SaschaFranck

In case you're after any kind of authentic "snappy" country tone, single coil PUs are pretty much a must. Some rather low output humbuckers may get you there, also some pseudo-SC humbuckers (using vertical coils), but in case your higher output PUs are humbuckers, you won't get exactly close to that typical sound. You might want to fool around with an EQ as the first thing in the signal chain, though, hence shaping the guitar tone rather than the amp tone, but that typical country "snap" most often is a result of not-too-high output single coils capturing a rather small "window" of the string (as opposed to the rather wide window, typical hunbuckers are capturing). There's also some guitar tone shaping IRs around, but anything applied "after the fact" usually won't give you too great results.

Food for thought: Pick any of the common famous guitar players. How many different core tones are they using? How many different effects? How many different guitars? I'm sure you'll find that most of them a) developed their own voice on a rather limited amount of gear, b) would still sound like them through pretty much completely different gear. Yes, there's exceptions, let's say such as Gilmour, Fripp, Belew and whom else - but even if you take away the FX stuff they're making much use of, pretty much all of them would still sound like themselves. Take, say, Paul Gilbert. He's a living guitar music encycopledia with a built-in juke box. And he manages to perform, say, some Beatles stuff or even some Gypsy Jazz pretty much authentically using his usual core tone, namely a rather overdriven Marshall kinda amp. Same goes for Phil X. My own experience from playing in cover bands for decades would sort of back this up. With all the projects, we usually don't do 1:1 (Top 40 style) covers but some versions leaving us some room for our own playing. Note: These are very well paid jobs, so the folks hiring us could afford pretty much any other band. But they don't care for an authentic representation of whatever but seem to vastly prefer decent musicians having fun with their own interpretations (and yes, there's also plenty of the typical wedding/birthday jobs that you'd usually see a Top 40 band playing at). Get the core idea of the music right, get decent musicians to perform with fun and ideally some great singer(s) and that's all you need. And along these lines, in any of these projects, nobody would ever care whether I play the "Le Freak" guitar pattern (which is one of the few key elements that likely need to stay, even when doing jam-alike interpretations) with a Strat through a Twin or with a Les Paul through a hairy Marshall. Well, maybe some guitar players would get out their cork sniffing cutlery - but rest assured, I couldn't care less. Fwiw, having talked about Phil X, there's him doing a cover of Stevie Wonders "Superstition" - and IMO it's every bit as great as any of the Top 40 band versions trying to mimic things 1:1. If you want the real deal, put on Mr. Wonders record or attempt a show. For anything else, enjoy what good musicians can make out of it. Here's a pretty tamed version of Phil X: And a pretty raw live jamming version with Guthrie Govan as a guest: I vastly prefer that kind of approach over literal covers. And most audiences seem to, too. The good thing being that you can completely forget about delivering "authentic" tones.

I would not necessarily call it an "impediment", but IMO one thing's for sure: Plenty of people drool about amps/models and what not a lot more than they care about their playing. Without even willing to point my finger at anyone specifically, I have often read people going all mad about how killer this or that new piece of gear (or even just a software update) would sound - and then, in case some sound examples coming from the same persons are available, I'm pretty often like "uhm, you should rather concentrate on muting strings rather than praising the new, super-duper accurate piece of kit you just got your hands on". Just so that nobody gets me wrong: I don't have any problems with most people not being kickass players. I also don't have any problems with them loving their gear. But all that endless GAS along with plenty of time spent on all kinds of chatter about how much an authentic amp such as XYZ would improve the general situation sooo much could IMO quite often be spent a lot wiser by investing some time into what's still the core thing of all this, namely guitar playing. Personally, while I defenitely love some new toys as well (especially in case they're inspiring in one way or the other), I have always been more the player kinda guy (no, that's not supposed to say anything about the quality of my playing), so regardless of whatever new toys, I rarely really "needed" them, unless it's for "ultility improvements" - which is also why I'm rather asking for global blocks than for new amp models. Typically, I just need some "working" sounds and then I usually just forget about those things. Apart from some things my "inner experimental me" would like to see (such as modulators, synth-style effects and what not), the Helix is already providing anything I need for my core needs in spades. There's decent clean, mid-gain and higher-gain sounds, case closed. Fwiw, I have spent a very looong time in the IR rabbit hole, but even that was kinda purposedly, because I wanted some cab simulations to make my live experience more pleasant. Once I had what I needed, I almost stopped fooling around with these things any longer. I do still spend some time on that stuff every now and then, but nowadays it's more like "ok, let's take this one amp model, see whether I like it and then brew a perfectly suitable custom IR". Sometimes that's working quite well, but usually I get bored quickly, return to the handful of "safe" sounds I already have and rather focus on playing. Having said all that, most of my "working" colleagues do it pretty much the same way. Get a decent axe, decent amplification, the modification/switching options required to play live and call it a day for a long time. And well, yeah, sure, that can become an impediment for less experienced players - very often they seem to think searching for new sounds would improve things in whatever way, rather than concentrating on all things playing related.

Fine (seriously), but I will. This ain't rocket science. I mean, I just tried and connected the same sustain pedal to my rusty GT-5, GT-10 and Zoom G3. Needless to say: It works with all of them. So, you may have a bunch of switches hanging around that used to work just fine for decades - but then you connect them to Line 6's flagship guitar modeler and they refuse to work? Fwiw, once I connect a 9V power supply to the working switch (so the LED shines a bit brighter), the switch won't work with the Helix anymore, either (again needless to say: it does work with the other units, did a quick check while I was at it). The very same switch also served me well for amp channel switching purposes and what not. Really, the only device that ever caused issues happens to be the Helix. I know, I'm sounding like a broken record on repeat, but Line 6's hardware quality assurance seems to be pretty bad in general (I already posted about several other issues). Fortunately, for the time being, none of the existing issues affects me much (I would like to have a brighter LED on that switch, should I integrate it again, though...), but all this will defenitely have an impact on any future purchase plans. Namely: no Line 6 products for Mr. Franck anymore (I'm sure plenty of you folks can't await that moment anymore).

That's quite awkward. You'd think that any plain on/off switch should do the job, really. I mean, especially as we're talking about switches that are absolutely common for pretty much tons of related tasks. Even weirder as the smaller units don't suffer from that issue - makes the bigger units look like some testing equipment.

Ok, I did in fact just try with a sustain pedal (which is really just a naked momentary open/close switch) and it doesn't work at all. I mean, that thing doesn't even work for switching anything when staying within a single patch (the pedal itself is working just fine, it's the one I'm using every day for my "master" keyboard), there's quite some erroneous things happening.

I actually didn't examine the switch I used, but it's one of the plain types, just on/off. Ok, it *does* have an indicator LED which is even sort of fed (doesn't glow very bright when not using the optional 9V input) by the Helix' EXP socket, so maybe there's some resistance existing. I could possibly try with just a naked switch, but ATM I can't find any. Could try with a sustain pedal (and just keep it pressed to simulate the "on" status), but the straight jack doesn't make it into the Helix as long as it's mounted inside my pedalboard case. Anyhow, I remember fooling around with another (completely plain) switch and from my memory, it worked as well - but I wouldn't bet on it (used it for different purposes). However, something such as this could easily be replicated just in the digital realm, allowing for global on/off switches. There could, say, be 4 virtual global switches and each block could feature an advanced menu, allowing you to connect a block's on/off status to one of those global switches. Yeah, might confuse some user - and because of that, it should possibly not be part of a patch itself but an internal hardware "play" choice valid only per physical unit.

Hm, not sure but I haven't stumbled over any issues myself. I actually just tried, connected a plain hardwired on/off switch to the EXP 3 input and assigned the IR block's bypass to it in two different patches. They were following the status of the external switch just fine and kept that status while switching between those two patches.

Fwiw, as I said above: In case you're not using any external expression pedals, you could use that as a global cab on/off switch. Hardwired latched switches work globally. Of course, you'd have to go through each patch once and assign it to your cab/IR block(s). Btw, also goes to show how easy it'd be to implement something like that straight on the unit, regardless of how relentlessly the Line 6 folks (plus their fanbois) are trying to tell you it'd be impossible due to the Helix' "modular" approach or because you might as well use IRs for other things than plain cab simulation. Add something like a "virtual EXP switch" (of course it should be called something different) and a checkbox to the cab/IR blocks (whether to assign it to that switch or not) and there we go. The entire programming infrastructure is there already, should be a piece of cake for any decent programmers. But hey, it won't happen anyway, I'd bet on that (just as so many things don't happen even if they'd make plenty of sense), so we will keep seeing these questions pop up regularly. Heck, this could even be expanded. Add the same functionality for amp and loop blocks and you could use the very same presets for DI purposes or with your analog amp 4CM style. Or add this to any block (along with a number of "virtual EXP pedals") and you could, say, assign global boosts, EQs, reverbs and what not. Would make a lot of sense when, say, switching between wedge monitors and IEMs, you could just switch on a nice little ambient room for monitoring pleasure. Etc. But as said, we won't see anything like that.

There's two more advances of using HX Native for re-amping, that haven't been mentioned yet: - You don't need to re-record your takes, something you'd have to when using the hardware. - You can re-amp multiple takes simultaneously.

But how does that even remotely solve the problem? You'd still have to switch it on/off per preset, you'd be losing a block and you'd be losing overall volume control via the volume knob. Again, this has zero to do with what has been asked for. There's plenty of people running their Helixes through traditional amplification.

So, are you saying that's something you'd like to do at soundcheck? For each patch? I'd rather program dedicated patches for each situation (real cab vs. FR amplification).

This will only work globally in case you assign them to an external footswitch.

No. One of the reasons why global blocks would be great.

USB hubs have been an endless source of problems ever since I'm using them. I can't even remember how much I already had and apart from some medium-expensive Belkin one (that I unfortunately forgot in a backstage area a while ago), pretty much all of them had some issues every now and then. Fwiw, this is my experience with standard USB hubs (there's newer ones such as what, say, many people are using with their M1 Macs, also allowing you to connect various other things, those seem to do a lot better). In addition there's USB cables and for whatever weird reasons, the differences between them are staggering - and once you're using a hub, you double those potential issues. In a nutshell: Don't use hubs for anything mission critical in case it's possible.

Fwiw, this is not the best way to see what an amp can do for you. Neither in the real nor in the virtual world. Yes, I'm pretty much aware of all those various tests, saying "I set everthing to 5 and this amp sounds killer already!". That's only true for some amps. "English" tone stack on a classic Marshall anyone? Yes, everything turned up all the way. Or take a Boogie Mk XYZ model. Those are known for their super effective tone stacks and also for the interaction between tone stack and gain controls. In real life, you'd never chose a "let's hang around as close to 5 as possible" approach. It's not what you can see being dialed in on most people's amps, either. In case of the Line 6 factory defaults, leaving the drive settings at what they come up with is an even bigger mistake, at least IMO. Some of the default settings do their best to demonstrate how to *not* dial in an amp. Just check, say, the first 13 guitar amps in the list. What in the world were they thinking? Not one clean default and some of them aren't even just "hairy" but horribly "over-dialed". The first exception is amp #14, namely the Princess. But right after that, the mess continues. Deluxes and Twins are mainly known for their clean-ish tones - but Line 6 tries to turn them into whatever else it might be. Usually the result is plain awful. And fwiw, the same goes for most master settings (on amps offering MV in real life), sag, hum and ripple. All turned up WAY too high to represent the real amps in a way comparable to how most people are using them. Seriously, Line 6 did a pretty bad job on almost all their factory default settings.

Are you using the Stomp as your audio interface already? That's *the* important regarding anything else in terms of re-amping, but your post doesn't say anything about it.

I'm absolutely familiar with latencies, their typical values and what not. Those 40ms was the number you came up with. And I'd never try to delay any harmonising part that much in case I was recording it manually.

Why would there be a "natural latency"? Choir voices or bigband sections aren't 40ms apart from each other. And once I manually harmonize a line (as in actually playing a hamonization), there's no 40ms of latency, either.

I even used them on acoustics sucessfully - and those pick up tons of environmental vibrations.

Fwiw, you could just get a clip tuner for such purposes. Inexpensive and not too obtrusive.

Gotta say I never understood the "Output" setting, either. Doesn't seem to be possible to have the tuner active with the full sound still coming through (fortunately I don't need that function).

While plenty of folks seem to disagree, I think that all pitch shifting effects in the Helix sound pretty bad, so IMO there's not much you can do about it.

Have you tried an offline update (you'd have to download the appropriate flash files and point the Line 6 Updater to them)? Are you connecting straight to the Macbook or through a USB hub? The latter isn't recommended. Did you check another USB cable?

No, it's not academic at all. It's easy to run out of IR slots in the Helix if you have a vast collection of IRs and want to check a whole bunch of them for example by switching through them via pedal edit mode (which is a most excellent thing to do). So, I might save a patch using one out of, say, 50 IRs. But I don't want to keep all slots clogged up so I might as well just remove the ones I tried all together. This will render the patch I created useless. With proper IR management the patch would simply come up with a message. "IR "kickass cab.wav" missing, search for it y/n?". That's all that'd be required and it's got nothing to do with any "core software design". I have been involved in quite some betatests for sample based software and more than just once a file locating algorithm had to be implemented later on. It was always possible. There's no reason it shouldn't be possible within HX Edit. Seriously, this is a glaring omission - and if you were in the software sampler business and came up with a sample organisation such as this, you'd be out of the game tomorrow, as easy as that.