theElevators

In terms of preventing yourself from messing up your presets, I have a nice video with all the best practices I've been able to find. For example, put the cursor in the corner, so the knobs are not going to change any setting. Otherwise, you can easily press on those knobs and create/change bypass behavior. I'm curious about the exact steps to replicate this! If you are saying the gain settings are all weird, could it be that you accidentally removed the snapshot assignment? And simply changed the settings of your gain block, so all snapshots would get the same value? I just updated my Helixes to the latest firmware because I needed one specific reverb for one of the songs, which turns out we are not even playing :) Prior to that I've been on 3.11 for several years without an issue you describe.

On the Helix Floor, you have a dedicated headphone out knob which controls a stereo 1/4" out jack for your headphones. So why not use that as it was intended? If you need to have an XLR jack for your headphone mix, why not get an TRS to XLR adapter? The added benefit is that you can run to FOH in stereo, if you choose to do so, as opposed to always having mono. Also sometimes you need to dial in the volume of your FOH volume vs. headphone mix. Same applies to the Global EQ--sometimes you only want to apply it to one output instead of across the board. So in terms of the stereo/mono mix, in theory if you have all your effects in mono, XLR L/R should be identical. To guarantee that that is the case, you need to put a mono block at the very end of your chain. Note that the legacy folders contains stereo versions of delays, reverbs, etc. So put a simple mono gain/volume at the end. I have seen a lot of weird issues where mono is not always mono, however. Some effects, like the doubler starts having really weird issues in mono--volume starts dropping because of phasing issues. Also you may lose some gain when you split your signal as you describe. I never use IEMs live personally. I do have a cheapo stereo IEM transmitter that I use during late night practicing at home. For that I use the headphone jack, controlled by the headphone volume knob, as I described.

you can easily hack it to remove amp/cab blocks and you can have more effects blocks. a well-known hack.

WD-40 with Lithium works great, however.

Here’s my take: Get the Helix and you will get everything you’d ever need. It’s a self-contained touring rig. No FOMO later. Otherwise, HX Effects is pretty nice, lots of buttons and snapshots. HX Stomp/XL always feel like it’s got a tiny screen, tiny crowded knobs and not enough horsepower for its price. Pod Go would be a great product if the build quality was at least as good as the Helix. It has even cheaper buttons that stop working with normal use after a few months. It will not withstand touring, unless you plan on replacing it with a new unit every year or sooner. The price is great—around 400 USD, if you are lucky. I got it as a backup and was extremely impressed with its capabilities. It’s basically a mini-Helix with snapshots, nearly all blocks in it, amps and IRs, even midi. It can be a sound interface too. But built like a POS despite sounding fantastic. And don’t even consider Helix One, or that new plastic pedal — the build quality is less than subpar. If you plan on investing money into something that lasts more than a year without needing to be cleaned in order to work, get Helix/Stomp/Effects. Or get a solid midi controller and then the build quality will be a non-issue.

The buttons on the Pod Go are absolute garbage. If the actuators actually work, the mechanism is very scratchy and just bad. That's because the buttons operate inside these plastic rings without anything protecting the plastic. The metal spring gets rusty, the actuators get gunked up. So here's the first thing to do: clean the actuators. I have a video how to do this here. Then if your buttons start getting scratchy (happened to me after several months of inactivity), use some kind of a lube, like I use WD-40 with Lithium grease -- it really helps with stuck hinges, etc; apply a little bit on the button, and then press it a few times, wiping off all the residue--there will be lots of it.

Or you can just circumvent that by: 1. Enabling wah in specific snapshots 2. Have wah get un-bypassed when you rock it past 5%. I NEVER use the toe switch and I actually disable the toe switch by plugging in a short-circuited cable into the external pedal jack. The problem for me is that on the Pod Go, the switch engages way too easily. I do the same thing on the Helix.

It could be that your preset is very loud. Some of the presets I downloaded on customtone were extremely harsh-sounding and distorted. You can take the amp and turn it down in your preset, until it stop being so loud. Your "new preset" should be about as loud as your "[actual preset]".

Do a complete backup of your helix. Reset it to factory settings. Restore from your backup. I've had this happen to me when I downloaded somebody's presets, and they got corrupted. That's when I started seeing the "guitar pick" icon next to the presets. Did my backup/reset/restore routine, and no more issues.

The only other thing is that depending on what you turn on/off with snapshots you may get audible pops/boinks. For example I recently discovered yet another example of that when I bypass the compressor, I get that really loud pop. Workaround: don't bypass the compressor, simply set it to a lower sensitivity setting in other snapshots, essentially making it useless. Countless other examples of bypassing an amp block will also give you the same unfortunate artifact. Sometimes you may want to reorder your blocks to minimize it, or use an A/B path with both blocks in question being on, just switching the routing.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/126046784878 I got this as a backup. Pretty solid cable/adapter. The only thing I don't like is the fact that the plug is not angled.

The short answer is: "that's just how it is, use snapshots". Helix supports a specific workflow that I am personally using: each preset is for each specific song. Within each presets you have snapshots, for each section. On HX Stomp it's 3 of them. In addition you can assign several stomp effects to external foot switches. If you're playing in a straight-forward band, 3 sounds is all you really need: clean/dirty/solo with delay. Then you can use the additional buttons for chorus/reverb. Long answer is: it's a bummer that some processors do this! Not all, but some. I know that Kemper does not have this issue. Also my old Zoom processor pedal had no gaps. If there was a CPU-consuming effect in the chain, rather than having a break, it would fade out one preset and fade in the next one. But if you had two identical presets, there would be no silence whatsoever. I am sure that Helix could easily accomplish the same, by comparing what is different between the two presets and consolidating them, rather than dumping everything out of memory and reloading it. I also know for a fact that there have been rack processors from early 1990s that had delay spillover between presets--forget the name(s). You would pay extra money to get that feature. BTW, on the Helix Floor/LT/Rack you can have gapless preset switching, but the tradeoff is that instead of two signal paths you will have only one. That's because there are 2 digital signal processor chips, so one can be sacrificed and act as a buffer. On HX Stomp, there's only one.

24 decibels is a LOT! If you ever need more than 12, how about adding two EQ blocks instead of 1?

It's not just the update process I was talking about--it's the firmware bugs and unexpected behavior. I've personally seen several things completely break in my presets after updating. For example the new and improved bypass behavior in 3.17? (I think) completely messed up all the presets where everything used to work. Like you modify one preset in HX Edit, make wah turn on when you are in the "toe down" position, but it updates other unrelated presets and as a result their on/off wah switching is reversed, etc. Also I keep reading about Glitch delay working differently, or a level of some block being different after upgrading. Or my personal favorite known issue of the Helix LT going back to the signal path view after the tuner, instead of the performance view where you see the virtual scribble strips. I've had that annoying bug resurface and managed to make it go away by tweaking some settings back and forth. But do I really want this thing to come back again? Heck no. If I'm playing a show, I don't want to be tapping needlessly, it's unacceptable. So all I am trying to say is that if you are a studio musician or a tinkerer--go and get the latest and the greatest. For me though, when I had to rely on my Helix to be able to play 26-preset sets, I did not want to risk anything getting messed up. Sometimes some things are not immediately apparent. It's a computer, so a certain series of steps can lead to unacceptable live results. I would need to do a good amount of testing of all of my 100-or-so presets to check that everything is still good. If not, revert to the previous firmware version. Once again, if you only use one or two presets, this doesn't obviously apply.

I personally don't understand the point of upgrading firmware. On the Helix I'm on the same version 3.11 from a few years ago. All I see is constant new bugs that get introduced. If something is working, I don't want to risk messing up my presets that all work great, just so I could have a hypothetical ability to play around with a couple new effects.

Guitars don't need a subwoofer. Unless you are playing some kind of a 9-string guitar. Even still on stage, there is absolutely no need to have a woofer for guitar. All it will do is rattle the floor and interfere with other instruments/drums. Chords through a subwoofer... oof! Look at it this way, in a typical band, each instrument occupies its own frequency range, so there's no overlap. For reference, I always refer to Led Zeppelin. Their music is pretty heavy, but the guitar is always relatively twangy. But both bass and guitar together create this massive sound. I've worked with many sound engineers who always took the bottom of the guitar frequencies and simply scooped them out. When you play at home without any other instruments, it's very satisfying to djent and feel the ground vibrate. But with other instruments, it causes an incredible amount of interference as no 2 instruments are ever in tune--there will be rumble and waves beating when several instruments hit the same note--yes, even the bass drum! So they will turn up because they can't hear themselves, then you will also turn up because you can't hear yourself. So in short, unless you want non-guitar sounds to come out of your speaker (bass, bass synth, kick drum), for regular guitar there is no need for a sub. My method of amplification is still going direct to FOH, and on stage hearing myself through a power amp (Mooer Baby Bomb) running out of a single 12" cab. It feels great, and very familiar. And I do not even adjust my EQ in any way for the power amp, unless the sound guy insists to do so, when it starts interfering with his mix.

When I add a wah block to a preset, I remove all the assignments immediately: snapshot, wah contour. bypass, etc. Then I create my own assignments. I use Pod Go Edit for all this stuff, as it's just so much easier to tweak things on a computer. It's all completely configurable. What exactly do you need the wah to do? For me, I assign the wah to turn on when I start rocking it past 5%, then below that it turns off. On the Pod Go, I only use Expression 1 for everything. So I assign the wah position to Expression 1. I actually disable the expression pedal switching between 1 and 2 by plugging in a patch cable into the external pedal jack into the "return" jack--that makes the pedal non-switchable: it's always Expression 1. I also take the "mix" parameter and assign it to snapshots. That way, the wah is not heard if it's set at 0% in certain snapshots, and then it is heard in other snapshots where it's set to 100%. In my opinion, this is the best way to configure it. The built-in expression pedal is very small and flimsy, so clicking it in to turn on the wah is unacceptable to me.

....civil war

The concept of a snapshot really makes Pod Go better. Not everybody uses/cares about this "revolutionary" feature. For me, I can't imagine how I'd play my sets if snapshots were not available. Once you start using something, it's difficult to go back. There are some workarounds to assign multiple things to the same footswitch, but it's still not the same.

Go to global settings, and change whether the BPM settings are: Global / Per Preset / Per Snapshot. Global Settings -> MIDI/Tempo -> Tempo Select. For my personal needs, I have tempo saved per snapshot.

You already have the return 1/2 jacks in the that you can configure to run the separate piezo signal. In the preset you can go to eaxh signal path and configure it to have return 1 as input.

Use the effects loop. That way you retain the wireless functionality, and the effects loop will only have your wah. Place it in the beginning of your chain.

If your guitar has 2 separate outputs: one for electric, another one for piezo, then you can create presets that process 2 inputs. That way you won't have to switch anything on your guitar, just press a button and you will have acoustic or electric guitar sound. There is a rig rundown (don't remember the name), but the guitarist wired his guitar to output neck and bridge pickups separately. So the pickup switching is done inside the Helix.

FRFR's do that. You need to take it and put on a stand. It needs to be off the ground, that's how it's meant to be placed--on some kind of a stand. The muddiness will go away that way.

There are hacks to free up blocks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlDhCZOOv9U&ab_channel=HeyWorshipLeader But the whole point of Pod Go is to dumb down the signal routing for people. You always have an amp, wah, volume control, etc. I made it work for me, after downsizing from the full-blown Helix. It's more than enough to get usable and diverse sounds-- if you use one preset per each song, like I do. Rather than adding a bunch of stuff to the signal path, like I do on the Helix, I started making use of various blocks' controls more. Like you can use a reverb echo, which can double as both delay or reverb... so if needed I can change various parameters and make all my 4 snapshots sound however I want. So take it from somebody who REALLY likes his effects--Pod Go is great and with some creativity can give you more than enough sonic variety.