donkelley

The most insulting arrogant person I've ever seen on a forum. I didn't start the thread. I joined in with the OP's thread points, talking about the helix specifically in my post, and brought up it's looper limitations, and suggested some logical conclusions about why it's like that, and the first thing you said to me was this: " O.K. Here we go again - this is like trying to explain what colour “red” is to someone who was born blind! " So who exactly started all of this? How exactly is that not incredibly insulting, and assuming a lot about me, and not sarcastic? You clearly think you have some senior rights in this forum and that everyone else must be ignorant and able to read your mind, so your first response is repeatedly wildly sarcastic and insulting. Why exactly are you so defensive about the helix looper? Look at your response to musiclover7's question about the looper length... a post that received 4 upvotes. You're standing alone in your behavior here. Thanks for completely derailing a very interesting thread. You mentioned 2016. I have not owned a helix since 2016. But I take it that the looper hasn't been updated significantly since then, and I stand by my thoughts of how it could be improved in firmware alone, no hardware changes, to make it a live performance tool. To me, the looper, like all of the helix, is still pretty new since I bought mine in 2020. I do appreciate the link to a thread I didn't know existed from digital Igloo... since, as I noted, I am NOT the OP... I didn't have any reason to search before contributing to a thread about the helix firmware looper limitations. Digital Igloo is amazing, and I've enjoyed his insights in my reading since I purchased the helix not that long ago.

If you are part of the massive crowd of people that's never found the need for a looper, why on earth are you posting in a thread who's sole topic is to discuss the limitations of the current looper in the product? That's like someone going into a thread complaining about the limitations in Fender basses because they are pretty much all bolt-on models instead of neck through, and you post that you're not the least bit concerned about Fender basses being bolt on. This is because you are part of the massive crowd of people who've never found a need for a neck through bass. You started your post by pointing out that this has nothing to do with you, and you don't care at all about it, but you went through with posting opinions about it anyhow. If you think the price of the helix would be significantly higher by them improving a feature, then I guess it must have skyrocketed with every amazing firmware release where they add HUNDREDS of new features and improve existing features by leaps and bounds. Just because you don't care about a feature doesn't make the feature less important to those who are creating, and participating in, a thread about that feature. And your logic about costs doesn't follow with how line6 does business.

So.... I took the following statement to be disparaging about my intelligence: I have no idea” Now, there’s a statement you made that could well be true. Hmmm... well there seems to be room for interpretation, I guess, but among my family that's something folks say when they're being general about the person, not specific to the topic. If you meant that I have no idea about the helix looper, well, that's sort of a strange point to make, imho. I clearly have used loopers, I know how the helix looper works, I have a strong idea of the feature set I'm looking for in any looper, I pointed out another looper that has superior features, etc. So, to me, for you to state a general statement about me having no idea, well that seems like something you really should have expected a defensive reaction to. Why else would you provoke me like that? "Dangerous" - we're talking about loopers here. If you actually have used loopers for live work, you know how dangerous they can be, and how important it is to have a few fundamental features to save you when something goes wrong. The word "dangerous" absolutely applies here. I googled it: - able or likely to cause harm or injury. - likely to cause problems or to have adverse consequences. - Similar: hazardous, perilous, risky, high-risk, ,raught with danger, unsafe So, maybe you assumed I meant that missing features could somehow harm you, although that seems very highly unlikely. Surprisingly enough, I actually meant danger in how the looper works in relation to live performance, which is what I was discussing in my post. Sarcasm - what came across in most of your responses. If they weren't intended to sound sarcastic, you have to understand that the way you reply to things, finding fault repeatedly in minutia that was apparently taken out of context or without granting that maybe I know something about the industry that you might not..... it comes across as sarcastic. "get over it"... get over it? You didn't disagree with my statements, which you claim is what I need to "Get over" - you disagreed with my opinions of the line6 helix looper because, what, you think it's impossible for someone to make rational, possibly accurate conclusions about the product without actually working for line6? Is that it? I couldn't possibly be correct since I don't have proof of my educated guesses about how things work at line6, which I guess couldn't possibly be similar in general to how it works at all other companies inventing firmware for their own hardware design in a competitive world with short deadlines and constant feature requests, marketing teams, QA stages, and follows the development lifecycle. I made guesses about it based on having a lot of experience in the industry, something that I most musicians don't have. It's a helpful set of knowledge that gives me some insight into some of the common things that happen in these companies, and I wouldn't be surprised, therefore, to find that the looper was going to go further than it currently does, but there hasn't been the money to do so (money which pays for human resources that do the work, not to mention the time it takes until that gets to customers). There's nothing wrong with saying what I said - I'm perfectly fine with being wrong about it. What I'm not ok with is being told I need to prove and defend my ideas. Why do I need to prove anything? I feel it's likely I'm right, but I could be wrong about why the looper is like this. Maybe it's exactly how Line6 wanted it, or maybe even more than they hoped for, and they are enjoying it's success. That's great -- I'd be surprised, but it's perfectly fine. We will likely never know, either way. It's not up to you to tell me I'm wrong - nor is it up to me to prove I'm correct. I just strongly feel that the looper is lacking in a few ways, and I'm not the only one. If this thread isn't about finding fault in the looper - then what the heck is it about? "The looper could easily be more useful" is the thread title. I agree completely - and I even explained how I feel it wouldn't be that challenging. I am very aware of how hardware restricts things versus firmware, and I'm sorry that maybe you think I must prove that. But you really are replying with strongly antagonistic posts.... which seems odd, to me. You assume I couldn't come to rational, or accurate conclusions about the looper and why it's like this. I thought my conclusions make a lot of sense, and I stand by my assumptions that line6 follows the development lifecycle, has a marketing team and financial team and deals with thousands of feature requests and weights pros/cons and dev costs for each, and eventually had to not go as far with the included looper as they may have originally intended. Have a great day! Cheers

Absolutely, yes, I am making a broad set of assumptions - although they're hardly WAGs or anything. That wasn't the point of what I said, though. I have strong feelings about the looper - there are open source loopers for pcs that are far more powerful than the looper in the helix - of course pc resources aren't limited, so it's an unfair comparison. My point of mentioning that, though, is that the state of loopers has gotten to the point where anyone can grab a useful, live targetted looper, for the price of a nice dinner out you and your date. So, that being said, it still seems to me like it is incomplete - for all the reasons I pointed out already. No sense in rehashing it - folks here seem pretty defensive that the helix looper is exactly as it should be, and that disagreeing with that must mean I'm asking for something unusual, or making assumptions about the R&D that couldn't possibly be accurate since I don't work for Line6. So it's ok - I made my claims about how I feel the looper appears incomplete to me, as though there were big plans for it but it looked like it would cost too much so further feature dev was stopped, and I'd bet real money that there is a developer or two at Line6 who would say that too, behind closed doors. I also pointed out good reasoning for my assumptions that it's a desired feature from a quick google finding a lot of youtubes dedicated to it specifically. Seems like a pretty rational post, all in all :-) I appreciate your reply - it makes a lot of sense, and doesn't disagree with what I was saying, actually. Just points out the reasons why I might be wrong, which I totally don't dispute. Cheers :-)

Really? Dangerous, OBVIOUSLY in the sense that it's dangerous to use live without errors happening. If you use loopers, you know what I'm talking about. You're a sarcastic person, aren't you? I guess you take this all very personally. FWIW, I'm a huge fan of the Helix, and a professional musician for nearly 4 decades. I'm not a fool, nor ignorant about my statements, and I clearly pointed out my frustration about the current state of the looper as it appears, to me, to be something that was designed to be an impressive feature that was released with a more simplistic feature set than is ideal, probably due to R&D cost reasons (since that is typically was causes incomplete feature development). If you disagree with my view, that's perfectly fine. I however don't assume that you are a moron because you disagree with me. There's nothing wrong with finding fault in a product you own. I find fault in one feature in an otherwise absolutely stunning piece of equipment which I chose over the Axe FM3 when I had the opportunity to use both, and have extensive experience in modelling. And yes, I understand the workflow of firmware development, having worked as a senior developer in two different firmware development companies for many years, having been involved in software management for several years, and so forth. Anyone in the industry understands the complexities in software and firmware development. So I'm not saying this out of naivety or arrogance, I'm saying it out of personal experience with the workflow a company like Line6 must go through, the costs, complexities, planning, surprises that come up, and the portability of existing business logic while requiring redevelopment for new hardware and, likely, using a new or strongly updated dev stack. So it takes a lot of money - but the hardware is not the limitation in the points I stated that about. What's your personal background? Why are you assuming I'm making this stuff up? There is ZERO sense of entitlement. How old are you anyhow? I'm in my 50s and worked my lollipop off to get my degrees, and had nothing handed to me along the way. The only arrogance I see here is someone assuming that statements from a stranger must be from an entitled fool.

With the effort they put into giving the helix looper a dedicated button layout, more buttons than most cheap 1 button loopers that are, shockingly, more useful, it's really frustrating to have it be such a restrictive, dangerous challenge to use. I understand it wasn't designed to have persistent memory between power on/off or patch changes etc.... but if it did, it would be a huge help right away. I have no idea if there is the ability to do that or if it's restricted by the hardware. If not, it's still capable of so much more than it does now. How about proper dual tracks (A/B style, or layering style)? That wouldn't reuqire changes to the hardware - 2 tracks, yes half length ones, but that suddenly gives a musician the ability to create real time proper looper songs that have parts that come in and out without having to use extreme care in your live track playing order. I'm fairly certain that this is possible with the appropriate software (firmware)... of course, lots of coding work, but it's not like they're inventing the business logic for loopers - it's all out there and some amazing examples are in public domain, not to mention their own old, but solid, hardware loopers. There is enough interest in the line6 helix included looper that a quick googling revealed a handful youtube clips about how to use the looper in the helix, amounting to 30 minutes of education about it with zero effort in google. That's before I scrolled my screen down. But I still can't use it for anything but the most simplistic looper song building... which is cool, but archaic. If there is that much interest in it, then customers want to use it. I don't expect it to turn into a high end looper - I just want it to become a USEFUL looper, competitive with the most basic good live use loopers available for 40 to 80 bucks on amazon. With the number of dedicated looper-mode buttons the helix has, more than many far superior dedicated loopers, the only flaw is likely the lack of development time and resources they have been given to create something more powerful. Short loop lengths? That's ok if the loops are useful and reliable and can be turned on/off in real time in productive ways. They already include the difficult part in the helix. It HAS a functioning looper, with a special foot switch mode for it, with it's own color scheme, block, etc. It's just so so close, but it's like it's unfinished.

Agreed. Better yet, include a real looper. I simply can't fathom that it isn't possible, and it has been requested SO MUCH that I'd think they'd want to put the financial investment into design, development, QA and integration into a future FW release. honestly it matters more to me than most of the other requests. More than polyphonic pitch, even, although that certainly is the other big request that people feel is critical. With those two things - this seriously would imho THE modeler to beat, hands down. As it is now, it's already in that ballpark, but requires a couple of fairly expensive other pedals in your fx loop (poly pitch and a good looper) to do what I do.

Just wanted to point out how clearly worded this post is! Your issue totally makes sense, glad you have a solid answer. I've been wondering about this sort of setup also, since the looper in the helix is inferior to even my $40 Ammoon mini looper (at least the Ammoon remembers your loop and undo history when powered off). Please post here with any updates about how this works out for you, OP - I personally would like to know if it's worth investing in a slightly nicer looper since I'd only want to use it in the same way you are describing... otherwise it's not worth the price for me. Cheers

powered studio monitors, with or without a subwoofer first that handles crossover to monitors for you, are a great (and imho, personally recommended) way to play through helix at home or, obviously, in a recording studio. You get the advantage of hearing how it would sound if recorded directly and played back through a daw through those studio monitors, so you learn to eq appropriately in the helix, or adjust virtual mic positions and cab choices according to how you avoid fizz or get the tone you want or accentuate treble or lows or whatever. It's a great concept, assuming it sounds half decent (gear-wise)... so enjoy! I'm just an end user like you though... not a line6 expert or anything

Kind of seems to me like the long scale length is maybe not being utilized for it's most traditional purpose, if you still have to tune it to E standard and use electronic drop tuning. I mean, the whole point is that you tune it down, when it's a longer scale length. But I guess you can enjoy the higher tension of longer scale length, which I guess some players would enjoy. But, I mean, speaking as someone who has yet to buy either Shurikan (I still use an old 300 highly modified),,,, A really cool feature UNIQUE TO THE 270 would be to allow it to be tuned to drop D or open D and have the tunings knob work natively with that as your base tuning. Then you're playing a long scale guitar that feels like a normal long scale guitar - not tighter tighter strings (longer scale tune up to regular tuning) or much lighter gauge than you're used to (if you even have room to go lighter - I play 9-48 so no useful room to lower tension except on the lowest couple strings). Actually sort of seems like this should have been in the basic design of the 270... why have a long scale guitar otherwise? Although the long scale does LOOK the part, even if there's no real advantage to playing one over the 250 25.5" scale from a variax point of view, and some disadvantages (maybe compromises is a more polite term) of playing one from a guitarist<->string-feel point of view.

Totally! I agree with literally everything you said. From your prior post it wasn't clear to me that you had actually tried all of this stuff and knew about it - but also I wanted to describe the pros and cons here for reference for others reading in the future. :-) I was suggesting similar "but it actually can be done, and could sound good" reactions, like you, after my "this is why we don't" paragraphs LoL, because I too like the idea of that and have played with those CAB IR files (not on a helix). They are really cool - but... I work like a recording engineer when I do this stuff, so I really do prefer the traditional (studio method) of working with a dry file and adding the wet effects (room sound etc) electronically after the cab block. But yea, totally.... there are not only ways to do it now (outside of helix, maybe a little bit within helix if it's still a short convolution file), but it's music we're making here... and guitar (or bass or whatever) that we're playing through this (probably in real time)... so just use the tech to work how we each want to use it to get the sound that inspires us! If baked in room sound is a good sound, then yea, go for it! I am aware of some of the experiments with cab ir files... just that in my own experiments with those files, they were more of a special case use, not an every day use. But just like how we all have some form of HOF reverb now (well, many of us anyhow) on our real or virtual pedal boards.... for some big room sound.... we can do the same thing with big room cabs, no matter if we're in a big room or playing through headphones. I personally feel that doing so, and then actually playing through a big reverberant room would end up being headache inducing... but that is more from my own single test of that theory than lots of experimentation. Cheers! Also, if you have suggestions from experimenting of long cab IR files that sound good for you, please post ideas here!

You're very welcome! Thanks so much for your appreciative remarks! :-) Well while that seems like a good idea, there are pros and cons to what you suggested, and it isn't just a technology limitation, actually, it's a physics limitation... and the current solutions work really well and are pretty much all we are able to do, based on physics. .....(Meaning, the way we play live, and the way room sound is heard by both microphones and our ears, how a cab being recorded for an IR file is in a room and your FRFR speaker is also in a room, and how live sound standards already just use a single mic on a single part of a single speaker on your real cab... all work together to make any changes to that a limitation of physics, not what our modelers and IR technology are capable of doing). Multi mic IRs do exist. I have some - they can be amazing. The ones I use are still done with all close miking, mostly still trying to avoid the room sound. Quickly I will touch on the problem with having a mic or two further back to get the tone of your cab better recorded: - Mic further from amp gets much less level from the amp, and therefore pics up OTHER sounds much more. In a room, your amp's sound is reflected back surprisingly loudly by walls, particularly the wall it faces, but all walls reflect back a ton of sound... floors are horrible for this, even carpeted floors (carpet just reduces some high frequencies, but it's still there, and mids/lows are not reduced at all by carpet). So you have a mic a foot or so away from your amp, pointing at it, maybe at a bit of an angle... seems like a great idea, right? And such things DO exist, by the way. But now that mic picks up early reflections from floor and walls, which are NOT an attractive sound, generally. Not something you want baked into your tone, since when you place your FRFR speaker down and play through it live, it has it's own fair share of early reflections and "speaker in a room" sound, not the cab effects, no, but still it's a speaker in a room... and having the original room sound in the IR on top of your frfr or pa speaker sitting in a room with it's early reflections too... well it CAN sound pretty horrible, I'm afraid. Therefore, we generally speaking, we do NOT want the "sound of the room" in the cab IR. Once you bake in a room sound by having mics further from the cab to get the great distant cab sound, you cannot remove the sound of the room again. IF you want distant miking of your cab (distant being anything other than right next to cone), then getting room sound mixed into the tone is a nasty side effect that is nearly impossible to avoid, hence my repeated points about room sound being baked in. Room sound is, initially and mostly, a bunch of early reflections, and, just like when recording vocals, you want no room sound at all normally and recreate it electronically afterwards to give you full control over the mix and tones. It's like having an undefeatable short analog delay effect with multiple repeats at a very short speed and fast decay rate. CAB IRs INTENTIONALLY have as close to zero room sound, in other words early reflections, as possible, because they give a specific tone that you can't take out again. You can add them IN again easily with early reflection reverb/delay effects.... but YES, to your point (and mine in the first post), the newly added ones don't sound quite the same because they don't include the various speaker angle output reflection complexity that helps our cabs sounds like they do in a GOOD room. Ideally you want to make your Cab IR recordings in an anechoic chamber (a room without any echos). Such things do exist, but are not even available in most recording studios, let alone something you can just build yourself or have easily available. The next best choice is making cab IR files out doors - but it must be completely silent where you are. Bird chirping? ahha, can you imagine? distant train sound, or a spec of wind noise? Ugh. So it's really tough making great CAB IR files, the initial recordings.... without room sound. So the compromise is that mose are made in GREAT sounding, well treated rooms, in recording studios where the walls are properly aligned to reduce early reflections of the same length, and so on. But even then, we normally don't want it to sound like ANY room at all, since playback with a speaker will, normally, be in another room when you use your helix. HOWEVER, there are folks to have tried distant miking for a cab IR - and I'm certain that there are uses for it, if you can live with the side effects that I described in this post. Does technology allow us to have longer CAB IR files that include distant mic information, assuming we are ok with a bit of room sound, or find an anechoic chamber to use? YES! Helix doesn't support super long cab ir files, but a major competitor does, and people play with those some. However, despite what the inventor of the competing product says, nearly all cab ir libraries try to avoid room sound and early reflection sound because of the reasons I described, and also because a cab IR file that is a convolution of such a long cab IR recording is going to be a very big file, and it will take a LOT of cpu processing power to work with it in real time. In hardware, the world does have such power available (it's sort-of in the competitor product but you lose slots when you do so), but it's expensive to add just for some potentially difficult to work with cab IR files that might sound bad when you play through FRFR in another room.... in a world dominated by short cab IR file standards, and it so far hasn't proven worth the effort to become a supported standard. Maybe it will prove itself one day, but for now it's a niche thing. Audio engineers are used to working with close miked cabs and can do great stuff with them. We are also used to working with distance miked cabs, and they too can sound amazing in recordings... but you NEVER get that sound in a live environment. Another note: YOU CAN MAKE Your OWN CAB IR FILES! IF you want to play with miking technique and room sound and such, try it out for yourself! It's hard to do, but even a bad cab ir file is still an exciting success moment, and you will probably find, as I have, that at first it seems like the magic solution and all's good, but then you use it in another room or situation and go, oh man, it really only sounds great through headphones, or recorded.. but when I play through FRFR I always get a headache. LoL.... I had that happen. I'm pretty sure it's because I had room sound over room sound, and the harsh peaks and reflections just irritated me after a while. I do have a decently treated room, but it's still nothing like a proper room where IR files are typically made professionally. Still, check out this site - it actually worked for me back when I did this myself some for fun: http://www.grebz.com/simulator_impulses_creation_eng.php I know right? Thing is, they have tried that stuff in the past, and still have sort of preset cab fix eqs in some competing products, and I had them in my eleven rack and stuff. It never is a universal solution, and you still end up dealing with fixing it all with EQ, but sometimes with those products you're actually turn the treble UP in EQ to make up for the fizz remover feature's tone changes that might seem to extreme. It's never easy to have a universal fix for musicians who are far from universal :-) But yea, I wish they had something like that in helix just as a "simple setup" option to get you started, that you can then remove or customize how you want. Oh well :-) Takes more work without it, but it's YOUR tone this way, which is ideal in the end. I'm sure it is constantly progressing! And the competition between line6 and the other big modeling company, and with kemper (a different take on things), and the other slightly lesser products (no offence to them) like zoom, headrush, and so on... )... are only improving each product's features and technology through competition and more scientists and engineers doing R&D constantly to break new ground! Also - computer-based modeling is actually quite a bit more powerful, just WAY less convenient... and a lot of amazing cab IR stuff can be done "in the box" like that but not yet on all devices.

Yea, with stock virtual cabs, no issues. Again, what I meant was if you are literally miking up a cab and trying to create your own IR. If you are miking a cab with multiple mics and recording it (like, in a real studio), it's incredibly tough to do with success. But if you do it right, it can be an excellent sound. Some of the IR libraries have IR files that are made up of a multi-miked cab... again I mean you use one single cab IR who's tone is a IR (recording, really) of a cab from multiple microphones, all phase aligned in the studio. IF you want to try that kind of thing, the only way with success you'll normally be able to is by using one of those specific cab IR files. You can sort of get there a bit with multiple virtual cabs in helix, sure! It's safe and fun to try. But you can only run a couple of cabs in parallel, right? I mean, I guess maybe you can run 4 with some path playing, which is cool, if you don't use more than one path for your effects. So there's that option, which yes, is safe and fun to do :-) One note - if you put cab after cab in series (in same path) it isn't the same thing as multiple mics, that's putting one mic through another through another and on and on. Parallel multiple mics requires cabs running beside each other, each fed the same signal and then mixed together again, so you need one path per cab. Although, of course, being on separate paths you can also add different effects before/after each cab, if you wanted to do that... or pan the outputs so the cabs are literally across the stage or around the room in different places.... all kinds of fun things. That's only useful if you are recording direct in stereo or playing in a stereo setup.

Well said, sir! The resulting EFFECT, though, is that the outer edge is darker sounding, on any speaker, whether your first assumption is correct (which it actually is, in some designs), or the speaker engineer's description is correct (which is true of other designs, no doubt those he worked with and sold). BUT, the speaker engineer's statement isn't entirely true, at least not of all speaker designs. Guitar speakers and full range single cone speakers as well as speakers for some other purposes, SOME of them at least, are actually designed to have the cone flex in certain ways depending on the vibrating frequency, so the inside of the speaker handles the high frequencies more (less mass allowing it to vibrate faster for higher frequencies more easily, less surface area which is ok for high frequencies which require less surface area for what we consider to be the same output level as the bass), while the outer part of the cone vibrates as a piston with the inside at lower frequencies, adding support for the low frequency output. There are plenty of speakers (not musical instrument speakers, generally, but hifi or similar styles) that try to be piston like over the entire surface - entirely rigid, in other words... but it isn't always the best choice. So yes you are right, but you were also right in your initial assumptions too, and the person from the top speaker company may have been speaking specifically about designs of his company's manufacture. He is correct, in many cases, but not ALL cases. Take also, for example, the "whizzer cone".... why does that work? Why does adding an extra small rigid cone on the voice coil instead of just a dust cap make more treble come out of the speaker? Taking the speaker engineer's statement as always true, it wouldn't make any differende to add the whizzer cone, since the whizzer cone and the other cone, both attached to same voice coil, would still just work as pistons together, and it would simply be the listening, or miking, position on the overall moving surface that affects how much treble you get due to the reasons he specified. However, it isn't true, in this case. A whizzer cone makes DRAMATICALLY more output in the treble for a given speaker, assuming the entire speaker was designed with the whizzer cone in mind. Because the cone of the speaker (in that design) is slightly flexible, and the entire surface area of the cone doesn't move as a piston at all frequencies, but only below a certain range (probably roughly 6k or 8kHz or something, just a wild guess, for sake of conversation).... but the whizzer cone, which is attached directly to the voice coil also, is fully rigid, light, and very efficient at high frequency output... Well this basically makes the whizzer cone into a tweeter, with a heck of a lot of mass on the voice coil compared to a real, dedicated tweeter (hence why it's not a particularly great tweeter, but better than nothin'!).... and makes the dual cone speaker (ss this design with whizzer cone is commonly known) work as a much better full frequency range speaker than it would without the whizzer cone. Speaker technology isn't all identical :-) My studio reference playback monitors have polypropylene woofers and midranges... with limited range on each because poly is a pretty rigid surface compared to treated pulp paper cones, and also heavier than paper. The highs just don't come out, so it has to be a 3 way speaker to cover everything (tweeter does highs, midrange does mids, woofer does lows, and the woofer and midrange sound truly horrible if operated above their designed frequency range, so it has a high ratio crossover network to ensure it all works perfectly. And it sounds incredible....)

True, but it's important to understand what the frfr speaker does versus a guitar cab. Guitar cab alters the sound of your amplified guitar signal, cutting treble, emphasizing certain frequency areas, altering directionality. FRFR tries to not alter anything. So you want a cab to get your guitar tone, specially if playing with distorted tone, and the cab makes that sound good!

Well, the powercab IS an excellent product, for sure. As far as dispersion goes.... just so it's understood: The powercab is a 2 way speaker, 12" main speaker, 1" horn tweeter. a "Compression" speaker is a horn speaker. Properly designed horn tweeters have VERY controlled dispersion... the exact range of dispersion is built into the shape of the horn. However, it is still a high dispersion tweeter, just like you get in any 2 way speaker, PA, home, FRFR or otherwise. The fact that the tweeter is in the center of the main speaker (woofer, although it can do more than woof, as you'll see later) doesn't change it from having great dispersion in treble, just like any other 2 way speaker with separate horn - although it can (depending on how far they went with the physics of the design) produce a much more even dispersion through the crossover frequencies where both speakers are outputting the same part of the signal in varying levels. So it's a great design, potentially, like some famous studio monitors by Tannoy, home speaker by KEF, and other coaxial designs of note. But, as long as the tweeter is running, it has exactly the same things going on as any PA or 2 way (or 3 way) FRFR speaker has with a separate tweeter... location of the tweeter makes no major difference. HOWEVER - the magical thing about the powercab is that in "flat" mode (maybe it's LF Raw, as you said... sounds like the cool feature I'm talking about!), if I recall the setting name correctly, it actually doesn't run the tweeter at all.. instead it runs only the "woofer" as a full range speaker and frequency compensates (in other words, turns up the treble a bit, probably, to make up for natural rolloff of the large 12" speaker in that range) to still be FRFR. But since it's a huge speaker trying to output 8kHz through roughly 20kHz, those high frequencies will be pretty much 100% beamed straight out in front of the speaker with little to no dispersion to the sides. Which does mean that the powercab, IN THIS MODE ONLY, works more like a real guitar cab.... so there IS that benefit for sure. In the other modes, if I recall it's operation properly, the tweeter runs at high frequencies, making it a good old fashioned 2 ways FRFR monitor. Tweeter in middle of cone still has tweeter output dispersing as well as if tweeter was installed in cabinet beside the woofer.

Thanks codamedia! Yea, I didn't take it that you weren't supportive of this, thanks though for clarifying! EVERY reply in this thread has been helpful. I absolutely have no doubt that some folks have never experienced the issues I described. And of course, as I was dealing with one small aspect of physics and how it affects the miked guitar cab tone, I wasn't dealing with the details of how you can improve mike position, type, and so on. Also - totally unrelated to codamedia's post, but something I just thought I'd add to the thread... It should be noted that using more than one mic on a single cab takes a fair bit of real engineering knowledge to pull off with a predictable and good outcome. So if you have an IR library where they have multi-mic IR files, like with more than one mic used in the single IR to make one great sound together (as opposed to lots of different IRs of the same cab, each with a different mic.. which is great but not what I'm talking about in this paragraph).... give those multi-mic IR files a try. They are something that only some of the real legendary tracking engineers ever bother with, something most musicians never get to experience on their own playing, and can either be amazing or, well, just different... but it's not something most of us ever would be successful at creating from scratch ourselves. The phase relationships between the mics is a real monster for most amateurs to figure out to avoid any microscopic but critical adjustments in the daw mix of those mics afterwards. But it can be an incredible tone, if done well. Cheers!

Yep. Totally. I do need to read up more about the tilt eq though... I haven't used it yet. But, if you want to use the helix virtual cabs, you have to do what I outlined in this thread... which IS what you would have to do if you were a mix engineer with a guitar track that was made too bright... due to mic choice, position, etc on a speaker that wasn't maybe the best choice for this. But the other point of all this is that with ANY close miked cab, it will be brighter and different sounding than a cab in the room. Putting an FRFR or pa in a room doesn't recreate the same tone as a cab in a room, even if the source recording is identical and reproduced perfectly by the frfr speaker, because an frfr speaker has good dispersion, even tone in most directions from front of cab, no interactions between speakers that create very complex tones in different directions that result in a tone that may well be picked up differently by each of your ears and will never quite be perfectly recreated by a single point recording of that cab reproduced by a single point source style speaker. So even a really well setup close miked IR may still be a little fizzier, or if not fizz, then just a little bit "simpler" sounding, less "3 dimensional", since even a mono cab in a room has very interesting stereo reflections going on. We can't have perfection with a single close miked cab IR or virtual cab, but it does justify the use of high cut eq if you feel that solves the problem for you... it's a workable solution to the engineering behind the single mic cab recreations. I personally really do prefer the cab IR libraries with producer-created multi-mic IR files.... many (not all) of those sound really full and more realistic, while still being free of most reflections and therefore allowing me to recreate the room sound using good verb and feeling it's pretty indistinguishable from the real thing. I'm happy that this thread has sparked creative, helpful discussion. By the way, I too am not truly sure what makes the "tilt" eq any better - I suppose it has a different slope to it? Also - I haven't spent much time worrying about the low frequencies, but someone was asking about how the close mic situation would affect them. Well most mikes have a proximity effect where the closer the mic is the source, the more boomy and exaggerated the bass is. It's something we use intentionally when miking a cab to choose if we want bass emphasis or not in the initial recording. a mic an inch from the speaker will typically have much more bass than one further away. The longer the microphone pickup element, the more pronounced the effect is. So a long ribbon mic will have intense proximity effect. A LDC (87/67/47... about 1 inch element) has lots of proximity effect too. A SDC less so, and some mics have it engineered out of them (EV RE-20, for example). So mic position could affect the tone - not sure if that is the difference the poster was asking about though. I normally find that flubby bass comes from either bad amp settings (lots of tube amp settings in helix that you dont' get to play with easily on a real tube amp - make sure you know how to set these like the real thing)... or, of course, bad playback monitors/frfr that introduce their own bass flub into the tone. Personally I don't find that problem with helix - the low end is outstanding, and I use it for bass guitar too.

Absolutely, cab IRs are great... solving things at the source instead of in the mix as my thread is talking about. Regarding your mesa tone - that's awesome! I've heard plenty of fuzzy mesa tones in my life, as well as plenty that aren't, and they get excellent clean tones also. It's about how you get the tone from a Mesa, what cab you use, the speakers, the gain staging (which is a huge part of it with a Mesa...) and whether you use a tube screamer (or similar) before it to get it there in the preamp stage (which is pre-eq stage). There are multiple ways to end up with or without fuzz on a mesa. I've heard terrible fizz from many amps with a distortion box when the guitarist doesn't (imho) know how to use the pedal's tone controls... and so on, and so forth. So many ways that a guitarist's tone can be full of fuzz, and their cab, design of the cab, choice(s) of speakers in the cab(s), how it's miked, all make HUGE differences to the end result. But I digress, and that is just my opinion :-) The entire point of this is that one can cut treble, and based on the scenario I'm describing - a mic that has a fair bit of high response (most mics are hotter up high than anywhere else, with a couple of fairly neutral popular mics and then ribbons which are less sensitive to high frequencies than most mics), very close to a speaker, getting a lot of energy in the 8k to 12k or 15k range, which includes picking, some attack, a tiny bit of very high frequency overtones in your tone, and.... fizz from any distortion that was generated after the amp's tone stack. ... If that is what the mix engineer is given to work with, then cutting treble is done all the time. Hence, my thread's points, and reason for existence, are justified and correct for the scenario in which they are intended. IF someone has trouble with the helix being too fuzzy, this thread corrects a common misreasoning that is used - FRFR are brighter than guitar cabs, which is the problem. Nope. FRFR should be neutral, so the CAB should sound just as good as in real life, without fizz. I went on to describe why that isn't true, and why cutting treble DOES work in these cases. I'm not saying cutting treble is the only solution. But I do describe what the true cause is, not the bizarre logic most people jump to, saying there is something wrong with the helix, it's virtual cabs, or that FRFR speakers are magically brighter (completely forgetting the cab already in your chain that should make their point moot). FWIW, in a studio, subtractive EQ in the mixing stage is extremely common... like it's done on MANY MANY tracks in most mixes. If it is used to remove too much brightness from a miked recording, then it doesn't remove anything that should be there.. just brings the treble back down to where it should be based on how the cab sounds in the room. It's very literally like Dolby EQ - the close miked cab gives a treble pre-emphasis, and then you de-emphasize it in the mix, resulting in the original sound you wanted. It gives you the ability to have more treble, if desired, since additive eq is a very dangerous thing in mixing. It's much easier to take away something than add it. Anyhoo - I'm glad you have your problems solved without EQ - I too prefer to use mike choices and such to improve the tone. HOWEVER, there are some great sounding virtual cabs in helix that, even with mic choice changes etc, are still letting in more of the close up cone tone than we are used to hearing... and high cut solves that problem. The virtual cabs give us options that are great, if you know how to work with them. IF you choose to only use IRs, and IRs that are darker by the nature of how they were recorded, that's a great decision. However there are a lot of people... like... a LOT of people, who have issues with the helix being too bright out of it's cabs. My post does explain why this actually is. Sure, maybe the helix is even brighter than a real cab... but in a real studio, with real amps, this problem comes up quite often actually, and if you have your guitar part captured great, the performance you want, and it is miked in a way that gives you more high frequencies than you want... solve it like this. Same goes for the helix. You can choose to solve it other ways, if you know how - although you certainly don't have to use IRs. Virtual cabs, and working with them like you would as a studio mix engineer, work great too and use less resources, should that ever be an issue. IF you feel that everyone out there is doing just great and the helix doesn't get complaints from folks saying it's too fizzy, then maybe you read different forums than I do. :-)

That isn't a monkey wrench at all. There are a ton of situations like yours in the world. It's very dependent upon your own personal overdrive/distortion sources and amounts, and your own tone, style of music, which head you use, and if you get much of your tone from the cab and speaker choices or from electronic filtering in your electronic signal chain. I went direct way before most people did - I was gigging live with a digital rack box direct to the PA without a monitor back in the late 80s, actually. Learning how to cut the treble after your distortion, fuzz or overdrive point is critical. I used to do it electronically in my signal path.... but a ton of guitarists rely upon their cab to give them the treble cut.... and may have no idea that this is what is going on. IF you are one of those guitarists, you will likely find value in my original post. If not - then treble cut would be a bad idea... why cut something that sounds good, right? :-) In your case, Robbie, I have certainly experienced the same exact thing. However, with certain amps or distortion pedals, I have also frequently had to use high cut in the studio... but it certainly depends on the situation and on your own tone. Your amp, your speakers, your "woody tone" absolutely no doubt contributed to the success of a 57 in front of a cone sounding great. Do that with a mesa boogie (on a heavy tone) and a cab with speakers that have good high end, as is a combination that I've come across a fair bit in my life and is a situation I'm dealing with currently, myself, and I'm pretty sure you'd agree with my assessment of the tone. Very fizzy and needing HF cut, or a very different miking situation.... both on helix and in real life. It seems well accepted that the virtual cabs included with helix are brighter than most IRs and need compensating eq. I find my own experiences with studio mixing and tone shaping to work similarly with the built in virtual cabs, with similar great results. I absolutely feel that the built in fender and roland cabs, and if I recall correctly greenbacks (but I might be remembering wrong here), sounds awesome without HF cut, with the right tone come from your amp (not fizzy in the first place). One of my favorite lead tones is with my genz benz el diablo - I've taking the line out from it and recorded it just out of urgency one time to get an idea down when I didn't have a mic available, and it tracked great without fizz... despite being a steve vai-ish lead tone with crazy overdrive. So again, your own tone control settings are an immense part of it, as is your own amp itself. With my overdriven fender tone (very SRVish), I have done so without any EQ and switching up the mic. One of my main heavy tones uses a virtual cab and an IR in parallel and sounds crazy good with only a spec of high cut in the virtual cab path. Use your ears, folks, but physics doesn't lie - the way the speaker is mic'd makes all the difference in the world, and if you have heavy tone that inherently has a lot of fuzz in it before you get to your cab, you'll likely find that the standard cab with a 57 trick isn't sufficient to warm your tone enough to sound the way you want. If your tone isn't fuzzy to begin with - then this thread is obviously not solving a problem you have. There is no monkey wrench thrown into things - with a good cab IR, virtual 57 if you like it, and your own amp tone recreated faithfully, you should sound great direct without any eq cut. Cheers!

The post you quoted here WAS a very broad summary - that was the entire point of the post, since the first thread post was detailed enough. I won't reiterate the first thread post since it was described in detail there. Nothing wrong with general summary posts to agree with someone when the first thread post detailed it clearly. My topic didn't discuss mics because I don't believe the solution is to only use a ribbon mic to kill highs and lose fizz. My solution is the correct one to solve the problem encountered by most people using the helix. My solution is the one used by mix engineers, to eq WHATEVER mic is placed on the cab to get the sound they want. The helix cab sims, and IRs, are most like working in a studio, and the logic I described is how you work with that setup. Don't like a 57? Sure, change to something warmer, or more rolled off in the highs, or extra thick in the lows, or more scooped, or whatever you like. Or choose an IR that has more than one mic on the cab at the same time and enjoy the great producer mix already created for ya. That is an entirely different part of the topic, however. And it does not address what I was trying to address... in a live gig you get a 57 on your cab and it sounds great. Same in a studio. The engineer EQs that feed, which is the missing part of what most people describe as the reason why we must eq the helix output to sound great and lose fizz. Nearly all posts I saw on this forum on the topic state that the reason is that FRFR speakers are brighter, so you must cut treble. They don't address, or may not have been aware of, the fact that a close miked cab has too much treble for a direct PA or mix output to sound great for distorted tones.... and the solution is to EQ that track. Use different mics? Sure. But that is a different solution to the problem that isn't always available to mix and live sound engineers... and the solution I provided, albeit simplistic, is the solution they use in the same situation. :-) My thread is describing how all of us can, and should, get great tone from whatever mic is placed on the cab... and the reasons why that cab IR or virtual cab sounds so much brighter. It's all in my first post, which I presume you read. Mic choices are well discussed by other folks already. My method works with any mic. And my "solution" is only very vague to help people get started.... I pointed out you need to experiment, listen, see what works best. I believe we agree 100% on everything. I actually mentioned in my first post about the various IR libraries having some great pre-mixed combinations of mics and not needing high cut, etc etc. So just remember not to read into a summary a strong conclusion.... what you quoted was a high level summary without the details I'd already explained clearly in the thread. Thanks for your post! Good points, just not actually contrary what I'd already posted :-) Cheers

Totally. So a CLOSE miked guitar amp is much brighter than the sound of an amp in a room, or even the sound of an amp a couple of feet away and a couple of feet up from it. You take that much brighter version of the cab sound and distribute it evenly with a modern wide dispersion FRFR style speaker (something with a dedicated tweeter), and voila - you have a sound that, no matter where you stand, sounds like you have your ear against the cone (only quieter). Thanks for chiming in :-) I've seen so many unresolved threads on this topic, and people saying it's incorrectly done by Line6. Folks have to remember that Line 6 was THE INVENTOR of guitar amp and guitar cab modelling. No such thing existed until Line 6 engineers created it. These folks not only know what they're doing, but literally everyone else has based their product on the line6 R&D, with improvements and changes along the way. Even Fractal. That isn't to say that line6 does it any better... but they certainly know the technology as well as literally anyone else in the world, if not better. I do wish there was a dummy mode for the cab emulation so it could "just work" like it does for, say, a zoom G3 LoL. But I do hope that my big post, and this thread in the future, can be referenced by people trying to understand, or describe, why you have to add high cut to the helix output.

For truly clean, you can also go without a cab, depending on the tone you're going for. It's free to try, in case you like that... ... but without any cab it's unlikely your tone would sound good with even any overdrive added, unless you have a strong high cut (Treble turned way down) built into the overdrive effect so when it switches on, it sort of has a built-in cheapo fake cab EQ..., but when you switch off the OD effect, the tone goes back to clean without treble cut. You can do things with this you can't do with real gear without spending a gazillion dollars - like have one amp that goes to 2 paths... switch between them with a button....one path with a cab for OD, and a second path with a cab (or no cab) for totally clean...

Yea, Fender, Roland would be choices... but don't forget, some amazing cleans come out of mesa boogie gear too..... Interestingly enough, yamaha cabs are not famous at all, and I think that's pretty fair. Back in the 80s my high school owned a fender twin and yamaha solid state twin - the yamaha twin had terrible, harsh tone... didn't sound good on guitar AT ALL. I'm talking clean tone... won't even get into it's overdrive. Although I've played through some old yamaha bass amps that I really liked (on bass, mind you).

yea, it goes without saying that it would require remapping that functionality for the guy's suggestion.