SaschaFranck

First off: What kinda funk? There's all kinda things from oldschool (think James Brown) over 70s clean (think Nile Rodgers), over 80s clean (think, say, Prince) to pretty dirty sounding stuff (think, say, some Lenny Kravitz tunes). And then there's anything inbetween. For some typical clean funk stuff that doesn't require much efforts, just start with the Princess (look out for a cab sounding a bit thicker than the default one) and use the neck pickup of whatever guitar. Adjust the tonestack to suit the context. Mission accomplished.

Hm, I should post the 2 button looper thing on Ideascale. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes.

Nah, doesn't work. Thought about the tuner as well, as in long-pressing the looper switch while the tuner is muting things, but on the Stomp, all switches become non functioning as soon as the tuner is engaged. Can't afford "wasting" a block and a switch for a mute block (I just switched from a Floor to a Stomp for several reasons, so I do now need to learn to use blocks much more efficiently). Besides, quite often when I'm clearing a loop, I still continue playing, so muting everything wouldn't be a too great idea. I also checked whether the Command Center Options would be of any help, but unfortunately they're not. I've also got a Jet Micro switch along with the Stomp, and while it has a dedicated looper mode, there's no "clear loop" option, either - not wondering about that, though, because there's simply nothing like it in the MIDI implementation chart. IMO this is quite an oversight on all one-button-loopers, they all seem to do it that way (even the sort of highly acclaimed Ditto looper is making no exception from that). These things are defenitely not made with live performances in mind. Anyway, as this is a software based looper, L6 could at least offer an option for a "silent clean" function, maybe just available through Command Center or by expanding it to a 2 switch looper. Or even a 3 switch looper. I mean, the 6 switch looper on the Floor is taking over all the switching functionality as well - why not offer the same thing for the Stomp (minus, say, reverse, double tempo and undo as separate switches)? Switch 1 could then operate rec/dub, switch 2 could be start/stop and a long press on switch 1 would clear the loop without conflicts with the play switch. Fwiw, double press to stop the loop isn't exactly too reliable, either. And apart from all that, I wish there was a "cancel" option one could use for the initial loop recording. The looper on the Zoom G3 has such an option and it's incredibly useful. I mean, if at all, the initial loop is *the* key thing of the entire shebang to work or not. And once you notice it might not be as great as you wish while playing, an instant cancel option is really neat to have. I for one am really digging this on the G3 - and as I also had in mind to finally replace the G3 with the Stomp for acoustic gigs (which is where I'm using the looper the most, in fact it's the only occasions I use a looper live), I'd really love a bit more comfort (rather than something that more or less qualifies as a showstopper).

Is there any way to clear the 1 Switch Looper without having to listen to the beginning of the previously recorded content? I mean, there must be some way to do this, otherwise you could never even remotely use it in a live context. Thanks in advance for any tips, tricks and hacks.

That's why I was asking. You should probably play things back to your Behringers as well. That way you might easier be able to identify what's missing in your patches. Thing is, if you like Ola Englunds sound as it comes out of your speakers, it's likely not an AITR issue. It might still become such an issue in case you manage to more or less copy the sound and still feel not happy while playing it. And fwiw, that's what all the AITR debates are all about. It's hardly ever about the sound itself but about how it feels to play that sound - which seems to be particularly difficult to adjust to for people coming from years of amp playing.

So, do you listen to those videos with something else but the Behringers?

Re: Cover Bands and whatever "authentic sounds" (or the possible need for them) Fwiw, I'm making my living playing mostly "corporate gigs" since around 30 years by now. This includes all kinds of things, more or less Top 40 stuff, sideman work for somewhat halfway wellknown singers, musical stuff, even some tribute acts. And not even once (!) in all these years have I been asked to replicate any specific sounds nor has anybody ever complained about the sounds I was coming up with. The most I've been asked for soundwise was some playing request such as "drive /w tremolo" on a musical sheet. Otherwise, people have always been happy with what I'd come up with on my own - and I never cared for authenticity at all. Others do so even less (apart from some corksniffer guitarists). Heck, most MDs I worked with wouldn't even get the difference between a single coil and a humbucker as long as the sound was clean, halfdriven or fully driven enough to suit the music. What I'm saying is: Authentic sounds might be important for us, the players. For pretty much anyone else, they aren't. Having said that, in the 3 years of gigging with a Helix, I have only used one single patch per gig (different patches for different gigs, but I never even once used more than one per show). And fwiw, FOH folks love it, believe me! They're often getting quite mad if you're coming up with totally different patches for each tune. Live playing isn't a studio recording - and unless you're a big act, trying to replicate studio tones isn't making much sense, either.

I can not second that. It's also usually not done that way in the studio (usually compressors are added during mixing, but very often guitars don't need any). Most guitar signals, especially ones with just the slightest bit of overdrive/sag, are already compressed a lot, there's usually no need to add some further compression as something you'd generally do (quite obviously, as a specialized soundshaping tool it's all fine). Add to this that adding a compressor after the amp section will cause the channel volume to not work linearily anymore as higher amp volumes will cause the compressor to work. As a result, balancing patch volumes won't be as easy anymore. On a technical note: The amp's Master Volume is a sound shaping tool. It's forcing the (virtual) power amp to work harder, hence causing compression/sag/drive. For overall level control, the Channel Volume parameter is the one to reach for. Can't exactly agree on that, either. Sure, unless you're going for some low end chugging, the very low ends can (and possibly should) be somewhat cut. But we're rather talking 100 (or maybe 200) Hz here. Somewhere between 300-500 Hz you're in a frequency range good to give your sounds some "vocal" qualities. Quite important for some patches, especially clean(-ish) leads. I would never apply cuts in that range as a general thing. Quite obviously, that also depends on the kind of cab/IR you're using, so in case there's too much of that "vocal" quality, go ahead and trim it away, but otherwise, at least for me that's a pretty important range to shape the character of many guitar tones.

You could mimic this using the Command Center, which is allowing you to configure any switch in pretty much any way you like (so you could, say, as well have 8 snapshots and 2 plain switches) per patch, but you will completely lose the "plain" stomp mode, making this approach a no-go for me personally as I'm always using stomp mode to quickly access the most relevant patch parameters.

Thing is, given current electricity prices, most of these solar-driven/loaded units need years to amortize. So they really only make sense in case there's nothing else available. It's a bit different for certain smaller devices. I once had a powerbank with a built-in (and somewhat expandable) solar panel that served as a loader for both my smartphone and tablet during roughly 2 summers (plus bits of autumn and spring) - not sure how much I actually saved, but as I got that thing for a mere few bucks (like €30 or so), it might've been worth it. Too bad it broke out of the blue.

Sure, there's some available, but as quite a lot of people seem to be expecting at least partial blackouts in Germany this winter (a little less so in other parts of Europe), prices are going up like mad. Planning to get one of these for the garden next year, though (along with a solar panel).

Not available (at least not over here). Expected that already, people are kinda prepping like mad.

Use the EXP2 connector. It even says "Ext Amp" below EXP2.

And fwiw: I'm using the dirac method to mix and match IRs of all sorts since years pretty successfully. Didn't only mix cab IRs but also created my own "acoustic resonance" IRs to enhance my piezo equipped acoustics or to steal the frequency imprint of some guitar recordings (again using the Match EQ).

Fwiw, otherwise, in case you only wanted the frequency imprint of the pedal, you could as well use Logics Match EQ to get there. Record both the clean and the effected signal parallely (in case you can, but the HX Stomp should serve you fine in doing so), place the Match EQ on the effected track, use the clean track as a source for the Match EQ. You might want to do fine adjustments after that. When done, remove the effected part and place a neutral spike IR (aka "dirac") on that track, run it through the EQ and export. You might need to trim the resulting file (which will then become your IR). Note: This will really only work in the frequency domain, anything in the time domain (which could be relevant, even if we're just dealing with a maximum length of 2048 samples) will be ignored. The good thing about this method is that you can easily compare things and do some adjustments. I'd do it that way even if you'd shoot an SDIR beforehand, too, just for a little polishing and what not. In case you've got no dirac IRs, I attach a whole bunch of them in all common samplerates, mono and stereo. diracs.zip

Logics Space Designer is pretty much straight forward. Connect the output of your audio interface to the pedal, run the pedal output into your interface and you should be good to go. The resulting file will be an "SDIR" which you can convert to AIF/WAV within Logic. Possible arising issues: - The pedal might do some dynamic stuff. Dynamic processing can't be captured with IRs. - The pedal might add some spatial information longer than 2048 samples, which is the maximum IR length the HX series can deal with.

I'd be quite interested in that as well. Does something such as Wine run properly under Android? Wouldn't want to use something like a virtual machine (my Android Tablet isn't the most powerful one), so an emuator allowing you to run Windows software without Windows being installed would be great.

As far as it comes to plain reverbs, most certainly. But as said, there's a whole new world of sound design within the IR realm, going *way* beyond any typical reverbs.

Not really.

That's simply because you'd have to bring a laptop with you to do so. Something not many people like too much (myself included, even if I had done so already and am still sort of tempted).

Fwiw, here's some guitar noodling through what is a crumbled liquorice plastic bag recorded with a mobile phone (and then duplicated and shifted L/R). slapped into Logic's Space Designer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aEsAmHcDuCaEnYI863anKz6DC0H81Nlp/view?usp=sharing

Huh? IR-based reverbs are a computer-thing almost exclusively. In fact, the only hardware box I'm aware of is the Sony DRE-S777 (and then the Logidy Epsi, which had a pretty limited feature set and was likely never used in any studio or whatsoever). So they're far away from being either huge, heavy or bloody expensive. Some lines of code, sometimes even available for free (or coming with your host). No. You can easily manipulate the reverb tail by using an envelope. Does a pretty convincing job. Besides, it's not that important anyway, pretty much nobody adjusts their reverb tails on the fly in a modeler - especially not in the Helix as you'd have to do it for each and every preset using reverb. Apart from all that, for me the truly interesting thing would be to use IRs outside of the plain reverb realm. There's things you can do almos no reverb unit is capable of. And it's a big pile of fun to create some wild IRs. I'll post an example... Well, 30 years ago you were not using "convolve reverbs". They simply didn't exist. Sorry, but it seems you're mixing up something here.

No, you don't see them in samplers - at least not in hardware samplers (and in the end it's hardware we're talking about). But then, there's hardly much hardware samplers around anymore anyway (at least not in the form of dedicated samplers, they're usually embedded in multi purpose units or in highly specialized things). And as far as latency is concerned, there's zero latency IR reverbs, very well capable of processing things within the set buffer size of your DAW. Having said that, given a proper audio interface, I can play through IRs with as little latency as what most hardware modelers deliver. An interface such as an RME Babyface allows for roundtrip latencies of roughly 3.x milliseconds, pretty much the same ballpark as most modelers. Add to this that in most cases, a little extra latency for just the reverbed part of the signal shouldn't matter much at all, usually you set some predelay anyway. None of all that should be an issue.

I would not expect any current modeler to be updated with such a feature, but I'd expect some new versions to feature longer IR loading. I mean, the entire Axe FX III line was released over a decade after IRs became one of the most common things in software reverb land.

It's actually quite astonishing that not a single actual modeler (not even the super-computer-alike Axe FX III) is capable of dealing with longer IRs. Especially given that the (now unfortunately discontinued) EPSI Logidy did that several years ago already. And also given, that, say, my 2008 Macbook could already run quite a whole bunch of them simultaneously. That would open up a whole new world in terms of sound design (not only for plain reverbs).