SaschaFranck

Yes and no. While we will never know any exact numbers, it's likely not as sturdy as other units. Personally, I would never carry it around without a heavy duty case for that reason. Before I got mine, it had to have the tap tempo/tuner switch replaced because not only the LED stopped to work but also because the switch itself was acting up (the previous owner only used it at home for a year and it's generally been in mint condition, so no serious beating had happened). Given my own history with Line 6 products, their footswitches are notoriously bad (had broken ones on a shortboard controller and an M13 before). There's also some other parts that are of pretty cheap quality, such as the mic preamp (which may blow up in some cases, apparently due to issues with phantom power switching) and also the XLR out (which can't deal with phantom power at all). It might occasionally be susceptible to heat as well (especially true for the EXP sensor). Personally, my worst experience in terms of reliability has been a preset that wouldn't let the unit boot properly, so I had to boot in safe mode which deleted the preset (quite bad as I'm always only using one single preset per gig - for reasons...). Ever since, I started doing copies of my live presets and I'm also doing somewhat "feature reduced" versions as I suspect the high DSP demand and/or complexity of some presets to be responsible for them to become corrupted. Still, the overall worst thing for me by far would be the visibility. It's by far the worst of all floor units I ever used (and that's been quite some). Under certain light conditions (diffuse, bright light or direct sunlight on outdoor gigs) you really can't see anything. LEDs, scribble strips - they become pretty much completely invisible. You can't even use the display anymore, should you need to adjust a parameter or two. And while Line 6 could adress at least some parts of that (inverted scribble strip labels when a switch is active, LT style display mode), they won't. So, in case outdoor gigs during daylight are a noteworthy part of your gig schedule (they have been for me during the pandemic), the Helix might not be for you. Line 6 clearly didn't test the unit properly under any such conditions (or they just didn't care), "looks great in your appartment" seemed to be the deciding factor. And yes, I'm seriously thinking about replacing it in favour of a Boss GT-1000, which has no visibility issues, not even in direct sunlight (and which seems to be a sturdier unit overall as well - pretty much in line with Boss' tradition of building things that stand years on the road). And fwiw, as you're coming from a well laid out pedal board (I came from there as well), you might miss direct access to crucial parameters. You can access most of them rather quickly on the Helix, but it still doesn't hold any water against analog boxes with all (or most) parameters exposed. Not exactly a maintainance issue, but sort of. Having said all that, I didn't have to use my backup (which, as has been mentioned, should be a mandatory thing in case you're running a one-size-fits-all unit), though (in my case an Egnator Goldsmith running into an Atomic Amplifirebox followed by a Zoom G3). And in case the visibility aspect doesn't kick in, I'm getting along quite fine with the Helix, so far everybody else (bandmates, audience, FOH folks) pretty much always seems to be pleased, too. Once the initial work (patch building and cross checking them under stage conditions) has been done, setting things up has never been easier, either. In a nutshell, I still like the unit and it feels great while playing, but I wouldn't buy it again. As someone making my living as a live player, the mentioned aspects are crucial for me and the Helix only partially suits these needs. And there's always a kind of fear hiding that something might break or not work well (even if it was just unexpectedly bright light conditions) - something I never experienced with other units.

Well, it's right there, between the US Small Tweed and the US Deluxe Nrm. Not sure whether it'd be your best bet for acoustic sounds, though, I'd rather check the Studio Tube Pre (under Preamps -> Mic).

In case it doesn't work as described above, try an offline update. I posted the process before and apparently it helped quite some people: - Quit HX Edit! Don't start it again until you're finished with everything following. - Go here and download the Line 6 Updater (in case it's not installed on your machine already): https://line6.com/software/ - Also download the "Flash Memory" from there (it's the actual update). - Install the updater. - Reboot the Helix while holding down switches 6 and 12 (this will take you to safe boot mode). - Start the Line 6 Updater, select "Offline Mode" and see whether it finds your Helix. - If yes, select it and choose "local file". Point it to the Flash Memory file you've downloaded. For Windows users, it's usually as well important to kill the HX Edit service running in the background (even after ending the program). In case you don't know how to do that, just reboot your computer (and don't restart HX Edit). Otherwise the Line 6 Updater might be sort of confused and not find your Helix.

While some explanations in this thread may help to tackle the issue, I noticed some sort of random behaviour here and there. Had a patch with two amps and rather little additional stuff and it popped pretty noticeably when switching the amps on/off alternatively using snapshots. Out of curiosity I changed their order (and nothing else) and the popping was completely gone. There might be some technical explanations for that, such as some amps maybe taking a little longer to change their on/off status than others (which would possibly result in both amps being active for a very short amount of time), or there might be some small latency caused by processing order, whatever. All I know is that it sometimes happens. Personally, I avoid this by using path layouts allowing me to place amps that are used alternatively in different paths. That way they're never running serially. Seems to work quite well, ever since I'm doing so, I haven't experienced any pops. Makes patch building a little more complexed, but on the upside, I can use the extra routing for other things, too (such as dedicating freely switchable drive blocks to just one amp, something I'm doing all the time).

So, does the Helix sound good to you on its own? Otherwise you might indeed have to check your cables and such.

Yeah, that'll be fine. When I posted the link to the headphone extension cable, I didn't remember the Helix had a full 1/4 headphone out (I never use it, that's why). And I also thought using the Helix' headphone out might be a good enough idea because I couldn't find the appropriate 1/4-to-mini-headphone adapter cable on a quick search. But yes, using the 1/4 outs will likely be the better idea, so go for it.

But just doing it that way will still not result in the Helix' sounds to come out of his PC speakers.

Correct. And believe me, once you're a bit more familiar with things, you may want to use the Helix as your computer's sound device. Even outside of any recording related things, it's just extremely comfortable. So you might want to have a look at some cable extension, allowing you to connect the Helix outs to your PC speakers input cable. Your easiest bet might be a headphone extension cable that you connect to the Helix headphone out, offering a jack to connect your PC speakers on the other end. Something like this (hope it loads): https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B01N6RTS2B/ref=sr_1_3?__mk_de_DE=ÅMÅŽÕÑ&crid=1OVNWDT4R5VLE&dchild=1&keywords=headphone+extension+cable+10+ft&qid=1631305462&sprefix=headphone+ex%2Caps%2C301&sr=8-3 You might as well look for something with two 1/4 jacks on the Helix side, but this should be sufficient for a start.

The patches you will create/use on the Helix will come out of the Helix output(s). If you want to listen through your PC speakers, you will have to connect them to one of the Helix outputs. The USB connection can be used to transfer sound into your computer, but that's mainly for recording purposes (there's some other things possible, but these will be too tricky to explain for the time being). The USB connection in your case will mainly be used to edit your patches without having to use the Helix' onboard controls. However, once you've installed the Helix driver (which you need to do as well), you can as well have your system sounds running through the Helix' outputs. You will have to assign it in your system sounds control panel. So you might as well just use the Helix instead of your onboard soundcard (the one you connect your speakers to at the moment) and then, say, play a YT backing track and jam along with your Helix, with all the sounds coming out of the Helix outputs and then running into your PC speakers.

Try recording some DI track (default: USB 7/8) and send that into Amplitube. See if things get any better. In case it's better, you may need to sort out some Helix settings, in case it's not, you may not like Amplitube.

I'm pretty sure that they could be turned off, though. I know, their intention is extra safety, but no serious FOH guy would want an always on limiter, regardless of the purpose. Apart from that, if it really only kicked in at 8-10dB above unity gain, you'd be in clipping heaven already. Unitiy gain in digital land = 0dB. Anything above will clip. And then, even if the makers of the units think different about unity gain, being an FOH guy and allowing any signal to exceed unity gain by such an amount is like asking to be fired.

I still don't get it. As long as there's no clipping happening on the console or some compression inserted on your channel, your boosts should be exactly the same through any PA. The worst to happen assuming there's no clipping and no compression would be wasting a little bit of headroom in case the input trim was set too low - but in times of 24bit processing (on digital consoles) that should be neglectable and have zero influence on your boost levels. Having said all that, I have experienced it more than once that (usually unknown) FOH folks were inserting a compressor on my channel (sometimes on the monitoring only, for whatever reasons, usually you only do that with InEar vocal mixes to avoid excessive levels should there be some feedback, but even that has gotten rare), possibly their idea of shaping my sound. Whenever I notice anything like that, they're into some kinda trouble, really (I will happily accept a certain amount of frequency correction but no compression). Whatever, as said, as long as your console channel is operating in a linear fashion, a 6dB boost will always be a 6dB boost, regardless of the input trim.

How is that? I mean, in case the channel input isn't clipping, 6dB are 6dB, no more, no less.

I absolutely agree that this is a sort of massive oversight. "Sort of" because possibly there's some rather inexpensive solutions for adressing this, the first coming to mind being a MIDI expression pedal. Oh well, no need to even post and later edit this - I just googled around a bit and it seems as if the cheapest MIDI-Out expression pedal (of which there are not even a handful, as it seems) are starting at well over 150 bucks already. Maybe there's some cheaper ones delivering MIDI via USB, but I doubt that. So yeah, that makes this an even bigger oversight - almost idiotic, given that the Mod Dwarf allows for all sorts of effects to be loaded, some of them defenitely profiting from an expression pedal. For a moment, I thought that they want you to buy an extra MOD footswitch - but they don't feature any EXP in, either. Downright stupid, really. But thank's for mentioning this, the Mod Dwarf has been on my "list of interesting things" for a while already - but this is defenitely not speaking in favour of it.

A very common thing (for whatever reasons that we could only speculate about). Noticed it on recordings of both my own and others' gigs. And hence it's as common for some FOH dudes to complain about too little volume for solo passages. The idea of sending different volume boosts to your monitor and FOH is valid but it would not work well for me as pretty often I have various degrees of volume levels, the leveling also originating at different positions in the signal chain. Sometimes it's me using the volume pot, sometimes it's a pedal, sometimes an amp channel switch and sometimes a plain volume boost. To reflect all these on a separate FOH out would be impossible in my case (it might work fine for others, though). It's also quite different in different musical settings, even varies from tune to tune. In case your guitar is just one of several instruments in a comparatively big band with other busy players (especially in case there's a keyboard player delivering rather thick sounds, let's add some choire and maybe a horn section, percuasion and what not), it's likely that the FOH guy will keep the guitar volume rather low, maybe even thin things out a bit. In these scenarios you will likely need a lot of volume boost for your solos. On the other hand, in a typical rock trio, you may barely need any volume boost as your guitar is the main instrument to carry over important information and hence will be mixed in quite loud to start with already. Listen to Van Halen and you'll not notice big volume jumps. What I recommend doing is trying to think as if you were the FOH dude. Turn your rhythm playing monitoring level down as much as possible (at least for a test), so it's more or less like you would mix it in yourself if you were the FOH. I promise that this will be a lot lower in volume than what you'd usually like to hear. In case you're recording yourself as well, you will be familiar with the issue already, you would never turn the sound as loud on playback as when actually recording. But it's a decent practice to get used to keeping that difference as small as possible. As far as solo boosts themselves go, I never just push the volume up since decades already (I have already started doing so in the analog world but it gets a lot easier with multi FX units). Usually I want something to push the front of the amp already, especially on overdriven sounds but on clean sounds as well, just so I get a somewhat more sustain. For overdriven sounds it might be the usual suspects (plain boosts, treble boosts, a drive with low drive settings but pushing output volume), personally, I almost always use a light compressor since many years already, which will allow me to push a clean sound without overdrive as well. Used a Mooer Yellow Comp in the analog days, within the Helix I like the Vetta Comp quite a bit. I keep the compression rather low as I don't want to completely squash the guitar signal. For me, the same settings seem to work well for either clean and overdriven tones. Next thing is adding an overall post-amp volume boost - but I'm never just adding a boost, I'm using an EQ instead. The main thing I'm doing here is to add some mids, which allow me to cut through better without running into harsh highs or muddy/overlapping lows. With the mids (fwiw, in my case usually something between 500Hz and 1kHz) boosted, the overall volume boost could be kept way more civil. And last I usually also add a little additional room (reverb or delay) on solo sounds (not that it really helps with the volume issue but it adds some fullness to the sound). The combination of these usually results in something more suitable both for me and the FOH folks (at least given the reduction in complaints ever since I'm doing it that way). Needless to say, but still: All that doesn't help in case the FOH is undermixing your guitar to start with. But in that case, it's his/her responsibility to look out for solo spots and ride the fader accordingly. Most proper FOH folks will do that anyway.

As has been said: Very likely a mixture of snapshots and stomp controls will be your best friend. With a clever patch layout, you'll be able to cram quite a lot of things into just one patch. Personally, because I need instant global control for the kind of jobs I'm playing (basically pretty much unrehearsed gigs, often just knowing about them a day or two before), I got used to optimize my presets so they would allow me to do pretty much anything within a given genre - and even with lots of stylistic bandwidth. For example, my most often used preset features two amps (clean and somewhat overdriven), both running through a master cab (an IR) to save some DSP. Within that preset I have a clean rhythm tone and a lead one, same for the overdriven amp. And as there's still plenty of DSP juice left, I can add some drives to either amp and also some FX (usually reverb/delay for lead purposes, the occasional modulation for the clean sound and there's even space for some ambient delay things left). I can as well turn the entire patch from smooth to pretty much rockin' with just a handful of knob movements. Now, I'm not suggesting you should be doing the same, but it sort of illustrates how much can be done just within a single patch. As you're doing a Prince cover show, I'm assuming you will actually do some rehearsals, in that case, adjusting some patches so they fit each other should be no big deal. And I'm pretty much sure that if you laid out the individual patches properly, a single bank of 4 presets might take you through the entire show. That way, you wouldn't have to jump through many presets, it'd just be two buttons to get to a new one, so your setlist could vary as much as you desire. Yeah, sure this needs some planning beforehand, to allow you to switch everything relevant in all tunes without changing presets, but as said, even just a single preset can take you quite far.

As everything in this scenario would end up in mono anyway, wouldn't it be a more elegant solution to insert, say, a mono gain block at the end of the chain (in case you're using stereo FX, so they're summed to mono internally already), feed the amp from the 1/4 outs and control the channels by adjusting the output pan? That way, you could even blend between the two channels easily. At least that's what I would do.

There's really not much in the Helix as far as MITB pedals go (possibly because there's plenty of Marshall amp models). I'd possibly check the Teemah, the Compulsive Drive or the Valve Driver (my favourite would likely be the Teemah as I usually find the tone controls to work quite well). You might as well slap a Kinky Boost behind the main drive, I found that to be a nice thing on some occasions, keep "Bright" off and experiment with "Drive" and "Boost" (can't even describe what exactly it does, but it adds something, hrrhrr...), I sometimes even slap it behind an internal amp for whatever unknown mojo.

Fwiw, I think there's *plenty* of room for improvements in the land of modeling. But less so in terms of sounds (especially regarding the basic amp and pedal sounds we all may want) but mainly in terms of useability. Unfortunately, Fractal doesn't push that aspect much further - I would actually welcome it a lot if they did, as others would pretty likely try to follow. For example, what I'd really love to see is a mobile device editor, ideally (and hence obviously) connecting wirelessly. At the moment, only Boss offers that - and it's one of the main reasons why I might get a 2nd hand GT-1000 one day (even if it might end up being sold again). Fracpad is a third party app and from all I know, it requires a cabled connection, plus it's only available for iOS. Personally, I'd also like to see a device with more knobs and switches (the knobs however could likely be replaced by a mobile editing app). Fractal at least allows you to integrate an additional FC seamlessly, the other competitors don't (and I'm constantly running into a switch limit on the Helix). I also think that each and every modeler should offer a feature such as global blocks - which would be tremendously useful in a whole number of scenarios. Just as one example regarding the Helix: Instead of slamming lots of things into one patch to achieve seamless switching, one could simply use the seamless patch switching option and distribute the overall DSP load to two patches while still not having to adjust multiple patches (as the important things could be set to be globally adjustable). For me, this would likely work absolutely great for anything I do. It'd possibly also make patch programming a lot easier as you wouldn't have to think about how to distribute things to paths 1 and 2. The resulting patches would offer a better overview, too. Another reason why I'm keeping an eye on the GT-1000 because apart from the Axe FX it's the only other device offering such a functionality. Another thing that's constantly bothering me with the Helix is the absurdly yesteryear-ish organisation of IRs. Come on, it's 2021 and each computing device (or application) dealing with file storage in one way or the other should have a search function. With the Helix, all you get is some alert that the IR is missing. Yeah, right. And when it comes to sonic improvements, I'm absolutely wondering why there's still no modeler allowing us to load longer IRs (for reverbs and experimental purposes). I mean, the Logidy EPSI was introduced in 2014 and could already load IRs up to 5 seconds in a box selling for 200 bucks. I can as well load a whole lot of IRs parallely on my 2008 Macbook. And now there's Fractal and Neural DSP coming along, telling us they'd offer the most powerful modeling devices ever, yet IR lengths aren't even covering more than 2048 or 4096 samples at best? In mono? Oh, and I wish there would be something like an experimental playground, allowing you to, say, construct some new FX by combining a few basic blocks into a "container" (if you will). This is sort of possible in some modular hosts. Also, in general, the experimental side of things is horrendously lacking. Where's some LFOs, envelopes, input level modifiers and what not? The Axe FX has some of that stuff, the rest of the hardware modeling world however doesn't even seem to know of the existence of any such things. Anyone who ever fiddled around with, say, Guitar Rig, will likely know what kinda crazy things are possible with just a handful of modulators. I do absolutely agree that for any kind of bog standard amp/pedal sounds of highest quality (as in "good enough to even fool some analog afficionados"), we're already into option paralysis. Personally, I'd be absolutely fine to never play any other amp model but the ones that are in the Helix already ever again. And I guess it's similar for quite some more people. But as far as some more "adventurous" sounds go, we haven't even seen any serious efforts yet (ok, maybe something like the SY-300/1000). Just have a look at the synth world (and even more so at the plugin world) and you'll instantly know that modeler makers have barely scratched the surface yet.

The Helix Floor is also inverting snapshot numbers on the scribble strips- which already helps a *lot* when it comes to visibility, and it's really just the small numbers, not even the text. Yeah, but not only that. They could give us a 1:1 representation of what each switch is doing on the screen, regardless of the mode. Just give me 2 rows of 5 equally sized squares, ideally in monochrome coloration for even better visualisation (as soon as something is colored, the display shows it's subpar quality, just try to read, say, some orange colored amp parameter values in sunlight, it's barely possible at all). And yeah, I apart from some last minute parameter adjustments during soundcheck, I never need any signal flow display, either. My guess however would be that they won't add that screen mode to the Floor as that'd be like admitting they didn't get the rest of the visibility related things right. Same for inverted scribble strip displays - which would very likely not even take half a day of programming manpower.

Let alone you can always get a Helix in pretty much mint condition used (even with some warranty left, I have seen them selling for around €900 not too long ago). Not at all possible for an FM9 for a very long time to come. Add to this that you'll likely want an expression pedal, too. Still, looks like a unit that could check many of my boxes - unfortunately, the global block functionality still seems to be something exclusive to to Axe FX. But they may have it added when I'm ready for a new unit (no need to spend any money for a modeler during a pandemic still killing pretty much all gigs for at least another half a year).

Quality LED rings. Compared the FM3 to the Helix already. The display has better readability as well. No idea about the scribble strips (didn't pay attention) but the bad visibility hasn't got anything to do with the size but with the lack of brightness and the rather pointless idea of making the text slightly more bold on active ones rather than inverting everything (which would immensely help already but L6 doesn't give a damn - would be a 5 minute job for any decent programmer). Sure - but it exists. Nothing like it for the Helix. And right now, no programmer outside of Line 6 could even come up with one for the Helix. A touchscreen optimized editor would be dope but L6 doesn't seem to understand that.

In case it's got the global blocks functionality (which the Helix will likely never will see) from the Axe FX, I might be in one day. Better hardware, better visibility on stage and an iOS editor, too. Hence, many things I'm missing from the Helix.

You could possibly abuse the favourites function for such purposes.

Everything that has been said seconded. I'll add this: - Do yourself a favour and tweak at least 2-3 of the most common sounds you typically use at gig/rehearsal level, ideally with some friendly bandmates allowing you to do that while jamming. Once you find something you're happy with, save it for future reference (you could then compare any new homebrewn creations to those). - In case you want an easier tweaking experience, insert a looper as the very first block (I know, there's a shortage of blocks with the Stomp, but this is just for the initial setup, you could replace the looper with, say, a drive block later on). That will allow you to tweak while the looper is playing for you. It will even allow you to, say, move the Headrush into different positions while listening. Fwiw, regarding the latter, I always found a little utility case (that I carry with me all the time) below my FRFR to be sufficient in terms of adressing whatever low frequency "coupling". - For a short term remedy, you might want to check the global EQ. To at least kind of defeat the mentioned Fletcher Munson effect, a rather broad mid boost (atm I have mine set to 750Hz with a Q of 1.2, but you might need to experiment) could do a nice job already. Make sure to check at least the low cut, too. You might be able to get through a rehearsal easier that way, then, back home, you could try to move those EQ settings into the patch somehow, so the global EQ is freed up again (which always is a good thing). - You might want to use some mid-heavy IRs. No real recommendation from my side as I'm using 1-2 pretty heavily customized IRs that I grabbed myself (I could post these, if you wanted), but I remember one of the York Audio IRs (from the cheap $1 teaser pack) to be pretty decent, but I wouldn't bet on it. In case you're using the internal cabs, try to find one that's more on the "warmer" side of things (which usually indicates more mids), possibly use one of the ribbon mics or just the good old SM57 with distance and early reflections turned all the way down (fwiw, unless you're in a recording situation, I would always turn early reflections all the way down). - Prepare a bunch of patches like that, each featuring somewhat different overall frequency ranges. You might not have enough time to fiddle around during your next band jam. - Try to borrow another monitor for a rehearsal. The HR 108 possibly isn't the greatest thing on earth. Even the difference to the sort of similar Alto TS310 (which I'm using) is very, very noticeable, especially the low range sounds a lot more balanced (I'm pretty sure they tried to get more "ooomph" out of that 8" thing via DSP processing, which usually doesn't work all that well). I wanted to get the Alto TS 308 (almost identical to the HR) as a smaller alternative, so I compared them side by side - it's been quite an eye opener. You might as well find a Yamaha DBR10 or DXR10 to try out, they're very common (fwiw, I also compared these to the Alto TS310 and they weren't any better for my purposes). - As a last thing: Keep it civil with any kinds of room FX when trying out sounds. IMO, a great sound should work well without any (unless you're exclusively into ambient things), so you might only want to look at them as the final icing on the cake, not treating them as a necessity. Fwiw, this is what helped me a lot ages ago already. Anything roomy won't just repeat whats wrong in the first place, it'll also mush it up, making it a lot harder to pinpoint the real issues.