soundog

Thanks to you, too, psarkissin. I'll give her a good examination this week and let you know if I see anything. I won't try anything too aggressive yet.

Nice haircut. ;)

Thanks very much, Charlie .... I'll do that today.

I have a Variax Acoustic 700 I've used for many years. Lately at a gig the low E string has no output until the unit has "warmed up". After that it works normally. Is this a symptom of an aging piezo like one of these, or do piezos just suddenly stop working.

For the money, hard to beat a Peavey. Like a Milestone model, or similar. Or, find someone who plays bass and have them look at some used models with you. Get a full scale 4-string. Set up is important if you want it "nice feeling and easy to play."

I remember when I just plugged a guitar into an amp and played it. Later, I bought a Big Muff. After awhile, things started getting complicated.

Another consideration for me was used marketability. I only use mine in the studio, but figured the market would be a lot larger for the floor model if I ever want to sell it.

I've noticed slightly less sensitivity some difficulty even with the E string of my 4-string Stingray when tuning. Response is improved if I adjust my volume and tone controls (more treble less bass), but often just use a separate bass tuner. Does B tuning work as good as, say, your hi G string? There has to be a point of diminishing returns with nearly any digital tuner on really low frequencies.

Lots of good info here, thanks. I'll continue to play around with my Variax to see if I can get some tone combos I like with the Helix better than the pure magnetics. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to: 1. Line 6 adding Work Bench integration in the Helix 2. Fremen's Variax Pack (Helix + Variax presets)

I have a Helix and a Variax Standard. I use them for recording straight to DAW. For Variax Standard or JTV users, have you found certain combos of Variax settings that play well with the Helix? It seems I always end up using the magnetic pickups in my Variax, because the Helix + Variax magnetics sound better to my ears. I'd love to be able to use different piezo-based Variax models that work well with specific amps/cabs/settings — I like having a nice tonal and color variety in the studio. Any advice or tips?

Take it outside, please.

Agreed. I only use an external looper (Boomerang III) for live performance looping. Powerful, less tap dancing, no muss, no fuss. The Helix looper does come in very handy for testing preset settings and comparing amps, etc.

I play solo and have similar equipment, and tried using a Helix in a similar fashion (mixer/sound processor/looper). My findings and suggestions: - Variax. you don't really need a Variax (you can get all the guitar tones you need with your current guitars), although you may want one if you use alternative tunings, which the Variax does nicely. Or if you need some of the esoteric guitars (sitar, resonator, banjo, etc). - Looping. you need an external (separate) looper. The looper in the Helix is not, in my opinion, useful for live looping unless your looping needs are very basic. For one, you can't do more that a single loop, and for two its a pain to tap dance in and out of the Helix looper during a live performance. Instead, buy a Boomerang or Pigtronix or one of the new Electro Harmonix loopers. - Mixer. the best mixer for what your needs, in my opinion, would be a compact MIDI mixer—specifically the Akai MidiMix. You could use it to control volume and presets on the Helix via MIDI, as well as all of your laptop applications (eg midi guitar, etc), your Roland drums, etc. The main reason I like this mixer for what you would be doing is that it has a "send all" button that will send the current position of every fader and knob with one button press. That way, if you change presets on the Helix you can press "send all" to re-establish every fader setting. Otherwise, you will go nuts trying to keep levels consistent between presets. With this sort of mixer setup, you would be controlling the output of all of your outputs (Helix, Handsonic, etc) via MIDI, and running the stereo or mono out of your Helix into your powered PA speaker(s). Another mixer option to investigate is a Behringer X-Air, which plenty of analog ins and outs, but can be controlled wirelessly from a tablet or MIDI controller. In this case, you would feed all of your analog outputs into the mixer, and the output to your powered PA speaker(s). Before you commit, draw some diagrams on paper of all of the ins an outs you need, and plan out how your routing would work along with the Helix and a mixer. This will save you a lot of headaches later on! - Helix inputs. You will probably have enough, although I'm not sure why you need two microphones. If you don't have enough inputs, you can always swap out an input or two when needed between songs. But I don't think you can play more instruments at one time than the Helix has inputs — it's really versatile when it comes to ins, outs, and send/returns. Good luck. Keep us posted on your progress. This forum if full of very helpful folks — its one of the best I've encountered.

Thanks for the heads up, zooey. I grabbed some because I can't resist a good deal. BTW, Rosen offers a nifty IR DAW plug-in called "Pulse" for free with any of their IRs. Useful for those of you using IRs for studio recording.

One problem with driving headphones right out of the Helix is the lack of metering, although I've had no problems with my studio Sennheisers clipping. If you have a lot of gain in certain blocks on a given preset, the signal can get pretty darned loud and could possibly overdrive your headphones. Is the clipping coming from all your presets, or only really loud ones? For critical tweaking (for recording purposes) with headphones or studio monitors, I send my Helix XLR output into my Apogee Duet interface, and drive my headphones from the Duet. That way I can monitor the input levels (Helix output), and the headphone output levels on the Apogee meters so I'm assured there is no clipping, and I get plenty of signal into my headphones. Any distortion I'm hearing is hopefully intentional, and coming from my Helix blocks.

I bought 'em, they passed the interview, and I'm putting them to work. They hold up nicely in the studio, through good monitors. As far as my concern about usable clean and crunch rhythm tones in addition to lead or heavier stuff, no problem there. There are some Jazz Chorus based tones, and I've also played around with swapping out the OCD block in some of the presets with less aggressive distortion blocks. These are great right out of the box, but also easy to tweak. Many snapshots use an inventive combination of cab blocks plus Glen's provided IRs, so those also have a lot of tunability. I'm especially digging the Cornford, Dumble, and Badger 35. Bottom line ... I found these to be very useful and solid presets—not a dog in the pack.

Yes, I thought perhaps Glen did his own Soldan modeling. Thank you.

I don't see a Soldano on the list of amps included. Am I missing something? Also, the video is heavy on overdrive lead tones. I am looking for clean and mild-crunch tones, mostly for recording rhythm guitar parts. Would this set of presets be useful?

This is true, but I wasn't including replicants.

As others have mentioned, phrasing is everything because the player's gotta breath! Its no different than singing. Allow natural "breathing" phrases ... with appropriate bends and vibrato. Stick to a blues scale. Study a few blues sax solos (e.g. Brecker, Sanborn, Crawford, etc). Blues guitarists already do most of this .... its part of the mojo. Harp players, too. Tonally, try to match EQ to sax. Try rolling off lows at around 250 Hz, and highs at around 1 kHz. Sweep and look for "woody" mid-tones. Use a mild distortion block or amp drive to simulate the vibration of the reed. Probably use your neck pickup or, perhaps, middle. After you pull all of this off, no one will believe its a sax instead of a guitar, but you'll be a better blues guitarist then you were before.

Love that song!

Are you human? And were you doing something bad?

....seems to be working better today. Who knows why...got better things to worry about. Like Trump supporters. They worry me.

.....clearing the cache fixes the problem.

That's After the Fire doing "Der Kommisar."