rzumwalt

Sure does. Thanks for your insights.

Lots of good advice above, and I don't have anything technical to add. But as a fellow ADHD sufferer, I can affirm that the Helix is option overload for people like us. If you're like me, you will have a lot of habits that are great for playing guitar for hours on end without a break, but not so great for efficiently setting up a polished set of two or three go-to presets that capture the range of sounds you need and little that you don't and remembering where you saved them. I know that I have created great presets, and then kept tweaking them for half an hour longer. I've created presets with dozens of of footswitch/snapshot combinations for massive variety, and not been able to remember which to use while performing. I think a major challenge for Helix users with ADHD is to resist over-complicating our presets and setlists beyond what we need and can effectively remember how to implement while performing. Once you've looked at the more technical comments from those above, and you should look at them first, see if the following ideas are helpful for you to keep in mind as you work out your sound: Your presets should be much more simple than you think. Your natural tendency will be to over-complicate things. (Why would the Helix be different from every other aspect of your life?) You will want to add an EQ block just because you have an empty block at the back of your chain. You'll want to add five different overdrives because maybe you'll utilize the slight difference between the Tube Screamer and Timmy. You'll want a button that turns off two reverbs, turns another one on, reduces your amp treble and compensates by increasing your amp presence and overdrive treble, raises the low pass filter on the wet signal of your delay, increases a gain block level by 0.7 dB on just the left stereo side, and switches from a Greenback Marshall cab to a Mesa cab. Just because Helix can do this, doesn't mean you should. Simpler presets will also prevent you from ruining them by over tweaking. Playing with settings is a natural outlet for your constantly fidgeting hands. You will spend many Saturday afternoons meticulously dialing in the right balance of overdrive pedal settings, EQ pedal levels, and amp drive and master settings only to realize that, on this particular snapshot, you had a ribbon mic in your cab block and a padded down gain block near your output, and you have to scrap the whole thing. You should stick with fewer amp/cab/mic combinations than you think. If you feel like you need to utilize every option the Helix has, remember that it has way more on board than any one person can realistically put to good use. If you like just one or two amps, maybe that's your sound; but you will try to convince yourself you're missing out by not using all the other models. If you like the standard amp-cabinet pair, you will think you're missing out by not trying unorthodox combinations like the Soldano lead channel into a Gibtone cab. Before you know it, you'll have two dozen off the wall new presets and you still won't have created the preset you originally set out to build. You should have at least one go-to preset that you very seldom change and keep a backup copy of. Your urge is to tweak every setting at least daily. You do this mindlessly and without remembering that you did it. There will be times when realize that special preset you made for a new song just isn't working, you'll punch around at the 50 or 60 half-finished presets haphazardly saved throughout your setlist not remembering what each sounds like, and you'll wish you had that go-to on standby. You can't remember how to use more than 4 solid presets across all of your gigging, depending on how complicated your presets are. (Or maybe two or three per genre you play.) If you have 8 or 10 presets you like to use, unless they are each specifically tailored to a particular song, you will be endlessly aggravated by hitting a boost footswitch and it turns out less loud but a lot muddier than you remember, or hitting a clean snapshot only to find that it has more delay and reverb than you thought. Keeping it to just a few allows you to become familiar with each one. The problem is, you can't stop yourself from constantly making new presets based on every fleeting one-off idea you have. To deal with that... Make one of Helix's setlists a sandbox for playing around with things as much as you want without jeopardizing your gigging presets stored in different setlists. It's best that we admit that we can't help ourselves from messing with dials, buttons, and flashing lights. So give yourself that freedom while preserving your working presets. This also cuts down on the information overload in your working setlists that causes you to scroll endlessly through preset banks, not remembering that foolproof name you gave the patch you're looking for. Every Helix owner probably experiences all of these issues from time to time and to one degree or another, but our friends without ADHD can't quite appreciate the level at which these things overwhelm us or our inability to ignore the impulses we have to make a huge mess of everything over-complicate life activities. For us, trying to resist implementing every feature Helix has to offer is like trying to balance a half-dozen marbles on top of one another at a circus during a fire drill. It's frustrating, but what part of your life isn't? It's best to embrace this and use that knowledge to set up my performing environment in a way that minimizes the effects of those limitations. On the plus side, the Helix's control and display features almost seem like they were created by someone with ADHD. You mean I can have footswitches that just say "LOUDER" and "LOUDEST"? All I need to remember is Orange = Overdrive and Green = Delay? This was revolutionary for me. Just so that we can laugh at ourselves, I'm guessing some of the following thoughts will sound familiar to you: "It has 50 amps to choose from: must...use...all...50...in....next...set." "Only 8 snapshots?" "Can I blend a fourth amp into this mix?" "Only 4 FX loops?" "If I have a two choruses back to back and one has enough predelay, will the totally offset each other?" "I love digital delay, better add that. I also love tape delay, better add that too. Ooh, I also love mod delay, tack one of those on. But what if I need a reverse delay, better add one than be sorry. Obviously I need to add a ducked delay just in case. What do you mean out of DSP?" "I set the expression pedal to turn on Tube Screamer at 20%, OCD at 40%, RAT at 60%, and Minotaur at 80%. Or does it go OCD Rat, Minotaur, Tube Screamer?" "Only 4 independent signal paths?"

I'm curious. When you say "slower in the rise," do you mean the slope of the graph from the low to higher frequencies? I think that's what you mean, but at first I thought you meant in terms of the response of the IR over time - over the however many milliseconds long the IR file is. Now this is all a product of my own ignorance, I'm sure, but is there some time element that comes into play here? That is, does the frequency response change or decay over time in a unique way? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

If the color rings have separate electrical leads for the red, green, and blue LEDs (or all the colors if they don't use primary colors), then one possibility is that you created some kind of a short between the different leads on one side of the ring. When the signal goes out to blue, perhaps it also hits the green lead on that side. and perhaps red is not affected. I would never recommend that one open up their device again, but perhaps the deoxit just needs to dry, or be dried.

Good advice. And I think you mean the input block to path 2.

Yeah. Or only do concerts to audiences standing in long hallways and turn your cab to exactly 12.7 degrees off center.

Shot in the dark: can you set both MIDI devices to receive on the same MIDI channel?

I was recently at a barbeque/outdoor gig and the host wanted to make an announcement from far away from my Helix or the soundboard. I ended up giving him my wireless pack and a cable with XLR on one end and 1/4" on the other. It was Sure 58 --> XLR end of cable --> 1/4" end --> wireless transmitter >>>>> wireless receiver --> Guitar Input on Helix >> empty preset. I think we had to play with the volume a little, but nothing extraordinary. I'm sure we could have done the same thing using just the XLR to 1/4" cable into a loop return. I'm not a singer, and the speaker was just giving announcements, but I couldn't tell any reason why it wouldn't work for vocals. Is the sound quality terrible? If so, my ears are equally terrible. I am eager to be proven wrong though. Edit: The signal then went from Helix via XLR to a sound board, if that makes any difference.

Point taken. But none of this changes the fact that the sound emanating from a PA or FRFR speaker is different from the sound emanating from a cabinet. As demonstrated here repeatedly by people smarter than me, once the sound leaves the speaker, it does so very differently from a FRFR than from a cab. You might be able to get some kind of raw amp signal into your PA or FRFR speaker, but that signal would be transformed by your PA or FRFR speaker anyway. If it were theoretically possible to hone in on one model of FRFR speaker and make the proper adjustments to simulate the in room sound, and I doubt it is, how many different speakers would have to be separately modeled for that adjustment? Any model that can work as an amp in the room would still have to at least have a cab in the room. And if you're going to buy a cab, why not buy an amp you like and play it or use Helix in 4CM?

IP Attorney: "Your honor, my client's IR allows guitarists to rock out to Led Zepplin riffs, and the defendant's IR allows him to rock out to Led Zepplin riffs in a slightly different way that is more feel than anything else." Judge: "What if he just buys the right speaker?" IP Attorney: "But your honor, think of all the extra cables he'd need to carry around with him!"

That's exactly the problem. And there is no percentage or absolute number of characters that one can use to determine whether he is making a fair use or a copyright violation. It comes down to what 12 of your peers or an appellate judge think is too much in any given circumstance. The interesting part of this is that, while there have been thousands of copyright infringement lawsuits on books and songs, I can't imagine there has been any precedent for lawsuits on copyright protected IRs. I wonder if there has ever been something like that for other modeling processes. And here you start getting into muddy waters between patent and copyright law when you are looking more at software...

I'm not an IP attorney, but I have some familiarity with the concept. There are two tests that I think would be the most important for determining whether the blending and recapture process you described would be a copyright violation or a fair use. I forget the names of the tests, but one would be the size of the copyrighted material used and the proportion of the new work in which it appeared. The second would be whether it would cause substantial confusion with the original work such that it would interfere with the market for the original work. There may also a third concept of how "transformative" your process was of the protected IR. One way of looking at it would be that you would be using the entire protected IR in your new IR, but it would only be responsible for a component of the new one. Whether the new IR would confuse people into thinking it was the protected IR would probably fall outside of the hypothetical you presented; it would probably have more to do with how it is marketed. The transformative aspect might actually be key. How much work did the new author do getting the right blend? Did he just do this with a bunch of protected IR's, or did he set out to make certain sounds and only used protected IRs in the process when they were appropriate? It's an interesting question, for sure. I'd be interested if an IP attorney had an opinion. Just for my own CYA purposes, nothing about the forgoing should be interpreted as legal advice. Assume you will go to jail for the rest of your natural life and be sued for ten billion dollars if you take any of what I say as advice.

Right, forgot about that. I'm not an expert on securities issues, but I can imagine a problem if they announce some new feature in an update that doesn't actually come to fruition. If key shareholders were to sell stock or exercise options at the wrong times, they might be accused of pumping the stock price artificially before the sale. But I need to know possible future updates now; it's worth them risking massive civil and criminal penalties, to me at least.

Ok, this looks cool, and it meets my basic price restraint.

My curiosity is peaked. Are you referring to unfair business practices act violations, insider trading, something else, all of the above? I don't think they are publicly traded, so I would lean towards either a false advertising or some kind of market manipulation scheme whereby they are accused of announcing improvements that would cause buyers to hold off on buying competing gear, thinking Line 6 will soon have some feature that they would have purchased the other gear for.

Have you confirmed that the PC or the DAW is not in fact receiving the MIDI message? You usually have to connect to the MIDI device (Helix, in this case) in the DAW software itself, like connecting to an audio source. But it sounds like you already did this since you received MIDI cc and clock. Or it could be that MIDI pc messages don't do anything in your DAW. I've only ever seen transport controls operated by MICI cc messages. And forgive me if you already know this, but I have to make sure, are you interpreting MIDI pc as "personal computer" rather than "program change." From your wording, it could be that the acronym "pc" has caused you to think it was meant for a personal computer. I only ask because it's the type of mistake I would make.

Hate to reply on a dormant thread, but ... I wonder if this would satisfy what you proposed. Suppose we modeled the amp in Helix, but without the cabinet model, output that signal to a perfectly neutral solid state amplifier designed to bring your level up to the output of a physical guitar amp, and then output that signal to a physical cabinet of the player's choice? So you would theoretically have all the character and dynamics of the modeled amplifier itself, going into an actual cab in an actual room. It would basically be a way of taking the modeled microphone out of the equation. If Helix modeled the guitar amp perfectly, and the theoretical solid state amplifier doesn't color the signal in any way, wouldn't the sound produced be indistinguishable from the same sound through physical versions of both the amp and cab? So, next we would see if we could accomplish the same thing by using your proposed speaker vibration measurement tool, let's call it a "Vibroscope" just for fun. If we took the Vibroscope measurements and made them into an IR, I guess by subtracting out the amp signal from the total signal, we could use that instead of a cab model. Finally, to reproduce the cab sound with all the "in the room" nuance possible, we would set up our Helix to play through a powered cabinet designed to work like a middle of the road cabinet. Whatever your interpretation of that is. The idea would be to get that cabinet's speakers vibrating the same way they would if hooked up to a physical guitar amp, like we measured with the Vibroscope. You are still at the mercy of the room you are in and the particular characteristics of the cabinet, but I would think that, at that point, even the most ardent "amp in the room" guys would have to admit that this is true of physical amps as well, assuming the our theoretical modeled amp is perfect. Now, I think we'd also have to admit that there would still be no way to get a PA type amplifier speaker to do the same thing. Even if we took the Vibroscope readings and played them back through the PA exactly as recorded--that is, as a recorded track rather than an IR--the PA still would not project like a cabinet or have the same final sound just due to the physics of it. But I like the idea of offering guitarists who reject the move to a miked sound an option to produce the sound they are expecting to hear, while being able to use the full amp models rather than just preamps going through a physical guitar amp's power amp section per 4CM. If they want to suffer the headache, noisy stage, hearing loss, and inconsistency of physically miking their cabinet at every venue, why should we stop them?

That sounds interesting. I saw your posted preset and I'm going to give it a try next time I can. I was going to ask what cabs, but I guess I see in the preset.

The 250K is for passive pickups, the 25K is for active pickups. (I've always thought it should be the other way around, does anyone know why the higher resistance pot is used for lower powered signals?) I assume the reason you want to use it as a controller rather than in your signal chain is because some people say it "sucks tone" from your signal. But keep in mind that what they are describing is the fact that it rolls off the high end of your signal as it reduces your volume. (I guess some have said that plugging a tuner into the tuner out jack sucks tone as well, but I've never done it.) I, like many others, don't consider that a bad thing because it is actually a very musical side-effect. Since I've never noticed any rolling off when it is fully open, there is no downside in my mind. At least do yourself a favor and try it that way before relegating it to a controller.

That is a really good way to put it. No disagreement with the idea that your ears have to be the final verdict, but when you get off work, grab your gear, head to the venue, and have 5 minutes of sound check, it would be nice during the performance to stare down at that preset you were working on at home and not think, "I hope I didn't make this thing way to loud."

This is not said often enough, in my opinion. One of my gigs is on Sunday mornings for church services, and it is where I have the most trouble with consistently balancing between being buried and overpowering. The problem is a combination of it being a larger number of instrumentalists and vocalists and a rotating set of musicians who all use different gear and play at different volumes. I would add to Zooey's comment...nothing actually. Ask your keyboardist to play in a narrower register, tell your drummer that every bar doesn't need a cymbal crash, and make sure your guitarists understand when they are supposed to play rhythm and when they are supposed to play lead. Remind your guitarists that too much distortion basically mushes their signal into one big spectrum-hogging nothing. (This is probably why you hear guys who are playing live complain about this more than those recording. You can just pull other parts back in a recording situation.)

I don't notice that with mine. Are you sure there isn't a problem? Maybe you are setting the level on your wah block too low or the heel-down frequency is too low?

TS9 Tube Screamer does it for me. That slightly sharper sound it has compared with the T808 modeled by the Helix makes all the difference to my ears. Then again... I am a repeated victim of thinking a slight change I've made has vastly improved my tone, only to find out that I've just increased the volume a little. Worse, how many times have I sworn I've heard a substantial change only to look down and realize I was stomping on an unassigned pedal. If you told me that someone had made the perfect profile of an amp I wanted in Kemper and stood me in front of a Kemper claiming the profile was loaded, but I was actually playing through a Helix, I would probably swear it sounded exactly like the amp I wanted and I could never get the sound I was hearing from a Helix.

Well, this actually brings up another issue. If you actually want different loudness between snapshots, do you have to decide what your "neutral" volume is and then level your snapshots +/- 3 dB. In other words, do you actually want unity gain between all the snapshots? Lately, I've been trying to use less actual volume boost and rely more on EQ and and eliminating reverb for leads. So I can see keeping things close to unity, but I can't see each snapshot being 100% the same volume for my purposes. Maybe you use your volume knob more than I do or use stomp boxes more within each snapshot for dynamics?

Also, append the 8-digit date to the end of each backup file: "my preset 1 20170509.hlx", "my setlist 1 20170509.hls", and so on. When you retrieve your backup, you'll know which is the most up-to-date version at a glance. Emailing would take care of this if you just refer to the most recent email. But using Dropbox or other cloud storage simplifies the process by automatically syncing to the cloud, if you have your folders set up that way.