SaschaFranck

Thanks god there's selective reading, eh? At least you're pretty good at it.

Fwiw, how comes, Line 6 still isn't able to come up with some even remotely decent default settings for whatever blocks? I mean, just select an empty patch and insert the new Ventoux amp as an amp/cab block. It sounds mediocre at best - but I'd go as far as to say horrible. A sound I would *never* ever use. And that's true for basically all amp blocks. Check the 11 "Brit" labeled ones. It's as if they were having a little "let's see whom of us manages to sound the worst" contest. With all of them winning. Given that I can adjust pretty much all amps to sound at least somewhat useful, also given that these settings seem to work rather well throughout using a number of different guitars, I fail to understand why Line 6 has never adressed this - very wellknown! - issue. Sure, I do of course know about user defaults, and quite obviously, I'm using them. But when someone interested in a modeler checks out the unit in a shop, it's all factory defaults. I still remember this moment myself, tried a Helix for the first time in 2016 I think. Brandnew, in a local shop. People were already raving about it online. And there I was, discovering 100% horrible sounding amp defaults and factory presets. Oh yeah, sure, Mr. Klein will chime in, telling us how much all presets suck (ok, in fact, he won't chime in because their own company forums is the very place the Line 6 staff avoids like the plague) - and that's true. But there's still a huge difference between presets and presets made to get the worst out of each amp model - the latter being what we find in the Helix. Just wondering.

Oh, I know - and I just wanted to make clear that I'm every bit as much an armchair quarterback. The marvel that is non-native-language internet communication, I suppose.

Did you restore your global settings and/or check your loop level settings?

I'm pretty sure it's the case. I had similar things happening before already - and apparently HX doesn't have much of a "download timeout safety net" (aka download manager alike feature) built in, so once any server errors occur, it might as well just keep trying to resolve whatever temporarily invalid request instead of just stoppimg and starting a new attempt (which is what download managers usually do - or offer - once they realize there's no chance to resume). I mean, I could download HX Edit from within itself just fine (which is like around 14 x the size of the actual update), I could as well grab the flash file in a matter of a second (it's just 5.x MB), so it's possibly not so much about the servers getting slammed but more about how HX Edit is dealing with temporarily rejected file requests. So, basically I agree with what you said in your second paragraph. And yes, it's good that there's an alternative - but from all I gather as an "armchair quarterback", I think it should be possible for L6 to kind of build that manual process into HX Edit. Alternatively, they could (well, they rather should) post the alternative Updater workaround along with their update instructions. I mean, it's not for the first time this happens. In fact, it happened with each and every update ever since I own the Helix (and before as well, I've been reading about these issues before I got my unit already), my post describing the L6 Updater workaround (in another thread) got a whole plethora of likes by now. And no, I'm not proud of these likes by any means as I was just posting something very obvious - which I think should be L6's job.

Cheers!

So, pretty much what I suspected. Always remember to treat it with care, Line 6 doesn't have a great reputation for these parts or the assembling quality. Not necessarily. Things you'd need to update your Helix: - Last version of HX Edit and nothing else. Start it, it should now find your Helix. Follow the update instructions. In case you're lucky, that will be it. In case you're not (which can happen for a variety of reasons) - Download the Line 6 Updater (I think you've done so already). - Download the 3.15 firmware flash file. - Quit HX Edit. - Start the Line 6 Updater and follow the instructions for an offline update. You might want to perform a complete reset beforehand (shouldn't be required but you never know). There's a list of reset options in this thread: That should get you going. Now, in case you wanted to use the Helix as an audio interface, you could just start doing so as it's a class compliant USB interface (and there's even some advances on Macs). But to take advance of some more functions (native recording in different sample rates and such), you might need to install the driver as well. Note: This is not required at all in case you don't need it as an audio interface.

Was the same for me (I suspect server issues on Line 6's end). Quit HX Edit (including shutting down possible background tasks in case you're on Windows), download the latest Line 6 Updater if you haven't already, download the appropriate flash file for the update, start the L6 Updater and do an offline update. Bob should be your uncle.

Given all the things he's already done, this is why I suspect something to be faulty on the Helix' end (obviously the most likely thing being the USB port). Apart from that, before looking into the Audio-MIDI-Setup, I'd possibly look into the system profile (about this Mac > System Report > USB). I had the A/M-Setup ignoring some devices already (even if they were supposed to be class compliant), but anything I ever connected showed up fine in the System Report. Should look like this (I'm running Mojave, but not much should've changed): In case the Helix doesn't appear there, any further dabblings are pointless, because in that case, the computer simply doesn't even see it as a connected device at all.

Ok - in that case I'm afraid there's a good chance for something being broken physically. It could as well have happened after the shop updated the device (I mean, 3.11 materialized a while ago already).

And fwiw, the Updater doesn't need any driver to work as the Helix is a USB class compliant device (in fact, I used mine as an audio interface without the driver installed for a while because the performance is better that way, go figure...).

For a start, try to uninstall/remove everthing you can and just install the Line 6 updater (latest version). You might want to reset the Helix beforehand and then perhaps enter update mode before starting the Line 6 Updater. But from all you've been writing so far, I wouldn't set too much hope into all that. But give it a try.

Ok, safe boot would be an option - but with an existing and working 3.x firmware installed, the Mac should at least recognize the Helix as a device in the first place.

Given what you wrote, I don't think so. It seems as if you've followed all the required steps, tried different computers, USB ports and cables. There's really not much more you can do. Nah, very unlikely. I mean, in case it's running fine, it's just running fine. So far, this pretty much looks like a hardware fault. Sure, there's still a slight chance it's the USB cable (the Helix is pretty much *the* most sensible device when it comes to USB connections I ever owned), but as you've tried 3 of them, that chance is minimal. Would it be lots of a hassle to have your unit exchanged? Or would you happen to personally know someone with a working unit?

Ok, that's not sounding good so far. Did you check the Helix' USB port? Sometimes, that little plastic "nose" in the middle is falling off.

Did you log into your account from within HX Edit? And in case that doesn't work, try the Line 6 Updater and the flash file provided in the download section. Had to do so myself as well.

Have you tried the Line 6 Updater? Also, does the Helix appear as an audio device on your machine prior to installing the driver?

First play: The Ventoux amp is quite nice, goes well with pedals. The Crisscross delay might easily become my standard allround delay as it's offering all I usually need/want. The Helios delay is quite nice too, I sometimes just like a little bit of additional reverb "wash" on just my delays, something you previously needed to sacrifice an entire path for. Too bad its got no tone controls, I'm making use of these all the time in case they're available. Shimmer might come in handy occasionally, at least it's sounding decent. Dynamic Plate and Room are quite nice I think. These will become my defaults now (have been using Legacy verbs so far). Quite digging the Random S&H, too. So much for now.

And fwiw, online update doesn't work for me, tried 3 times. Offline via Line 6 Updater seems to, so it's neither my USB connection or internet issues.

Seems like a decent update (apart from that there's absolutely nothing in it I was wishing for, but hey...), so I'm sure plenty of people will welcome this (and quite obviously, I will use the new toys as well, even if I don't need them), but uhm: "IMPORTANT! We ran out of reserved Global CCs and unfortunately had to steal five user-assignable CCs for this feature. Any parameters you've assigned to CC77-CC81 will have to be remapped. Sorry 'bout that" These are just the ones I was using for some patches. Not a biggie by any means because external MIDI control is wonky anyway (/cue "what I might have been wishing for"), so I'm not making much use of it, but in case I had made this a serious part of my Helix business, I'd surely be way less than happy. But what's really bugging me is that the feature for which these CCs had to go seems to be something pretty much nobody will use much. I mean, once you control any of those knobs via external MIDI CCs, parameters will jump all over the place all the time - that's not what you usually want when finetuning a patch. Let alone you still have to somehow select the block to be controlled beforehand. And let's also not let alone that generally, external MIDI control could be realized much more elegantly on a whole number of levels (/cue "what I might have been wishing for"). In my book, patch backwards compatibility should always only be compromised in favour of truly great and often asked for new features. Which this isn't. Anyhow, going to have a look for the other things now.

Yeah, they're very well done, after all, Levy Clay makes a living from transcribing.

To be honest, I didn't use any. I have always been the kind of "explorer" guy. Ok, I *do* have a pretty solid background, studied at the music university and hence learned a lot of the fundamentals (nothing country-ish, though), which makes it sort of not too hard to examine things on my own. I also seem to have pretty good listening skills "by nature" (never exactly trained them), so that defenitely helps (and yes, it's kind of an unfair advantage over those who do have to practise that stuff a lot). Anyhow, what I did quite a bit when my interest for country-ish things started, was to get down to the basics of it. Basically, most typical chord progressions are rather simple, so I broke these down even further and started fooling around. As an example, I would just take, say, a I-V progression such as A and E (or E7) and play over it, then start to incorporate some typical elements. Such as: - Triads (yes, I always play chordal stuff first, it's what brings money home, noodling is just the icing on the cake). For me, triads are the mightiest chord tool ever (for a good number of reasons that I could explain...) and country is all about triad-based music. - Thirds and sixths. These are key ingredients of many typical patterns, also double bends/stops massively profit from a good knowledge of those. And once you know your triads, they come in quite easily. - Endless consecutive even length note sequences. No licks. Which means you have to start at a very slow pace. And you need to follow some guidelines, such as "I need to hit a chord note on every downbeat". These things are absolutely crucial and each and every decent country player seems to make use of this more or less regularly. - Melodic improvising. As in creating things on the fly that you could instantly remember and pretty much sing along with. - Bends. In general, each note should become a target note for a bend. Using any finger (well, at least ideally, doesn't exactly work all the time). - Hybrid/chicken picking. Especially concentrating on dynamics. Now, all this is pretty much general advice - but it really gets pretty tricky when you do this over simple diatonic major triad progressions. You're 5th position A minor pentatonic box licks all of a sudden will refuse to work, even in case you look at them as C major pentatonic licks. For me, *the* key thing to learn is the most relevant note movements going from one chord to the other. In my example from above, A to E and back, there's 2 essential movements, namely from A to G# and back and from C# to either B or D (the latter being a part of an E7 chord) and back. In case you don't integrate those into your playing, it will pretty much never sound like more or less authentic country. This is also why it's a good idea to start with playing triads, as you can see all these relevant movements pretty easily, especially in case you're using the shortest possible movements between them. An A triad in root position, namely A-C#-E, becomes a first inversion E triad, namely G#-B-E. First inversion A (C#-E-A) becomes 2nd inversion E (B-E-G#) and so on. Hm, I'm just noticing that this will get too long in case I'm taking it further. Might as well not be the right forum. I could've taken this to, say, TGP, but I'm banned there for life, as it seems. But then, we could perhaps continue this in a sort of dedicated off topic thread.

Thanks - fwiw, for me, when it comes to these kinda faux pedal steel swells, it's an advance having a bridge humbucker available. I used it in SC split mode for the picking, but for swells, that sound has a tendency to get too thin, so the extra midrange added by switching to full humbucking mode defenitely helps. Add to this that the higher output level also triggers the compressor a bit more, so the swells become a little beefier (as in offering a bit more decay to work with).

Yeah, that's me (and my super-bad-taste Elvis hoody). Thanks for the flowers - and no, I'm not really a country picker, but IMO some things country can bring you further than pretty much anything else (triads, finding nice target notes inside of long consecutive note runs without playing pre-made licks, hybrid picking, etc.). One of the interesting things being that pretty much all proficient country players have no issues playing, say, a bunch of jazz standards - but the other way around? Not so much... there's even good (as in almost scientifically explainable) reasons for that. Whatever, what I learned from country stuff has now found its way into pretty much all my playing.

I might agree on the silly looks, but personally, I find this sound to work quite well for me (admittedly, it could be a little less chimey and bit more twangy, but especially live this works fine). Fwiw, it's the Princess, some homebrewn IR and the Vetta Comp in front. Recorded for a FB group which is sort of about some instant "look and jam" thing with a new backing track posted each week.