theElevators

There have been several threads about this. The answer is that your studio monitors are great to dial in your sound at home. Yes, dual amp setup certainly makes things worse. Each amp has its own frequencies that can become exaggerated when you least expect it. If you're not careful you can have really significant volume/tone discrepancies. Guitar is such an interactive instrument! You as a musician must have your setup so that the feel / sound is consistent and the same. Any sort of a speaker colors/distorts your sound in some way -- even FRFR or mixing monitors. Some physical speaker cabs will completely swallow up your delay tone, some will make it more pronounced. If you don't hear your familiar delay sound for example, you can start to panic and start picking lighter/heavier. Not good! To have consistent feel, I recommend picking a piece of stage amplification and sticking with it every time. I have Mooer Baby Bomb amp that I connect to a speaker of a Fender-type amp -- and it always feels and sounds the same. Same feel and sound on stage -- same playing. A lot of times guitarists try to adjust/compensate for what they hear on stage as opposed to what comes through the PA. So if you are in your happy isolated world on stage, you have one less thing to worry about. Live there are always additional factors such as: 1. amount of input gain that flattens your sound in terms of volume variation. 2. you can start hearing sub-harmonic frequencies that you never experienced at home or headphones. 3. certain amount of "gating". 4. other things running through the PA that can distort your sound. 5. PA can have a certain frequency response due to blown speakers, worn-in speakers, positioning of the speakers, room resonance. Your sound will always be different at home vs. a big PA -- there is no way to have your sound be identical. All you can do is to avoid some pitfalls that are well-known: 1. don't have your sound too washy with too much reverb/delay. When a room has natural ambience, delay can make your sound become just noise. 2. don't have too much gain. at high volumes, your guitar can start squealing and having uncontrollable feedback inherent to big sound systems. 3. Dial in your basic tone and use variations of that basic tone for everything. Don't use multiple amps, or different amps for different songs. This only works for bands with million dollar budgets. So in summary: try to have consistency with your gear. Practice on a loud system to work out all the kinks -- they are always inevitable. All pro bands rent out a theater and rehearse until they fix everything. Trial and error is pretty much the only way of doing this.... And if you have a sound guy friend they can also help you with a sound spectrum analyzer.

There are a myriad of settings you can accidentally override/change. So -- before you start messing with anything: BACK UP YOUR HX device.

External pedals for Helix Floor or LT / HX stomp /HX stomp xl do not have switching capabilities. External pedal always becomes EXP 2 on the Helix, for example. You can use presets/snapshots/stomps to turn off/turn off blocks. Snap 1 has volume pedal on and wah off. Snap 2 has the opposite. I have some presets where I actually use both: wah and volume. There are some presets where I set the volume pedal to a fixed position to use in specific snapshots and I remove an ability to control the volume pedal percentage. Or you can have the 'cocked wah' sound where you dial in your wah pedal and disable means of controlling it.

Contrary to all logic, this is the intended behavior. Touching tap brings up global tempo menus. This to me is the most dangerous setting: you can accidentally override all preset/snapshots' tempo settings. For example, I have some delays that are timed to a song. If those stop behaving as intended, it'll sound like garbage. So.... basically always ensure your global tempo settings are as you expect them to be.

My workflow is as follows: I have 2 folders with all of my presets: One folder where everything is and another as a redundant backup. Every time I make any changes, I create a backup of the Helix, and email myself the backup file. Things go wrong, presets get overwritten accidentally so it's very convenient to "version" your presets and back up everything.

Download Helix updater. Run it. Select 3.11.

I showed the video, and describe what was in the video. They said at first they could not reproduce on Windows 10, but then said they did, and reproduced and forwarded it to their QA team. Maybe it's an issue with the Mac HX Edit... I don't know and don't care lol. 3.11 works just fine. Ain't broke, don't fix. If I literally have no need for the new features, and am perfectly happy with 3.11, I will continue to use it. " Thanks for providing your info. Me and one of my colleagues were able to reproduce it. I've forward the issue to our QA team for further review. Most likely it will be fixed on the upcoming updates if they're able. Regards, Pete "

OK. I got a confirmation from Line 6 support that this is a bug. Well, we knew it was, but just to know we're not crazy. The new "behavior" behavior is buggy. I dowgraded to 3.11 and will upgrade when this bug is sorted out. To me, the new legacy synth sounds + a new amp are not needed. The downgrade process was very simple. I just ran the line 6 installer and selected 3.11. Cheers.

Here we go again... You can get an inexpensive boost or EQ pedal. https://www.amazon.com/JOYO-6-Band-Electric-Equalizer-Provides/dp/B085QKS9LZ/ Or you can use my method of setting up your presets to work with multiple inputs, e.g. guitar / Receive 1 / Receive 2 -- each receive jack has a variable pad. There may be some negligible noise that is added to the preset using this method. To see what I'm talking about, you can watch my video. I have a wireless system and it has an adjustable gain control on the receiver. So if you don't have a wireless system and have some money to spend, treat yourself to a wireless system, like Shure GLXD16.

Helix operates in 2 main modes: 1) stomp mode and 2) snapshots. Right off the bat you can customize how you want to see those snapshots / stomps in each preset: e.g. top row stomps and bottom row snapshots. Obviously if you do that, you are limited to only having 4 stomps and 4 snapshots you actually invoke. Some people like approach, some don't. To switch between the snapshot view or stomp mode view, you press the "mode" button. If you didn't set up any stomps set up, then that section will just be blank -- all unassigned buttons. You can set up some stomps by assigning specific block(s) to one footswitch and give it a custom label / ring color. After you do that, you can open Command Center, where you can rearrange all of these newly-created stomps / snapshots, preset links. Command center allows you to overwrite the stomp mode view in a specific preset to have something custom in terms of where buttons are located, and what they do (e.g. press/release) If you are using the Helix Floor, you have 10 footswitches you can rearrange however you want (you need to first enable 10 switch view on the Floor unit). Between those 10 FS's and the Expression pedal(s) you can create your ideal layout to be able to cover an entire setlist easily. You can have some FS's engage things on/off; some have momentary engagement; snapshots, going to a different preset all together, re-entering the current preset, etc. If you decide to use "Preset spillover", you can mix/match presets, snapshots, stomps and have seemless transitions without any audio gaps. With this option, you are however limiting your signal path to be half of what it used to be. It can get a little tricky if you create "wormholes" taking you between presets. You need to test out that every button has been assigned correctly so you don't hit a dead end :)

Helix LT has a screen 4 times the size of HD 500 X. To me: Helix Floor is fantastic for a dark stage, or any indoor shows. I recently played a gig where they decided to have "fun" with the lights and smoke on stage. I have glowing side dots on my guitar and the Helix Floor's scribble strips saved me. But outdoors, the scribble strips are hard to read, and it's not clear if you engaged a specific snapshot or not. That's why LT's virtual scribble strips work better -- the colors are inverted and you can see if something is engaged or not.

Or, don't use the switch at all... use EXP 2 for everything. I do that and it works for me personally. 1. Engage wah / volume / anything else per snapshot. or 2. Engage blocks using the threshold value. So applications I have: * If I have the wah throught the song, then it's automatically engaged past 5% for example. * I time the "turn off" time per song. Sometimes it's immediately, sometimes after 300 ms, 500 ms, whatever the song needs * If the wah is only for the solo section, then I have a "wah solo" snapshot * I have a kitchen sink preset where depending on the snapshot, the EXP 2 controls: vibrato, delay, freeze, EQ, filter sweep. So in short my band has a lot of trick sounds, I never ever feel the need to have the wah pedal be switchable/clickable. As a matter of fact, before the Helix I was a Bad Horsie user. The main selling point is that it did not have a switch.

yes: it's called command center. You can customize your pedalboard view to have any configuration you want: stomps/snapshots/next preset/previous preset.

Hey, VMusicV -- Ever heard of a noise gate? The noise gate's purpose is to prevent low signal aka noise from being heard. So if you tweak the settings, you can get the "auto fade out" effect. Put this at the end of your chain, after the amp, etc. Play with the parameters. You probably want to bypass it and un-bypass it repeatedly to make sure it does not affect the loudness of your signal. Threshold: how sensitive you want the noise gate to be. Decay: how soon you want the note to die out. Level: this is so that the noise gate does not affect your overall loudness. These are the settings that achieved the effect for me. Cool?

Select your snapshot, bypass/unbypass things, Command + S or ctr + S. Do the same for every snapshot. I highly recommend using "discard" global setting, to avoid accidentally saving something horribly wrong by accident.

You can control many things with the same expression pedal. Then in each snapshot you can bypass things, or set the mix parameter of blocks to 0%. That's what I do -- in one preset I control the following things with the same EXP 2: wah, filter, vibrato, freeze, delay. The wah has auto-engagmenet when you put it past 5%. But I only use the wah in one snapshot -- in others it's mixed at 0% effectively bypassing it. I set this up before the (rather buggy) 3.15 toe down / heel down functionality. So in short, you can control many many things with the same exp pedal, it's just a matter of bypassing things / mixing things out.

https://www.amazon.com/MOOER-Baby-Bomb-Micro-Power/ + https://www.amazon.com/Marshall-Amps-Amplifier-Cabinet-M-MX112R-U I'm a user of the Mooer baby bomb amplifier. It looks ridiculous because it's tiny. But it sounds awesome, and is solid state. It became my stage setup: running my Helix through it into a combo amp's speaker cabinet.

VMusicV this you again? If you are using a Helix Floor, your external pedal cannot be switchable. Plug in a pedal and it's immediately EXP 2. On Helix Rack, you can attach the external pedal and have it be switchable.

Well, Wah by default is using EXP 1. By default your preset has EXP 2 enabled. So in order to operate the wah, you need to click the pedal in to switch to EXP 1. I hate that! Clicking the pedal live is too much of a hassle. Instead, I change the wah to use EXP 2. You can use the "learn" function to assign the wah percentage of engagement. Or simply do it in HX Edit. I run my wah in 2 main modes: 1. engaged in specific snapshots -- the wah block is enabled in certain snapshots. 2. auto-engaged for the entire preset -- when over 5% it turns on, otherwise it turns off after 300 ms. advantage of using EXP 2 exclusively is that an external pedal without a switch will seamlessly work with the Helix. I made several videos about how I run the wah, if you'd like to watch: https://youtu.be/H5PMjg-oZJ8 https://youtu.be/mgTA3tKYst8

Probably another preset is affecting this behavior. This is what happens when people test things on only one preset :) Gotta expand the scope of testing. Also, maybe the EXP 2 vs EXP 1 makes a difference as well. Either way, this is a scary bug. I am always cautious when I upgrade the Helix. I have my main gigging Helix on the previous version still and will not upgrade it until this is sorted out. Last thing I need is to have weird glitches on stage in front of a lot of people. Ugh.

Some tips for what I've found so far: 1. don't have too much gain. At full volume, you may get unbearable feedback in-between your notes. What sounds great at home, on a loud stage may be too gainy. 2. Easy does it in terms of dynamic changes. When everything is loud, your "louder" stuff may be absurdly deafeningly loud through a PA. So don't go crazy with too much rhythm/lead contrast. 3. Turn off Global EQ!! and make adjustments with it turned off at home. Otherwise, you risk having your sound being too brittle live. Otherwise, you need to just practice in a space where you can crank up the PA with your Helix. No other way to know what can possibly go wrong. No amount of meter checking, or spectrum analyzing will save you from the unknown.... lol

As a gigging musician, I can tell you -- using onboard amp/cab/mic is great. You can dial in your exact sound on the Helix. I too was at one point the "my setup is so unique, I have to use a real amp", etc guitarist. Nope. Spend some time and dial in your exact sound. Plus the stage setup is a breeze without having to be tied to your exact amp requirement. Plus you can play at any volume, and record straight to the DAW. Even if you decide to use an actual physical combo amp, having an ability to have a great signal ready for FOH is always great to have. Even decades ago, bands like Rush have been going direct to FOH, using amp/speaker cab simulation to FOH. Anywyay, just get the complete package -- the Helix, as opposed to later on realizing you are missing stuff....

I'm seeing this behavior (also posted in the bugs thread). The 3.15 "behavior" parameter value gets auto-saved and sometimes applies to unrelated presets. https://youtu.be/j96k1ZFB2Fw

I made a video for the support guy. It's here, in case you want to see the bug: