sxross

So thanks for all your information on this. I like to write a wrap up on this kind of thing since I did ask the question and all of you good people took the time to contribute. I still have the Peavey, which has a custom branded 15-inch Peavey speaker and the power amp is running 4 Mesa Boogie EL-84 tubes. The preamp, which I'm bypassing completely by running the Helix into the EFX. RETURN is (just as an aside) running 3 Mesa Boogie 12AX7s. I've discovered a few things about this rig. I have an EPI Paul that I was going to replace with a A LP Standard 2015 but instead got 450P and 490R pickups and the thing sounds awesome. Heavy, but amazing. The Helix loves this guitar (PAD on, PAD off, no difference, same love). I have a Fender Strat Clapton model with active circuit that has always been my go-to guitar. The Helix doesn't love this guitar as much. I have completely given up on the active circuit (so I will save on 9V batteries). But that's the one I need to dial in next. Then a Taylor T-5 (I have no idea what to do with this, I'm currently running it through a Marshall AS50D with Celestion Speaker). One thing of note is that using the Peavey power amp, IRs are not all great. Most introduce a fair amount of hum and/or buzz that sounds unappealing to my ear. The part of the sound that is shaped by these IRs is just not surviving the "ick, the #@$@ amp is buzzing" agony. On Santa's list, if she's listening: Friedman ASM12. It weighs 50 lbs, and I just weighed the Peavey which weighs 51. So, I continue to go to the gym, do my lifts and squats, and hope I don't have to carry the thing up too many flights of stairs. On the other hand, Santa might opt out and I'll be just ok :) Again, many thanks!

It would be GREAT if we had clip warnings on each block, so as you're playing a block that's clipping would go red or something. Finding and fixing stupid mistakes is the most time consuming part of this.

I like the preamp in the Delta Blues for what it is but it's really not what I bought the Helix for. So to use the Delta Blues preamp would seem to color just about everything else. I'm still poking away at this, but it may be that FRFR is on one side of the A/B switch.

Running through guitar in. FX return just doesn't crank enough volume. Am I doing something wrong?

I'm very sure this topic has been discussed ad nauseam, but I'm struggling a bit with it. I have a Peavey Delta Blues 15 guitar amp that I like very much. I don't care one bit about the preamp characteristics, but the amp itself is just peachy and I actually own it! I previously had a POD500HD hooked up to it and I was dissatisfied with the tones I was getting. A lot of inconsistency of tone, especially on the higher strings at the 10th fret or above. I've found this on my Fender Strat (active pickups) and my Epi Les Paul with Gibson pickups. I've been watching the Helix since the Line 6 tease emails and recently spent about an hour playing on one that a friend (former Kemper fan) bought. He's playing through an FRFR setup, but I reasoned that if I neutralized my tone on the Peavey I could live with the tone coloring the Peavey would inject. I chose not to go with the 4CM because, as I said, I don't care for the Peavey preamp -- it's just another preamp and not a distinctive tone like a Bassman, Plexi, or Dual Rectifier. There is a question lurking in here -- please be patient. I tried hooking the Helix up to the power amp using FX Send and there just wasn't enough volume from it. I actually like loud. So I went with Left/Mono (Helix) -> Guitar In (Peavey). The demo tones are far and away better than those on the POD HD, but nothing I would ever use even for goofing around at home. So I created some straight-line serial tones using models for guitar rigs I knew. For example, Eric Clapton favored the Tweed and not a heck of a lot else. I threw in a compressor and Fassel Wah on the front end and '63 reverb after the AMP+CAB block in case I wanted it. The results were good, and I could see that the Helix was superior in almost every way to the POD HD500. But still I was left with the stupid "but there must be more I'm not getting." feeling. Then I tried a Fender clean with the Deluxe model. I tried with the Preamp model and let the Peavey handle the CAB. Not too spectacular -- I expected lots of brights with the Strat, but found it a touch dull and found the headroom not what I expected. It broke up pretty easily and I'm at a loss to figure out why. Ok, last bit of describing my adventure: I followed this tutorial and created a relatively complex tone exactly as described. I understand that using an amp and IR in front of a real guitar amp has pitfalls, but what's a guy to do? Anyhow, this is a great patch once you get it right. It's downright playable! Now, I know a number of you get into the weeds (and that's a good thing) about how to craft a tone. Even after playing as long as I have, I'm still more a plug and go guy but I now want to understand how to make "that tone." I'm not just stupid happy with grabbing a great guitar and plugging it into an ok amp and wailing away. So here's the question: Am I always going to feel handicapped by not going the whole way with an FRFR setup? My reading suggests that a lot of people have sold off some pretty trick amps and purchased FRFRs and are living happily ever after. Obviously, there is no single right answer to this, but my goals are 1) Not necessarily to sound like a particular guitar player to make my cover band sound authentic; pleasing to me is more important. 2) To use the Helix to potential and not limit it artificially by some self-imposed constraint. Money is an object, but if I'm way off track, that's something I need to know. 3) Any comments regarding whether is started in the wrong direction and should rethink what I've done. Note: I do have a pair of reference headphones, but I just can't spend my life with them strapped on. Things do sound different through them, but I can't exactly isolate how/where they sound different. Thanks for reading and looking forward to your comments.

I gave it "one more try" and it worked. Not having an EXP-2, I'm not certain the significance of the LED turning from red to green when the toe switch is pressed. In any case, I made the changes in the POD-HD software. What may have worked was shutting the effect off by default and then uploading it (downloading it?) to the device. I guess I wish I knew what the real problem was so I could fix things on the fly.

I was able to do this in the past, but have obviously forgotten some key element. I have a straight-through stomp-box configuration with no amp models. The signal chain is: Tube Compressor -> Conductor -> Chorus -> Distortion (several) I've had this in place for a while, but noticed that while I can activate the Conductor using the toe switch, moving the pedal does not do anything. This may have been something new in firmware -- I've updated that more recently than this patch. The L6 factory presets still work fine with the pedal and effect. Any help on what I may have done wrong is appreciated. The Conductor is set at 100% mix and the controller uses the toe switch to activate and the pedal position to control the effect 0-100%. Thanks!

So @gear head, when you were using the HD500 plugged into the FX return, what power amp did you have on the back end? This does solve some of the issues I was encountering, but the Peavey seems to control volume at the preamp stage, leaving volume modulation to the HD500 in your first configuration. Is this common and were you able to get sufficient volume without micing the amp? By the way I like it so far. On a different but related topic, I have a couple of really different guitars. One is a Strat with an active circuit that is really a loud guitar when the preamp knob is turned up. This can add crunch in most preamps. I've found the Line6 models respond differently than a typical amp to this kind of overload (I wouldn't say overdrive so as not to confuse it with preamp drive). I have an Epi Les Paul that was pretty soft by comparison, but I'm getting some pretty hot pickups put on right now ($25/pickup! How could I say no?) Thanks

I'm using an HD 500 in front of a Peavey Delta Blues 15 amp with either a Strat/Active or an Epi Paul/Seymore Duncans. I'm getting really mixed results on all effects and wondered if this is even a reasonable thing to do. I have a preset with just chorus, Here are my assumptions: The "no effects on" should be a pass through (right now it doesn't seem to be -- sound is muddy) A compressor on the front (before the preamp) shouldn't do much to dirty the tone. Right now, the Tube Comp is really dirtying up the tone. That's cool if I want dirty, but sometimes I want clean Tone and volume can be managed on the guitar and amp Crunch can be set on the amp The main reason I'm wanting to do this is that I was using amp modeling with all the tone knobs at 5 -- as neutral as possible -- and it just colored the sound so much I wasn't hearing what I wanted. I tried the 4-wire technique, but with just those effects, what would I put in after the preamp? Anyhow, is anybody running an HD in front of a real guitar amp instead of a PA? What are you doing? Thanks!