phil_m

What Line 6 product are you using?

In Snapshot Mode, you'll always see 8 snapshots. The different view settings apply to what's displayed in Preset Mode.

Well, of course I'm listening to respond here, as I'm personally powerless to make any design decisions as to what we're talking about here. I'm not a Line 6 customer service rep. These aren't CS forums. They're user forums. They're meant to be a place where users can interact with each other and discuss how they're using the unit. The fact the there is some amount of involvement from the product management side of things is a big plus, imo. It's a relatively new development here. But the thing is people like DI aren't going to give the standard PR answers to questions, and I'm glad they don't. I actually want them to honestly defend their design decisions and state why they did things and explain why they can't do certain things... It's refreshing to me.

Nothing I said was adversarial or condescending. I mean, people complained about the tuner, so they changed it. If they made further changes, there would likely still be people who wouldn't be pleased (there were people on Facebook saying they liked the previous version of the tuner better, for example). It's just the way it goes. I actually didn't say anything about drawing a "line in the sand"... That was the comment after me. I did say that they would have to draw a line at some point. I don't think that investing a ton of time and energy into a feature like the tuner is the best way for them to use their resources, but it's not my decision.

The thing is that if product developers listen to every opinion or complaint they hear, they'd never be able to make or own any decision. It's impossible to satisfy every critic out there. Not saying it's easy to know when and where to draw the line, but I'm certain it needs to be drawn.

Well, in some sense, since the USB 7/8 inputs are digital, talking about input impedance as it relates to pickup loading kind of doesn't make sense. But the dry signal that get sent to USB 7/8 will be affected by the input Z setting because that setting is actually determining how your guitar pickups are being loaded. Think of it like this - the USB 7/8 dry signal is split off after the guitar in A/D converter (after the signal has been converted to digital). The input Z setting is affecting the analog signal prior to conversion. Does that make sense?

The input impedance is an actual physical circuit, so if you're reamping from a signal you recorded through the Helix's guitar input, the input impedance is "baked in" to the recorded signal. The input Z setting doesn't have any affect on the USB input signal.

Whenever I see this topic move back up top, I think of this:

Where are you seeing all these recent negative reviews, though? The last negative one I see on Sweetwater is from January 2016... (same on GC and Amazon). Just curious. Personally, I think with any item sold online, there's always going to be some negative review. There don't seem to be a ton of reviews of the G70 in general, so I don't know, it's hard to say. This particular section of the forum isn't exactly tearing it up as far as the number of posts per day goes. I think because a wireless system is much simpler from an operational perspective, these forums are always going to be slow. I think people see these things as either working or not, and I imagine that people who own them and haven't had problems are much less likely to post about them than those that have problems.

I don't have the G70, but I do have the G75, which is essentially the same transmitter and receiver, but the receiver in just a different form factor. I've been using it consistently for probably six months now, and I've literally never had a dropout... This is in all sorts of environments - church, clubs, outdoors and at home. So I don't know why some people have dropouts and others don't. I guess the thing I notice in regards to the reviews is that none of the retailers actually have all that many reviews. On Musician's Friend, for instant, there are only 4 reviews, and the two negative ones are from 2015... I just think that no wireless technology is going to be completely bulletproof because of the nature of the tech itself. There's always a chance for interference. I see it my work with wireless lighting controls as well. Manufacturers try to plan for all contingencies, but there's always unexpected issues in the real world. But to answer your question, I don't believe that Line 6 takes the line that they are simply going to walk away from developing solutions to problems with the products if they need it. I think the one thing that makes it kind of tricky is that this sort of development usually requires some amount of cooperation from the customer side as well. Line 6 can only fix problems if they're made aware of them and the context in which they happen.

The throughput latency of the Helix is kind of difficult to give exact numbers on because it's always going to be slightly different depending on what's in the patch. But, IIRC, I believe it's less than 2ms (probably closer to 1.5ms). Generally every layer of conversion through one of the Helix's loops add something like 1 - 1.2ms. So, I suppose if you're using multiple loops with digital pedals in them (all loops on at the same time), it would be possible to get up around 10ms. But that would take a lot of stuff.

I imagine that would sound pretty bad...

I think if you are the type of player who has a lot of consistency from preset to preset, snapshots make a lot of sense. For example, if you have a number of presets built around the same core amp sound, having snapshots makes this a lot easier if you decide you want to change an amp setting. Rather than doing it every preset, you can just do it in the one, and that's it... It is a different mindset, really. If you truly "set it and forget it", than there might not be a huge benefit for snapshots... For my acoustic presets, for example, I haven't even messed with snapshots because I don't really ever change anything in them. But for my typical electric playing which is more improvisational, snapshots have been a huge help.

Well, not really... The "none" mic option on the Axe-FX is simply a reference mic (I believe Cliff said it's one of the Earthworks reference mics). The reminds me of the Acoustics classes I took in college. I believe one of the first thing the professor wrote on the board was that acoustics was all about sound sources, signals and receivers... Take away any of them and you would have no sound. So the answer to the question of whether or not a tree falling in the woods with no one there made a sound was unequivocally "no"... :)

I should add that right now there's a bug (well, I think it's a bug, but in any case, it's a behavior that's not explained in the manual). If you have a CC Value assigned to a footswitch, you can actually assign a different value to that for each snapshot, and that value is shot out with each snapshot change. So that could be one reason why you're running into issues with having a CC assigned to a footswitch. You could actually use this to your advantage, I suppose, where it treats the CCs assigned to footswitch like Instant Commands, but it also might make it hard to keep track of what values are being used where. If you do want a MIDI CC Value footswitch that does the same thing in every snapshot, you just have to go and set the value to be the same for each snapshot.

You don't actually need to assign these CC Values to footswitches, unless you want to. To do what you want to do, go into the Command Center, select the little lightning bolt icon for an Instant Command, and the CC accordingly. You just have to set it for each snapshot. If you have the Snapshot Edit parameter set to "Recall", your changes will be saved as you make them. If you have it set to "Discard", you have to save the preset before going to the next snapshot. It's really that easy.

This probably isn't really a helpful comment for you, but, personally, I'm not a huge fan of using compression with electric guitar live. I've owned probably at least half a dozen compressors over the years, and it's just never been something I've found all that useful when playing live. If anything, I find it to have more detrimental effects than not using it. There are few of my Helix presets where I use it in limited ways, but most of the time I don't use it.... That's just me. Recording, well, that's another thing altogether. I find that I use it a lot of different ways. In a full multi-track mix I actually like creating a separate guitar buss and applying compression there to help glue everything together. It's kind of a cliche, but the trick is to not overdo it... But getting back to live use... I read an interview with the Edge once where he was talking about how he hates using things like noise gates because they never feel right to him. I put compression and noise gates in the same category in that they are messing with the dynamics of the guitar (a noise gate is technically an expander, kind of the opposite of a compressor). Overdrive and distortion introduce some amount of compression, but that always feels more natural to me than actually using a compressor.

The switches on the Firehawk are the same as the HD500X.

I kind of like the idea of having a visual indicator of the position... It would be cool have a horizontal bar on the scribble strip above the expression pedal indication it's relative position.

Did you get the EXT AMP jack to work with a footswitch? If you can do that, you should be able to get it to work with snapshot changes.

Perhaps you're on the full version rather than the mobile version? If you are, there should be a link on the lower left hand corner of the screen that says, "Use Mobile Version".

Yeah, that's a typo... The correct description is on pg 36:

The way you're getting the EXT AMP switching to work with snapshots is by design... You have to have it assigned to a footswitch to work with snapshot changes. You can't just assign it as an Instant Command. As far the humbuster cables, they actually won't make any difference with the Helix. Without actual humbuster jacks, it's the same as using regular TS cables.

The only differences between the them is that the HD Pro X's processor offers about 20% more processing power than the HD Pro and the Pro X has a slightly brighter screen. The main reason the X was released was that processor that the HD500 and HD Pro used was discontinued, so that's why Line 6 did the partial upgrade. Both series use the same firmware and the model packs will work on both units.

Sometimes ground loops are simply unavoidable with the 4CM. Picking up one of these little guys (even though it's from the company who shall not be named...) can help. If you put this after your amp's effects send, it would most likely clear any ground loop noise up. You could actually do it on both the send and return, but you should only need it one place. It's basically an isolation transformer, so it actually creates a physical break in the circuit, hence breaking the ground loop.