the Helix displays 8 snapshots when you select the preset. Other possibilities are 4 snapshots on the bottom and 4 stomps on the top. Or 4 snapshots on the top and 4 stomps on the bottom. Some people still go old-school and don't use any snapshots and simply use your Helix in stomp mode and turn on individual effects, or have one bottom that turns on/off their "lead" sound (delay, eq, etc). In stomp mode, you have an ability to create wormholes and place anything you want on your pedal board: snapshots, stomps, even other presets. This is accomplished with the Command Center. If you must use presets to switch between different sounds (ummm, why....?), e.g. solo/rhythm, there will always be an audible silent gap with no sound when you switch between your presets. This is absolutely not an issue if you use snapshots, no silence there -- so just use that approach. Helix allows you to have gap-less preset switching if you enable that in global settings, but you will reduce your signal path so it becomes half of what you currently have. The reason is that Helix has 2 DSP chips, and in this arrangement the 2nd DSP chip will load the new preset, so you don't experience any audio dropouts. So.... A lot of info out there, manuals and videos. But if you ask me about my preferred professional approach, it's like this: I have 60 presets, one for each song I know how to play. If the song has one sound throughout, even if it sounds exactly like the previous song, I still have a "redundant" preset for it. Inside each preset I have 8 snapshots. If there are no sound switches in my song, I have 8 identical snapshots. All my snapshots are organized similarly: e.g. lead is on the bottom right, etc. cheers!

Mooer baby bomb

Yes that’s a cool idea. You can add a block and in HX Edit: right click on any parameter and assign it to an expression pedal. So you can add a parametric EQ and set various things to increase and decrease as you move the expression pedal. So you have your own customized EQ that is adjustable.

One time I thought my Shure transmitter got broken because it wouldn’t charge. Just red blinking light. Long story short: the charger cable was bad!! So if it applies to you, try a different cable itself. Weirdly, the same bad cable charged other appliances with no issue.

This quality control.... I remember when I was getting my rear-view camera installed on my car, they put my license plate upside-down.... Somebody must have been drunk.

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!