donkelley

thanks, I'll be checking it out. Although it never occurred to me the sound should be any different for my drop guitar than my regular guitar... so maybe I have something to learn for that (drop tuning is one of my new things). Cheers

I've experienced this also. I'm not sure yet what it is I'm doing that makes it happen, same as you.

Oooh, good suggestion. Not just for this but for some other items I own (mixers, etc). Please let us know how they work out :-)

I wouldn't say it really works like that. Not sure you can actually bypass the entire unit in one go, at least not with the HELIX which is what you asked about. To understand that, you have to understand what true bypass actually means. True bypass means there is a hardwired direct connection from input to output when you bypass an effect pedal. It is generally considered the opposite of buffered, which means there is a circuit in place on the input that ensures the electrical properties of the input remain ideal for a passive guitar or bass, whether or not the effect is in operation. The input on the Helix is designed to be either automatically, or manually if you prefer, set to run at a certain input impedance, so it works ideally with whatever you connect to it (typically a guitar or bass, but there's no limitation). For example, if you connect a passive piezo instrument to the input, you might want to set the helix input up differently. Active instrument? Then you don't need to worry about the input impedance so much. What about an old Fender rhoads electric piano? It's all part of a circuit, and you need to understand what you're doing to set it up ideally. That very lightly touches on the input of the helix, and should suggest to you that buffered versus hard wired ("true bypass") aren't really part of the picture with the helix. Then, within the helix, you can place models of pedals chosen from a library of hundreds. Each of those models accurately recreates the electrical properties of the actual pedal, in a rather shockingly amazing bit of software engineering from Line6. So an ancient, famous fuzz pedal that wasn't buffered originally and actually had somewhat bizarre input impedance properties will still behave that way within the helix. Hence why the Auto mode on the input of the helix is such a great thing. It can work just like your non buffered fuzz pedal, and work with your guitar how it would work in real life, more or less. That is several steps further in "wow" value than simply making this either a buffered or non-buffered question. The DRAWBACK to this is the same as the drawback to using the real fuzz pedal with your guitar in real life, without a buffered pedal before it. It is a tone killer, in many cases. Buffers can be a GOOD THING with certain circuits, which was understood well in the 70s and 80s, but wasn't understood well in the 60s. So the helix correctly emulates the good, AND BAD, effects of unbuffered pedals. Bypass on the pedal works the same way in the helix. That same pedal, unbuffered, can cause tone suck when turned off, unless you put a buffered pedal ahead of it in your chain. If you want true bypass, it is all software, but the bypass can/is 100% ... you don't get any line6-caused electrical or tone changes when you bypass each pedal. The only effects you get are the actual pedal's effects when they are bypassed, for better or worse. The entire helix is generally expected to be used also as an amp/cab modeler... and as a result, asking if the Helix is true bypass is sort of not a realistic use case, I would think. Who would expect to hit a switch and bypass their entire rig, and just send their raw guitar cable in the PA? I mean, you could, and the helix would let you... but yuck :-). To bypass the entire pedal, there is a bypass button, and you can probably program a foot switch to do that for you, at least I wouldn't be surprised. But it's normally an always-on thing, just like your amp, and you turn on/off stomp pedals within it using the floor buttons (as well as changing presets, snapshots, etc). I hope that helps. It's a complex topic, and I also hope that I got it all right in my very high level (I.E. simple, lacking-detail) summary.

Yes, that's very observant. Very good point, and it is a lesson we should all learn, whether or not we use modelers that require a lot of prep. Thanks for pointing that out!

You ARE using a cab after your distortion box in your hx blocks, right? And you probably will want to cut highs on the cab or after the cab (or using global eq) around 8k-ish by a few db. If you aren't using a cab block, it'll sound like crap, just like taking a distortion pedal and plugging the output into a PA system or a recording interface.

So clever! I'll have to play with things like this.

Sorry to hear that! Certainly firmware updates via USB aren't rocket science, so it's likely that you did things correctly. The app does everything for you, and assuming you connected directly to your computer usb port and didn't have a misconfigured laptop who's usb port erroneously went into a sleep or low power state, it all should have worked fine, and FW jumping to 2.92 is apparently valid. Either way, the app takes care of those decisions for you. Since you already said that you followed the steps provided by line6 and after opening a support ticket, it's highly likely that you did everything correctly. But please do review the steps outlined in the post above mine to make sure. If something was missed in your execution that then resulted in this issue, then posting that detail here might help re-enforce this info for others in the future. Hope the assistance from datacommando works for you! Good luck!

Cool! He always was a line6 fan, and used them right from the ax212 amp onward, despite fighting with the tech at times. He uses a lot of other things too, mind you (I got to hang with him and talk shop 20 years ago and go through his rig, which was in my drummer's home/studio/rehearsal space at the time). I'm excited to hear he's using the helix now! A true legend in guitar land, although very polarizing as a player. One of my all time favorites, and a hell of a guy, too, not to mention one of my personal idols. He's been so dedicated to line6 from the start, it's rather amazing really!

Yea I know folks do the laptop thing - I don't want to deal with that live at all. But there sure are great software apps!

That's sort of interesting! I wonder if some software loopers work like that (sans the key sig requirements/limitations etc)? Computer looping, heck, computer anything, is limitless compared to hardware products, if you ignore the obvious differences/limitations/pros/cons of a pc versus a floorboard.

moar looper

good point! Thanks! :-)

Oh, folks on fractal forum talk about their looper often. And FWIW I meant "the original pod looper" as in the original looper that appeared in a pod. I didn't explain it further since that was clarified in the video posted by someone before me in this thread, which is why I continued the conversation about the original pod looper. Literally every competitor has loopers that are more useful. If you think it's a niche feature, then maybe it depends on your instrument. For example, I play several instruments, one of which is 6 string bass. If you go to youtube and search up 6 string bass solo, you see a good example at the top, and no it doens't require a long looper - helix will be fine. but then you see a suggestion at right of 50+ 6 string bass solos youtube collection. I watched several of them last night. 90% use a looper. That was a total shock to me last night. Yes they're using short loops, but it's part of nearly every solo bass song example in that collection. It's just a random video collection I hit as the topmost link, and it didn't mention loopers at all, yet nearly all of the examples use a looper. If I were performing live, I'd want a looper that was more predictable and deeper than the helix looper, unless I was desperate. I didn't buy the helix because of it's looper - but when I tried it, I was so surprised that it has it's own footswitch layout, own operating mode, and so much physical layout room for improvements.... I just hope that they will improve the software in some way to bring it up to current standards, even if the length remains short. Any one of features that are probably varying complexity to add would be beneficial to using a looper live, safely, reliably. When Helix came out, other competition didn't exist yet, at least not with the features they have now. Now, even the Zoom g11 (their helix/axe competitor) has a several minute looper with built in rhythm patterns. Zoom is legendary for 30 second basic loopers like the older line6 multifx looper, still used in the helix. It makes me think, maybe line6 will up the priority of the looper improvements that they probably tossed around early on (every software feature design includes ideas for the future, whether or not they ever get built). I expect their own market research is pretty deep and will tell them what to do, though. I'm just crossing my fingers a little bit in case. Either way, I can't wait to see what comes in 3.0... looper changes or not! :-)

Yea, back in the day when that was all we had, we made use of it like crazy. Compared to tape loopers, those early digital ones were amazing! But the helix looper is pretty close to what the original pod looper had, which wasn't exactly far reaching back then even. It's been, what, a decade? more? And look at the competition to the helix... what their included loopers can do.

Headrush looper is amazing, and even the axefx iii looper is at least a usable 5 minutes long (or is it 6?). I really hope they can give us competitive length, and honestly, anything the headrush can do, the helix has pretty much been able to match or surpass, so I would be surprised if there isn't a big improvement to the looper coming up with fw3.x I am only guessing, though. As someone who has enjoyed making music with loopers many times and uses them sometimes when doing solo live concerts, I'd love that! longer length, more useful double track control with safe undo controls (not dangerous "oops, he killed his loop live in concert!" situations as is possible with some older, very basic loopers..... which the helix looper is equivalent to other than having a couple more buttons (And several buttons completely unused that could have been doing great looper tricks/effects, if the firmware ever manages to include the looper software features to utilize those buttons). And heck, the looper in this thing doesn't exceed the capabilities of loopers in many year old multifx devices I have kicking around. So here's crossing our fingers that it's one of the items they managed to improve notably in the next big FW update release! If not in 3.0, then I kind of think it'll never happen, so let them focus on the rest of the device, and we can do with dedicated loopers if needed.

I believe, generally, that IRs use more DSP. If so, then you could run out of DSP for other fancy effects and multiple blocks of stuff going on, rather than using one of the built in helix cabs. The built in helix cabs have far more configuration options, miking choices and positions, etc... all in one cab block. The built in helix cabs tend to be brighter, which can be great, but if you want to shave off the fizzy highs on a distorted tone, for example, and you are used to getting that from your choice of speaker cab... then you maybe could find an IR file that handles that for you. You can make your own Cab IR files..... not saying it's easy to do it well (ideally you want an anechoic chamber, or at least a very well treated (dry, acoustically) room, so your cab doesn't always sound like it's in your kitchen, even when you're playing at carnegie hall. Those are superficial items. If you check my post history, you can probably find a thread I created about cabs and IRs and how to avoid fizzy sound, and such. Might help, might not, but it's free to read, and has good contributions from multiple people. Cheers

Too bad you can't duplicate it then remove the cab (which, behind the scenes would actually replace the block with the amp-only version and replicate the settings for you). Definitely something that could be coded in, but I bet it would be a huge task for them since it likely would require custom code or some kind of custom lookup/copy system for each and every amp that is available, which is a heck of a lot. At least we can get by ourselves by manually copying the settings - just like the old days if you had a backup amp on stage... you'd spend time setting controls similarly between them (unless you were very successful and had a roadie/tech I guess LoL).

So they still haven't solved this problem eh? It's why I eventually sold my variax 300, which had several upgrades and was a good guitar, and which I used professionally for studio recording (even to do a cover of a famous guitar solo for the soundtrack of a big budget movie made in China, using a hollowbody tone on my variax). But eventually it's very subtle latency combined with a subtle piezo quack and a tiny issue with the tail end of the decay.... made me just want to stop playing it. I keep reading this forum to find out that with the newest, sexiest guitars, they have found some new ways around these inherent issues... and by the way the variax is AMAZING... but that inherent problem for me just limits it a little too much. It's great for many purposes... but yea, quack is an interesting word for it. Sorta fits though. Not sure I've heard it quite as strong as you are describing it, though.

FYI - android is built from some of the same foundations as linux - but most of it's system and concepts are completely distinct from how linux works. Android and ChromeOS are independent operating systems, built for different purposes, and of course may share some similarities... but one could not say that chromeos is android. It's quite unique in what it runs, and how it runs it. But of course, they do share a few pieces, which would be dumb for Google not to have done. My brother was director of technology at PalmSource when Google came to him to negotiate a way to utilize parts of PalmOS in the new operating system Google was developing - soon to be named Android (2 decades ago). There are aspects that are unix or linux based in nearly all modern operating systems (so basically everything other than windows...)... modern being really anything invented within the past 4 decades, more or less. You can go back and run the same bash commands on an Amiga or on your android phone (with a terminal app installed) and they will work identically. The filessystem structure might superfically seem similar, once you get into the private system folders in Android and ChromeOS and MacOS, for example. But they aren't compatible in any deep, meaningful way, and any audio hardware that happens to work on one OS is either uniquely supported intentionally by the OS (built in or with a special driver), or the hardware itself includes standards-compliant USB protocol for the fundamental audio it processes, so it will work easily, if only in a basic way, on lots of hardware. If plugging in a helix does nothing, then I doubt it's an easy hill to climb to get it to become compatible. It might require low level knowledge and development, even. If you want to make something run under ChromeOS or Android, you have a lot of work ahead of you. :-) I DO think it would be incredibly useful if you could use a chrome book with helix products..... so if you succeed at all, please let us know! I just think it'll be more effort than it's worth, if possible at all (I mean, I'm sure it's possible, but you might need to go get a job with line6, have them agree to pay you to do this (IE is it worth their money), just so you can have access to all of their existing driver code for other platforms to see if you can build something that allows the basic stuff to work under Chrome.

Holy, that's awesome! What a great story! I'm a multi-instrumentalist myself, and recently moved to the Helix LT for a total replacement of all other gear (hopefully... so far that's looking possible, other than the far too limited looper). My main instruments are Bass, violin, and guitar, but also viola, mandolin, drums, synth/piano, and recently working on learning Cello sufficiently to perform reliably on it (helps that I'm a trained violinist and a bassist). Always wanted a stick, but never got one. I too am blown away with the responsiveness of the Helix, it's tone, and it's usability and versatility. It's near limitless! Congrats on your story - great to see your 2 year update! Cheers

Great.. now I want fish for dinner! Update: Yep, I had fish last night.

Everything is these days, unless brass or steel are required. Even where brass or steel are required, like in guitar bridges, I owned an $8XX instrument that was considered sort of an iconic top of their line axe (import line, yes, but some amazing instruments are imports).... and the bridge metal bent as you tightened the adjustment screws. Pot metal! (Proven when I took bridge apart to see the damage.... chrome plated pot metal, not steel). annoying, eh?

That's odd. I'm happy you like your pedal now, but I get AMAZING tone from the built in wahs. Silly question, but you're using the built in ones properly, right?/ Like you have to press hard on toe switch to make the light turn red, and have to configure the wah in a block and then configure that block to work with the built in expression pedal... or something like that.

Great post, thank you :-)