lou-kash

… the piezo pickup in my old acoustic bass guitar which the previous owner implemented the wrong way so that it now sounds like crap… Yes, sometimes things are so "fundamentally wrong" that the best way to fix it is by taking unconventional measures. For the above case, apart from the parametric EQ for finetuning, I have used the Multiband Compressor to radically suppress the frequence range that I don't want to be there. It works.

In Logic, you can also non-destructively increase the region gain using either the Gain tool or the Region Inspector.

Haha… ^ strike that. As of 3.71 I'm back at SVT-4. It's simply the most flexible amp simulation in there. It. Just. Works. That said, in the meantime I've been rather experimenting with various cab/mic blocks, and mic positions. All this makes a massive difference on a "good" (depending on one's taste) bass sound. But it should be fine tuned via a PA.

^ This might be the culprit. As noted above, creating an aggregate device via the Audio MIDI Setup app is the safer method, likely because (based on my "quarter-educated guess") the MacOS takes care of syncing both devices at the system level before even Logic has to deal with it. For what it's worth, I've been using the Stomp with Logic as part of aggregate devices for four years now, mostly without any issues. My recording setups include a 15" MacBook Air M2 with Roland OctaCapture as the second interface, but also a 2008 (!) MacBook Pro with a 2009 (!) Alesis and a 2003 (!!!) M-Audio Firewire interfaces as part of my aggregate device setup. It works.

Yes, Strats or any other single coil guitars have a relatively low output signal, compared e.g. to guitars with humbucker pickups. As I said: simply put the Gain plugin on top of the FX chain of the Logic track and add 10 dB to it. That's how I proceed all the time, whether I'm recording guitars or basses via the Stomp, or via my other interfaces using mics. Because the absolutely last thing I want is a digitally clipped signal that I can't fix. -20 dBFS is fine and doesn't do any harm whatsoever. :)

As long as you record in 24-bit, you can absolutely stop caring whether your signal level is "too low" or not. You can always crank it up with the Gain plugin in Logic, or any other plugin that has a Gain/Volume parameter. That aside, the unprocessed output level is "low" for a reason: When I slap my bass, especially with some active preamp EQ setting on the bass itself, I can quite easily reach something like -6 dBFS peaks in Logic. That's anything else but "low".

Never observed anything like that when using the Stomp and working with Logic. But on the other hand, I have also deliberately disabled USB MIDI in the Stomp Global Preferences, just to make sure it's never interfering…

I've been using my HX Stomp as a 4-channel mixer for an acoustic guitar, acoustic bass and two vocal mics already. No other devices involved, apart from a power amp and a speaker. It is possible, albeit admittedly awkward to set up, as I only have two paths on the Stomp, so each instrument/mic pair needs to be lined up in series, i.e. some settings will affect both at the same time. But… it's manageable because the Stomp has 4 analog inputs. Looking at the Helix LT specs, you have only 3 analog inputs (plus 1 digital Variax input), so you would have to combine two of your channels into one.

For the record… Yep, that's on a 16 years old Mac! Now rewind 16 years back to 2008 and imagine what you could do then with a 16 years old Mac from around 1992… (well, I even still have one from this era, a Macintosh LC475…)

Although officially unsupported, the most recent Helix Native version 3.71 still works on El Capitan, on a 16 years old Mac, nota bene: (I've actually updated this Mac to Native v3.71 only a few minutes ago, after noticing I still had "only" v3.60 installed. Silly me… :)

In theory, you could activate the unmuted tuner via MIDI while muting the guitar path only at the same time. I haven't tested this, so it's just a "thought experiment" that may – or may not – work on my HX Stomp.

My biggest concern here would be whether the workers in Vietnam are being less exploited than the workers in China.

I've been using Simple Pitch on the Stomp as an octaver with bass guitar, but I've never experienced any "spontaneous activation". I'd suspect that if that happened, it would be because you may have accidentally saved its active state with the current snapshot in your preset. That's something that may happen every now and then because snapshots allow for quite complex configurations. Speaking of drop tuning, I actually prefer the Poly Capo for that because… poly! :) But it will eat up a lot of DSP resources so you may be limited elsewhere, depending on what other blocks you use.

Yes, I had something like that a few times since one of the recent firmware updates. As @Schmalle said, turning the device off and on fixed it.

Line 6 Central https://line6.com/software/index.html requires MacOS Big Sur