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theElevators

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Everything posted by theElevators

  1. Or touch the tap tempo button and select the setting you need. To me it’s a setting I don’t ever want to use since all my presets and snapshots are timed to our backing track.
  2. Headrush 108 is excellent: light, compact and loud. I leave it in the trunk of my car all the time. You can even play bass through it (if you don't blast it through it). I don't know, but all the amps I've had are so ridiculously heavy, it's as if they are loaded with bricks. If you play through a processor, then FRFR is really the only thing you need. Just keep in mind they tend to bee too boomy, so use your mixing monitors to dial in your sound instead of relying on the FRFR.
  3. HX edit is excellent! The night before the show when I know the order of the songs, I rearrange my presets with it. So super-easy! Then it's just pressing "next" throughout the show, no need for a set list. If you play in several bands, you can use the folders to organize all your presets for each project. Or use the folders to back up your entire preset collection. I have a backup folder for everything, in case I do something stupid right before the show, I have an entire folder of untouched presets.
  4. My advice is to see how many sounds you need at the moment. Do you need to have clean, distortion, wah and an occasional solo and that's it? Or do you need crazy U2 sounds in every single song? As others have mentioned, Pod Go is an excellent machine. I have the Helix and Pod Go. The Helix is big, heavy and powerful. The Pod Go is light, compact and can easily fit into your gig bag. The limiting thing about the Pod Go is that you must always have your amp/cab block in your signal chain, even if you don't need it. It's wasting DSP. But this setup is ideal for most applications, including how I have my signal chain setup. I say this with confidence, for non-complicated cover bands, bar bands, etc, Pod Go will get the job done. If you have a couple of sounds and don't need to have different effects and complicated signal processing, this is the way to go. It has all your amps, pedals. It runs in stereo and can work as a recording interface. It has all the sounds of the Helix, but has more limited signal paths, fewer buttons. It has an expression pedal, switches, etc. HX Stomp to me personally is way to limiting. But if I only played AC/DC covers, then this would suit me perfectly fine. IMO, Pod Go > Stomp for sure! Stomp XL to me is a stupid product. It's just the Stomp + more buttons and no expression pedal. Stomp is already limited and is 1/2 the power of a Helix, so why not use an almost equally-limited Pod Go instead that is lighter and has an expression pedal. Now for me personally, I need the big Helix because of how complicated some of the songs I play are. Not all, but some. My band requires a lot of effects, time-based effects. I would not be able to easily play some songs with only one preset on the Pod Go. I would have to break up my presets into "part 1" and "part 2" to get the job done. I play more straight-forward music with my other band and use the Pod Go there. In that punk band I just need: distortion, delay, wah, solo boost. So I can get by with only one preset on the Pod Go easily.
  5. There are volume levels that you can set on the Helix for all your outputs. Mic < Instrument < Line. These are just your volume ranges. And you can always turn down your signal on the Line level enough so it becomes what the passive Mic level typically is. https://www.sweetwater.com/sweetcare/articles/whats-the-difference-between-mic-instrument-line-and-speaker-level-signals/# I have XLR outputs at Microphone level. The volume knob does not control the loudness of the signal, it's always at Mic level. It goes to Front of the House. For FOH, you don't want any distortion/compression of your signal, so you set it to the cleanest level. The 1/4 inch outputs are at Instrument level. As most people do, I use it as my personal monitor mix. The volume control is used to make myself louder/softer on stage. I also apply Global EQ to my personal monitor mix as needed. On a big Marshall cabinet, I have to dial out the boomy lows. On a Fender amp's speaker there is no need to do so. I run the 1/4 out signal into an effects loop of an amp, but recently I favor a stand-alone mini power amp: Mooer Baby Bomb. The mini power amp is connected to the speaker cabinet directly. I have had excellent results running it through speakers of a Fender Deluxe or Fender Reverb. When you run your personal monitor mix on an unbiased power amp, or monitor or whatever it is, there is no need to dime your signal. I set up my loudness on the amp itself so that the volume knob has room to turn myself up or down. You know how it is on stage: you start playing a show and realize you can't hear yourself enough, so you just turn yourself up. The front of the house mix remains unchanged. If my personal monitor mix does not get loud enough on stage and my volume knob is maxed out, then I can change the setting of my output level for 1/4 inch out to be Line. I have never had to do it. Usually the knob is turned half-way and there is plenty of volume.
  6. Regarding the original post: In the manual it says: Global Settings > Displays Knob Parameter Description 1 LED Ring Brightness Determines whether the Stomp mode footswitches’ colored LED rings appear dim when bypassed or off when bypassed. When playing in bright sunlight, you may want to set this to “Off/Bright” to increase contrast In reality this works ONLY when you save the LED ring color that is NOT "Auto". The easiest way to change the LED color is to right-click on the Snapshot, etc, in HX edit. You will see LED ring options. Select an actual color, for example: green, red, pink, etc.. and save. Then, when you toggle this setting to "dim", the rings will be dimly-lit when the snapshot, etc is not engaged. So if you want to take advantage of this "dim" feature, you first need to change the ring colors of all the things you want to be "dimly" lit.... It's actually good, because it gives you extra flexibility to not have the outline of some buttons light up. On Helix LT, I could see this as a useful, whenever I need to see where the buttons are. On Helix Floor, the scribble strips are more than enough to be able to see what I'm doing and where I'm pressing. I played on a completely dark stage and had no issue switching my sounds. Or you can just go with the old school approach and get a music stand light! If the stage is so dark, you won't trip over the cables...
  7. No, this cannot be done. I also wanted to have a consistent predictable flanger sweep going "woooooosh". not "shwoooooo". The only thing you can do is to assign something to EXP pedal and manually engage it with the pedal.
  8. You can simply use the Microphone input for your guitar. It has a gain setting and you can use run the tuner for the Microphone input too... All you need is an adapter, and now you can raise the level of your instrument with the Mic gain setting. Of course there's no negative gain....
  9. Howdy. I just figured something out, and wanted to share my hack with you all. This is a hack that solves the issue of having 2 different guitars with different output levels. As you know, if you dial in your sound for a Humbucker-equipped guitar, playing a single-coil guitar through he same preset is not going to sound anywhere close.
  10. I recently got the Line 6 Pod Go. If you play through physical amps, this is the unit I'd get. You can have it in the pedalboard mode with 6 buttons, or 4 snapshots. Nearly all Helix sounds are there. Since you will be mic'ing your amp, no XLRs are needed to go to the FOH, this is perfect IMO. If Pod Go existed when I was making the switch from analog gear, I'd most likely have gotten it and built all my presets on it for my shows. Too late now... I purchased it as a backup for my Helix to take to shows, and it's self-contained and sounds great. I also love how light and compact it is. You can put it into your gig bag....
  11. Helix LT is mostly awesome, except the expression pedal. For me, I bought a lightly-used unit and the exp pedal squaks after a year and a half of normal use. The pedal used to break off in the earlier run of the LT, but that has been fixed a long time ago. If you put your entire body weight on it, it may break, I don't know... it's pretty thin... Also sometimes the exp pedal does not go all the way to 100%. It goes to 99% then 98%... until you reboot it and it corrects the issue. So if you use pitch effects with the expression pedal, you may have a situation where your Digitech Whammy-type sound will be out of tune.... You can buy an inexpensive expression pedal to use if your onboard one fails. My hack is as follows: set up all your sounds to only use EXP 2. Use auto-engaged wah-wah, like Morley Bad Horsie... or save your wah on/off depending on the snapshot. If your onboard pedal dies, connect the external one and it will be EXP 2. There's a weird bug if your external wah is connected while you save your snapshots, your EXP 1 or EXP 2 state is not saved to the snapshot. So just disconnect the external EXP when building your sounds. About a separate headphone mix, there are many ways to set up multiple independent paths. You can have it so that the main volume knob controls your headphone mix, for example. Or if you only use one preset, you can have some kind of a volume block and put the cursor on it, to adjust the volume during a show... Or even use an expression pedal to control your monitor mix... The possibilities and workarounds are plentiful. Watch https://youtu.be/XIWlCNhA96E I personally don't care for scribble strips and find LT screen's snapshot view a lot easier to read in direct sunlight. I don't use any of the effects loops at all, I find that it defeats the purpose of using a guitar processor if you use stomp boxes in addition to it. LT is slightly smaller and lighter, while the buttons are spaced out exactly the same way as the Floor. Good enough for Bumblefoot, good enough for you. But then again, just for a couple hundred more, you can get a more solid machine, the Floor model. I have both and use them interchangeably. Why both? Because I need a backup, as all equipment breaks down.
  12. try 2 amp blocks: enable one/disable the other one...?
  13. My band has guitar, keys and 2 horns. We set up the sound so that it's in stereo, but not hard-panned. For example the trumpet player is panned slightly more to the right, trombone player is panned slightly more to the left. Keys are panned more to the right, while guitar (me) is panned more to the left. I run my sound in stereo, but my "center" is moved slightly to the left, if that makes sense. When the sound system is really crappy, we just run everything in mono and forget about panning. Using the stereo spread helps "unclutter" the sound, but it's never a good idea to do the extreme left/right "Beatles mix". You know where they had Drums, bass and vocals on one side, and everything else on the other. That's bad... One more thing that helps unclutter 2 similar sound sources (2 guitars) is to EQ them both differently. One has more middle presence, while the other has more scooped qualities. Together they will work and complement each other nicely. This is one of the reasons I hate playing with another guitarist, because there is always this loudness war going on. Especially when both are playing rhythm... So 2, 3 guitars will only really work effectively when they are EQ'ed correctly and their volume levels are matching. If you have 2 rhythm/lead players, it's really tough to get the balance and stage volume right. True story: I saw Black Label Society ages ago, and Zakk Wylde's solos (as crappy as they typically are) were completely inaudible. You could hear he was playing something, but could not make out what exactly, because the rhythm guitar was always in the way. An all-girl metal band that opened for them had 1 guitarist and that sounded 10 times better....
  14. I have a suspicion that this bug will resurface again. I always press FS 9+10 after updating firmware, and then restoring from the backup... maybe it take 2 times to fix it?..... Well, anyway, I have a "sound check" preset that will be my preset 0, so I can always confirm all my sounds are coming through correctly, before playing a show, play a few notes....
  15. LONG story short: did a complete system restore to all default factory settings, restored from my backup and everything is now working as expected. There was something wrong with my global settings. Pressed fs 9 and 10 when starting the Helix restored from the backup back to normal.... daaaaaaarnnnn!!!
  16. I will try some more things at home, including a factory reset. I will keep you all posted. I will document whatever I do in form of a video :) thanks all!! (as a computer programmer, these gremlin bugs drive me up a wall.... )
  17. If I build a preset from scratch with a ping pong delay and nothing else, I get what I described. It's not the preset, it's the entire Helix not combining left and right. always, with every single preset. Something with the global settings, EQ, line output level, global tempo, touch sensitivity, or other.
  18. It behaves the same way whether there are XLR cables plugged in or not.
  19. My entire backup is in the first post. It happens in every single preset where I have any sort of hard panning, e.g. ping pong delay. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fTk2FYrUJNZMNxu7ZvAF5OB5VCU3xZ0X/view?usp=sharing steps to replicate: 1. have an exaggerated delay, for example one repeat left, followed by one repeat right. You will most likely not hear anything wrong until you actually set up a slow one-repeat delay. 2. power on the Helix with only Left/Mono plugged in, and you will notice that you hear only one side. 3. plug in any cable into right, unplug, now it will combine it together and you will hear both in mono. Video explaining the bug, for those who are still confused... https://youtu.be/frlsZpUkTdo Line 6 support was able to replicate it a year and a half ago, and said they would send it to QA. After which all I get is arguing whether I ACTUALLY need stereo or not, and various workarounds for it. "Here is a silly question... if you are worried about the mono summing, why do you use stereo effects in the chain? Just curious." thank you!
  20. I can get the left/mono to sum correctly by temporarily plugging something into the right side, then unplugging it. It is a bug. It is working as expected, and as I need it, but only after temporarily plugging a 1/4 inch cable into the right. Is this bug the end of the world for me? No. But I need to always remember to perform this ritual of plugging/unplugging a cable, otherwise I will have a problem. The biggest thing is that if you do a sound check, then power down your Helix, you need to power up the Helix, then do this absurd plugging/unplugging ritual and it looks silly.
  21. Umm... it could be all sorts of interference. A cable that is not plugged into a guitar always makes some kind of noise as it acts as an antenna. Fluorescent lights, computer monitor, power source can all be the culprit. Try a different cable and/or plug it into an actual guitar and see if there is noise. I just tried the same experiment as you and my tuner is also reading some random notes, but I don't have the same noise as you, it's nearly silent.
  22. To elaborate: I need to sum up the left and right in order to hear both on stage coming out of one amp/monitor/FRFR. I go to the front of the house in stereo. So: 1/4 inch has to be mono and 2 XLR's in stereo. It's perfectly logical to expect left/mono to be left/mono and not left. I have a Nord Electro 2 keyboard from 2006 and if I plug into Left/mono, it works correctly and nobody gives me snarky remarks why that is needed for me. On that keyboard the sounds are in stereo (when the virtual leslie is spinning), and mono in case I want to hear both left and right sides.
  23. Yeah... I very rarely change the settings of my blocks between snapshots, just bypass and un-bypass things. Maybe instead of changing the gain on the amp, try adding an overdrive pedal. I'm sure you can find something more suitable. Helix has these weird popping noises when there is a big change in terms of volume/gain. I've had to redo some of my presets in order to overcome that.
  24. I remember seeing posts about bugs with 2.92 regarding tap tempo. Make sure to update to the latest version.
  25. Hello, world. I have been an owner of 2 Helix units for almost 2 years. I have been experiencing a bug with both of them where Left/Mono is not actually mono, but simply "left". A workaround is to unplug the 1/4 inch cable, plug it into the Right jack, then back into Left/Mono and then it starts adding it correctly. For some unknown reason, barely anybody seems to be suffering form this bug. I am convinced that this is either related to my Global Settings somehow, or every single Helix has this. Customer support's response at Line 6 has been absolutely unacceptable. This latest interaction with Mr. {redacted} has been short of a joke. After going AWOL for several weeks, he claims he cannot replicate the issue, even though I for a fact know he did not even bother trying to do so. How do I know this? I am able to replicate it all the time because I back up and restore my Helix LT and Helix Floor all the time. Back up on one, restore on the other. Can somebody do me a huge favor? Restore my Helix backup and see if you are able to hear what I hear? Steps: 1. plug in just one cable into Left/Mono, nothing in Right 2. Power down Helix 3. Power up Helix 4. Go to NOGU SVELO! / 000 Sound Check preset; "2 DELAY" snapshot. Play the guitar and notice how the delay behaves. then. 1. unplug the cable from Left/Mono and plug into Right 2. plug the cable back into Left/Mono Play the same thing now, and you will hear the delay combined as expected. This can be replicated on an LT or Floor. Could somebody please tell me what could possibly be wrong. backup file is here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fTk2FYrUJNZMNxu7ZvAF5OB5VCU3xZ0X/view?usp=sharing thanks a lot, d.
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