SaschaFranck

Ok, that's at least good to know. Line6 is really not doing themselves much of a favour. I mean, for non-HX-hardware users not getting any discount, this is among the more expensive lines of guitar amp sims and a demo should rather run flawlessly. And unlike myself, I bet most folks running into the spinning beachball or hourglass won't give it much further tries. I really love fully functional demos, but I'd rather take something save-disabled or whatever than something freezing my projects. Apart from that, I only knew about a possible solution because I've already heard about the "requires to be online" restriction of the demo before. Many people may not realize that and they may as well not even try to get as far as to cut their internet connection temporarily to "fix" HX Native. "Normal" users will just be like "Oh, the thing is constantly freezing my sequencer, byebye Line 6, Positive Grid (or whomever) here I come". Which is a shame, as the thing is really great (not sure I'd pay 400 bucks, though, most people will only need around 5-10 amp models and you can get those for a lot cheaper). But with the demo acting up like this, I could even imagine some hardware users won't purchase it.

I owned quite some decent drive pedals over the years, but I gotta say that the Heir Apparent is easily up to even the very best of them. I don't think I'll ever create a patch without it anymore. Does a fantastic job in front of pretty much any amp at almost any gain. Not a too huge fan of the fuzz boxes though, even different input impedance settings don't seem to deliver the right dynamic behaviour.

If there ever will be one (which is likely), I'd love to have a bit more horsepower and more switches (another row of 6 for example) and knobs (again another row) to support that additional power sufficiently. I'd be very interested in such a thing. As far as devices/FX go to use up that additional horsepower, I'd love to see HOG2 and SY-300 clones (or derivates...).

That is quite weird. So this happens on all patches, the factory ones included? And you're defenitely connected to the proper input (just asking, you know...)?

Oh, I just noticed you've done a reset - in that case, Guitar In Pad shouldn't be on. You may check it anyway (even if that shouldn't make a difference as dramatic as you describe).

Sounds a lot as if you may have accidentally activated the Guitar In Pad. It's in "Global Settings" -> "Ins/Outs" -> leftmost option at the bottom.

So, to perhaps make matters a little easier for the fine coders at Line6 (I actually don't know whether it'd make things easier...) and to probably achieve better transparency for the users, how about this idea: Instead of being able to "tag" each and everything as "global", there could be some kind of limitations to the concept. I could imagine that there could be something like "patch groups". It could work like this: You would start with one patch and assign it to such a group. Now, each and every other patch you'd add to this group would share: 1) The entire patch routing. 2) All blocks (and their settings of course) you would tag as "global" (or rather "group-wide"). Quite obviously, I don't have the slightest idea wether anything like that would work anyway, but it could adress a few issues that might arise with different solutions. 1) Within such a group there'd be no trouble with DSP allocation as the routing couldn't be changed. So there'd be no way that an amp from path 1 which you might've tagged as a global block would all of a sudden be used in path 2. I could even imagine that patch switching within such a group could be a little faster. And well, in case you've tagged a delay as a global block, even trail spillover might be possible (as the required DSP power would be constantly reserved for that very delay at the very same position in the signal chain and as no dramatic routing changes could blow things up). 2) No patches outside of these groups would be affected. There wouldn't be any blocks all of a suddden appearing as "global" in whatever additional lists or what not. So, as long as you wouldn't explicitely enter "group patch mode", you wouldn't even notice something has changed. 3) As the routing would be identical within any such a group, you would likely not try to achieve fundamentally different things between the group patches (aka "super serial vs. super parallel") but keep it down to some patches sharing the same basic architecture, just with the added bonus that you could add, say, more different FX than within a single patch while also being able to control everything as you would as well have a sufficient amount of switches (which is pretty much what SlavaBass was mentioning in his Ideascale submission). As an example, to illustrate things: My basic patch for such a group may look like: 2 amp and 2 cab blocks (in parallel paths I may switch between or whatever), 2 drives, a general purpose delay, a general purpose reverb and maybe a general purpose EQ. I would tag these as global, the routing would likely be some parallel thing for the amps. With these, I would be able to very quickly adjust the entire patch group to work in a whole amount of genres. For example, I can turn my current main patch (that I just used with great success on yesterdays first full stop Helix gig, fwiw) which is almost laid out like that from bar jazz to almost heavy rock in around a minute, just by changing some relevant parameters of the things mentioned. Which is mighty fine already, but I could *not* do any such a transformation *and* use multiple FX scenarios. With the approach described above, I would just use, say, 3-4 of these group patches and have one for the ultimate delay mayhem, another one for filter madness and yet another one for all the dirty fuzz I may ever need - while always being able to easily keep a snapshot (or two or three...) using the core sounds I just modified. Within one patch that isn't possible due to DSP and switching limitations, across multiple patches that isn't possible because adjusting 2 amps and 2 drives on 3-5 (or even more) patches just isn't doable during a soundcheck, let alone during a gig. Last but not least, let me illustrate it a bit more by comparing things to any of the half-analog, half-digital rigs I used during the last 2 (or even 3 - yuck, I'm old...). All of them were managed by some sort of loop switchers along with some MIDI-controlled FX units. But for example, the preamps and pedals have always been analog. So in case I needed a different flavour of my clean and clean-ish tones, I would just turn the appropriate knobs on one single preamp channel and call it a day - no need to adjust multiple patches at all. I'm sure you all have seen these kinda rigs in several rig rundowns - and there's good reasons why many of these folks still stick with them. One of them IMO being the very fact that you can control things globally with ease. I am very sorry for this longwinding post, but this very issue has been plaguing me ever since I started using programmable gear. It has as well been the reason why I ditched my (IMO very nice sounding) Triaxis preamp back in the days, in favour of a much larger and much more expensive rack containing a loop/channel switcher, a Soldano and a Boogie Studio preamp. Simply because I needed that kind of global access. And in a way, it's still the same with programmable stuff. Sure, with all it's DSP power, the Helix suits almost all my current live needs within one patch. But it's still just "almost" and IMO there's no reasons for that.

I don't even disagree that this might be fine for plenty of folks - yet, it's all up to the kind of jobs you do. As said, I'm often doing "last minute telephone band" gigs. So I really have no idea what's going to happen. And for such gigs, I need to be able to quickly do some global adjustments, sometimes even within a song. And I wouldn't want to perform these operations on multiple patches, even in case it's just 3 or 4, let alone redoing them or finetuning them later on, should I notice that I turned up the treble knob too much.

I've seen various suggestions along these lines. For whatever reasons, they always seem to get very little votes. Maybe there's not *that* much live players among Helix users, no idea - because this is something I'm sure many live players would dig a lot. I'm just had an idea about how this could perhaps be a rather transparent thing (and likely easier to code, too). Will post later.

I'm not going to start a platform war here, but you can get that out of a Windows machine without any issues. And nobody's forcing obsolence on your machine, but Apple does. There's zero technical reasons my machine couldn't be supported any longer. Apart from that, with Catalina, Apple is breaking backwards compatibility for 100s and 1000s of programs (and no, I am not talking about 32bit programs). Business as usual. A business I'm having enough of.

Installed 1.81 first (official demo download, only the full download - which you can use for the demo, too - is at 1.82. Worked properly for 1-2 days, then it started freezing. Downloaded 1.82 to see whether it'd adress the issue. Worked fine for 1-2 days, now it's freezing Logic again. Whether I try to open an existing instance or start from scratch doesn't matter - beachball, have to force quit Logic. It clearly has to do with the demo being forced to be online, because in case I disconnect my ethernet cable, it works (at least the UI with all the information about it not being able to connect the server pops up). Two things: 1) I think this is a pretty bad way to present a demo. There's still several basement studios without online connection over here. Even worse if the reason for the demo to freeze Logic (and Garageband as well) is because it can't properly connect to the Line6 server. If you want people to like a demo coming with such a massive restriction already, you should at least make sure there's no server issues. 2) I hope the full version, once authorized, will never call home. Fwiw, I'm running it on a 2010 Mac Pro under High Sierra.

That is all fine, but seriously, right now, I fail to see any reason why anybody would upgrade to Catalina without being forced to. Half of the audio worlds programs are still not tested for reliability while on the other hand there's little (if anything) to gain. Personally, I will stick with Apple as long as my machine (2010 Mac Pro) will be supported (probably for another 2-3 years) and then switch platforms. I will never use Catalina.

Pretty much everybody right now is advising not to update to Catalina yet. Go back to Mojave for the time being.

Ah ok. Fine then. I was suspecting that you might have accidentally used some of the guitar presets (which, as you've said yourself, contain quite some plugins). A plain audio track without anything on it is what you generally want when using the Helix. Fwiw, I just recorded something in GB, using your patch, everything seems to be normal.

Fwiw, the patch is now working just fine. You can have a look at it, if you want, it's a tad complexed, I'd say (there's even some informational bits and an IR I "shot" myself in the zip): http://www.saschafranck.de/Helix/Soulmates.zip

Got my Helix with 2.82 installed and the first thing I did was a total reset, so I got that potential issue covered.

No, I meant the preset when creating a track in GarageBand...

What kinda track preset are you using? Guitar, by any chance?

Btw, not that it'd neccessarily matter for the recording quality, but using different devices for in- and output has a certainl potential to cause some other issues, such as recorded audio files being a tad (or even a tad more) displaced, which could be the result of the two audio devices not being synced properly (usually, when you're using different audio devices in one setup, you connect them via some SPDIF/Adat/Wordclock cable which will take care of the two not suffering from small offsets of the samplerate. It's nothing that *has to* be a bad thing but there's a potential. So, in case you can avoid that (which you perfectly can with the Helix), that's what I'd recommend. Add to this that the outputs of the Helix will be of better quality.

As far as the audio quality goes, did you check whether there's any plugins on the recorded track?

Why in the world are you using the Macs onboard interface at all? Use your Helix all throughout!

Yeah well, that's why I slapped the IR block into the last slot. I need that anyway and I don't mind everything to run through it.

Fwiw #1: The patch is working fine as is (as long as it works). I just can't add anything anymore (at least not to path 1). Fwiw #2: Everything I use is mono, as long as possible (unfortunately the legacy FX come without mono versions). I will never play stereo again live - at least not in a typical band context (been there, stereo, dual amps, wet/dry/wet, 90s rack stuff, the whole enchillada). Talking about mono: I wish there was a globally valid mono switch on the output. I know there's the left/mono outs, but they don't help when you use headphones to work on your patches. And as soon as you add, say, a legacy verb at the end of the signal chain, well, it's stereo. Which is the reason why I have slapped my IR at the end of the signal chain in this patch. Fortunately I do believe in "one cab only" patches (even if I'm using dual amps), so the global mono thing may not become an issue too often.

See, I'm not exactly new to all this (in fact, I'm with modeling and other digital things for around 3 decades by now), so I am pretty aware about how things can fail. And I always have a backup solution with me anyway (in this case an Amplifirebox and a Zoom G3, quite a nice backup rig, fwiw). But regarding “never update to a new software/operating system/firmware before a gig” - well, there must be a first gig for the Helix (unless I would never use it on any gigs...). And I didn't exactly update it, just used it. Whatever, it seems to me that I may have to strip this very patch down a little. At least in path 1, I can only add a gain block, anything else is greyed out already. And it's close to that in path 2 as well.

Guilty as charged (and fwiw, I'm absolutely a*** about anything related to computer backups) - but seriously, when you work on the unit itself, there's no way to really back up things. And you usually don't copy a patch before you add some stuff to it. That's just not the way you work on hardware units. In case I want to add a block, say, during soundcheck, I just want to do that. And I haven't even once in my life owned a piece of digital music equipment that didn't allow for this. Fwiw, could pretty much be that the patch corruption was caused HX Edit. I have now been able to reload the patch (straight after a reboot, directly on the Helix), copied it to another setlist, then started HX Edit and overwrote the potentially offending patches with an empty one. Apparently I can now load the copied patch in HX Edit fine. Fingers crossed and all that...