SaschaFranck

For whatever reasons, preset switching on the Boss GT-1000 is *way* faster, almost instantaneous. In addition, as the main reverb and delay blocks are present in each patch, in most situations even reverb/delay spillover is possible. Anyway, if they added a global block functionality, all of this would be way less of an issue (I'd happily elaborate why that would be so).

Hm, I actually like the design of the Kemper a whole lot.

Yeah well, the Mooer functionality doesn't seem to be much more than a match EQ (and not even a good one at that). Same goes for PGs Bias Amp. Personally, I like quite some of the profiles available for the KPA. IMO the MBritt stuff is just excellent - and at least for some of these profiles, I wouldn't happen to know how to get there with the Helix. Anyway, regarding plain amp sounds, I really don't need much more (even if I could happily do with some Dumble things), but I could imagine having plenty of fun profiling (err... capturing) rather unusual things, such as, say, a combination of two amps doing different things in the high and low registers. Fwiw, I'm actually wondering why there seem to be so little experimental profiles - well, maybe there's a lot of them and they're just not very wellknown. Still, so far there's just pictures and no sounds or anything. But then, in 1.5 hours their live Q&A stream on YT will start. That should be quite interesting.

There's a list of some of the included amps somewhere already, containing all the typical stuff as well. Their Archtype plugins (ported to the Cortex) will only be an addon - kinda like the genuine L6 amps (Badonk et al). Fwiw, these aren't the tones I'm after, either. I like it quite a bit more raw. Yet, they demonstrate Neural DSPs coding skills quite fine - and I absolutely don't think you can get the same quality from each and every modeler, they're really detailed and dynamic. In case they manage to keep that level of dynamics and details with whatever standard amps, I'd be all in.

I'm not all *that* excited (and I'd never place a pre-order), but the specs are pretty awsome so far, the CEO is a serious guy in the MI business and their plugins are pretty much top notch. So, given just the description and ignoring things we don't know yet (for me certain things regarding usability would be most crucial), personally, this really checks more boxes than any other modeling product on the market. Nothing making me nervous, though. The Helix is serving me marvellously fine and in case it won't break, I would possibly never "need" anything else. I'm also not someone to quickly hop onto each and every new thing just because it's there. But then, from all that is known so far, this is simply too good to be ignored by anybody into this kinda thing.

While you're (probably) right, I know what I'd prefer, though.

I have no idea about the total number of failures, but I do know two guys personally who had to have their joysticks resoldered. Out of the, hm, 6 (or 7, there's one guy I don't really know...) Helix users (8 including myself), that's 25% already. Add to this the "non-lethal" issues, such as the thing wearing out (a lot too fast, if you asked me). Maybe it's been a bad production run shipping to Germany, maybe not.

And well, fwiw, you might even be able to run this thing from a powerbank (I absolutely don't like wall warts, but they're not the end of the world, either - and you could run 12V straight from a car battery).

Apparently they didn't "win enough" - otherwise Android phones wouldn't look 1:1 like iPhones. Besides, I think the case was more about multi gestures, swiping and such. And even regarding those Apple didn't win. Really, there's only so much ways to put icons onto a flatscreen and demonstrate a signal flow between them. Sure, they could've made them circles or triangles, but that's really about it. Apart from that, tried and trusted designs are copied, that's the way things go, absolutely no way around it. Fwiw, personally, I found it more amusing that they used "Cortex". Cortex vs. Helix... that's a nice little side stab. Anyway, they seem to be doing exactly what most people in the modeling world want: Combining modeling and profiling (err... amp capturing) in one unit and spraying massive amounts of CPU power icing onto that already delicious cake. All that with a great to use interface which will make any of the others completely pale in comparison. A touchscreen *and* enough knobs to twiddle, yay! Talk about decent fly rigs - weight comes in at a quarter of the Helix (and you could hide an EXP pedal between your socks). I'd also imagine their XLR outs will work without a phantom power blocker and their mic ins won't break once you actually use phantom power with them (sorry but no sorry, pun intended). In a nutshell: What's not to like? The only thing I see so far is the lack of a digital I/O, can't exactly understand why they leave that out. And perhaps the switches might be too close to each other (not *that* much closer than on the Helix, but I sometimes wish for a tad more space to do my stepdance already). Regarding the durability of the switches also serving as rotary encoders, I completely trust scandinavian engineering. I mean, TC has already shown it with the G-System that such things can work flawlessly over decades in case the quality is decent (unlike certain joysticks we all know...). Bottomline: I'm all interested. More than in anything else on the modeling scene.

Usually, mic combinations are merged into one mono IR.

As said several times before: add an option to couple IRs with patches and all is fine and dandy.

So, nobody on this? This is really spoiling quite some fun for me...

No. I'm talking about the full, registered version. I can reproduce that by 100%. So do other people. The trial version is even worse (I already reported that) - not because it requires online access but because it's as well regularly crashing in a reproduceable fashion. IMO this needs to be adressed urgently as plenty of people (myself included) don't show any understanding for a plugin calling home each time you open it. This should only happen once you try to access your account and/or the marketplace via the plugin UI but never ever in any other situation. Especially not in case these attempts to call home result in crashes. Unfortunately, this seems to be a fashion among plugin makers these days. Bias FX is trying to connect well over 20 web adresses each time you launch it (including Facebook, Googleads and what not). Absolutely ridiculous. I paid good money for it and yet, I uninstalled it. Won't transfer my license, either, as it'd be kinda un-ethical to sell something like that. Would not like to see HXN taking a similar route, but quite unfortunately, it looks awfully familiar.

So, this seems to be wellknown in the audio plugin world (heard about it from some Reaper user), it seems to be closely related to what happens with the demo (see report somewhere down the topic list). Here goes: - Create a project (doesn't matter whether your DAW machine is online/offline) using HX Native. - Go online with your DAW machine. - Reopen the project a while later (no idea about the exact timeframe, HXN seems to give you a kind of "grace" period), this time blocking your sequencer from online access (through whatever firewall). - Try to open HXN. -> BOOM! Back to desktop. 100% reproduceable under Logic Pro X (10.4.8) and macOS High Sierra (10.13.6). In a nutshell: Once your machine is online, you *need* to allow HXN to call home. This is pretty much not acceptable. I usually don't want my plugins to call home once installed (it's way enough of a hassle in some situations that you have to be online for authorisation already) and using a firewall is a pretty legitimate way to achieve that without compromising other online activities. No plugin should force me to either not be online at all or not use a firewall. As said, this problem seems to be wellknown.

Well, it only happened exactly once to me and just in a "semi critical" situation (rehearsal) - but that, plus knowing about others experiencing the same, already left me with less faith than I'd prefer to have in what is the center of my live rig. Add to this it's something I have zero influence on (others than, say, broken strings, cables and what not) and there's that somewhat uncertain feeling. I'm all for new features and toys to play around with, but I think the single most relevant issue when it comes to dedicated music hardware is rock stable performance. It's why I usually use a case for the Helix instead of the vastly more comfortable Novation bag, it's why I stepped back from using laptops live, etc.

I hope the "bigger fish" will be the corrupted presets. By far the worst thing to deal with in case you're a live player.

I have once tried to capture an IR of one of my own cabs, an open back 1x12 DIY thing with a G12H100 (around 30 years old, so pretty well worn in). Didn't turn out as bad as I expected but had zero to do with the cab when I placed a Yamaha DBR12 (that I borrowed back when I did the experiment) next to it and played between both of them alternatively. The main reasons probably being: - Me being a lousy engineer, not exactly knowing what I did back then. - The cab being open back (hence an acoustic dipole) - The mic characteristics being captured as well. There's endless discussions about the subject already, so I don't think it's a good idea to repeat all the stuff, but my personal bottomline would be that I never liked typical guitar speakers too much unless it was under ideal conditions (which is pretty close to "never"), so I don't even want an exact replication, AITR or not. What I have done instead was to start mixing and tweaking my own IRs. For that, I was still placing some cabs and an FRFR next to each other and just started tweaking in my "IR mixing template" project (running Logic). I quickly stopped trying to exactly mimic the cabs (see above, don't exactly love them anyway) but rather concentrated on making my IRs work as good, without any role models in mind, the real cabs only serving as something to give me an idea of a tried and trusted that I could compare things to by their feel. I ended up with a bunch of IRs that I use ever since (in fact, right now it's just two). They seem to work quite nicely both live and as starting points for recordings (I always record without IRs and only monitor through them) and my live sound feels quite great to me while playing. No idea what else I should be asking for.

I use a mono Cali IV EQ as the last thing in all my live patches. Sorted. I like the idea of an overall EQ per patch (not global, I use that for different purposes) anyway. Would perhaps be nice to have the legacy stuff running in mono genuinely, though, as it might save some CPU cycles.

Note: If you were using a plugin IR loader, you'd have to go for software monitoring in your sequencer of choice. That may open up a can of worms, especially as the latency of the HX family isn't all too great to start with already. Further plugins may add more latency and in order to keep things acceptably low you'd probably have to stick with 64 samples buffersize - anything higher might start to feel a tad disconnected when using headphones. At least that's what it's like for me. I would rather try to not use delays and reverbs while recording - usually you don't want to record them anyway and there's a rather elegant way to have them on your signal while recording without compromising the low latency of your directly monitored signal. It's a little different in different sequencers but basically you would use software monitoring but drag the channel fader down to zero (some sequencers have dedicated input fader objects, which makes things a lot more comfortable) and set up a pre fader send to a 100% wet reverb/delay bus. That way, the only part of your signal affected by the higher software monitoring latency would be the wet return of your room FX - and it really doesn't matter much on these (if at all).

I really think it's a lot about the playing to get the individual "chuggs" out properly. Once that is managed, finding a proper amp shouldn't be too much of a deal. And fwiw, I gave that riff a try but didn't exactly manage to get much closer. Fortunately, my oh-so-valid excuse would be that this isn't my cup of tea (I'd like to be able to hammer it out tighter, though, should possibly practice my palm mutes a bit more...).

Every bit this. As weird as it might seem in these days, really great USB cables are a rather rare breed. In addition, the Helix is really sensible when it comes to USB connections (no idea why, doesn't even need to be bus powered and the required bandwidth is covered multiple times, even by USB2) That's why you need to check out multiple USB cables. In case you stumble upon a good one, treat it like a raw egg (and make sure to mark it - seriously!).

Thanks for your investigative efforts (really!). Yet, whether restarting the Helix will result in "edit-able" presets or not (I didn't have too much issues, but well, as said, I had one preset completely freezing the Helix, but that didn't happen on a copy) is of little help because that's not even remotely how I'd want to work at all. I have a few baseline presets that I build the final presets up upon. Hence I need to be able to copy and edit them. Besides, this is computer 101. You just don't restart your computer in order to be able to edit a copied Excel document. In a nutshell: I think this is by far the most serious software related issue the Helix is suffering from and it's pretty wellknown, too. The Helix team should be all over it. At least I'd be, if I were in their position. Might be a tough thing, though, as there's no 100% reliable ways to reproduce the problem (if there was, I'd happily give it a try, usually helps programmers to tackle it down).

Hm, after some more investigation, it's not that much of a strange sound but the original seems to be extremely palm-muted and maybe gated as well.

There's some almost drone-like sound in your DI track. I have no idea where it's coming from, but as soon as you add gain, it becomes very apparent. Listen to the attached file. Note: No, this is *not* meant to sound even just similar to the original, but it illustrates that drone-ish sound. With that sound being so loud, it's impossible to match the original. Metalpatchclone_01.mp3

Jo, werd's mal ausprobieren. Viel steht und fällt anscheinend leider mit dem Attack, der ist bei dir etwas weniger prägnant. Aber mal sehen. Sorry for the german, translation: Yeah, will give it a try. IMO the attack would be the main thing which is less present in THRASHERs DI file. But we'll see.