Leftzilla

Saw this effect directly while working for the Department of the Army as a civilian. Usually if a manager was pretty incompentent basically the only way to solve the problem was to promote them out of the position and get them out of the way. Sad but true.

Back to the original topic. Perhaps I have just been lucky in the fact that every single Variax I have purchased via Sweetwater has shown up very well setup and only needed minor adjustments (both the JTV89F and 59 were a little low on the action for my personal preference) this also includes a VAC700 which showed in perfect playability. Your experience with the 5 position switch alone would have me fairly upset. I would have leaned toward returning the guitar but can understand if (like in your case} being more hands on instead of waiting for a replacement. I can't say whether its Sweetwater's involvement and the way they prep their guitars prior to shipment (Just got and Epiphone Les Paul Custom from them that was brilliantly set up) has to do with it, but I highly suspect it dies. Sounds like you may have gotten a JTV that had been sitting around for awhile. I am in love with mine and I hope all of these issues are worked out to your satisfaction.

Alternate tunings work very well. I have a one man show with Goo Goo dolls, Creed (Higher and My Sacrifice) along with some fallout boy. Makes life so much easier!

Pretty much the same experience here. Ran HD500-HD500X for quite some time. 1st 2 albums of Elephants of Scotland were recorded with Variax (JTV59 on 1st JTV89F on second). Lined up for Helix and then used it for the 3rd album. Same as OP 1st job was recreating HD patches for Helix. Very easy and a more natural sound along with imporved effects. Keybaord player who is also our sound engineer LOVES the Helix. But I am in my Early 50s

My band runs an XR18 into a Behringer Headphone amp which can send stereo monitoring, and I happen to use an Audio technica in ear wirless (everbody else is just taking a line feed off of the headphone amp). You have 6 bus feeds so you can certainly customise the monitor mix on the XR18, so as Phil M said feed one or two of the bus feed to your IEM. WE rehearse with this system all the time now. We have the drum kit fully miked, keyboards, bass and Helix all running through the system. We use the USB from XR18 to multitrack every rehearsal. Sound is fantastic. The headphone amp is key as it has additional amplification available for the bus feed. This system was originally developed because we ran into a couple of venues that had marginal to crappy monitors onstage. We added an 8 channel splitter snake so we could isolate our onstage monitor mix (into IEMs) from the main board and not interfere with the house mix.

I am from a slightly different camp as in I do not use an amp and go direct to the PA, but the improvement from HD to Helix is quite substantial. The suggestion from .rd2rk is pretty spot on, and I think you will have a hard time returning the unit once you have played with it.

What Silverhead said. I currently have 10 pieces of Line 6 equipment including HD500X and Helix. SO I wouldn't worry about it if I were you.

I agree with all of the sentiments expressed here. I currently am the sound guy for my band and have worked with quite a few house sound guys in my gigging career and have never met one that did not PREFER going direct out of the modeler. The only thing I could possibly think would be his problem is if he is relying heavily on stage volume for the guitars. Asking for a DI box is probably a good way to break the ice and open it to discussion, but I do find that telling the band what type of equipment they will HAVE to show up with seems pretty disingenuous.

I have had no problems with my setup on 2.11 but I have not jumped into changing Variax with snapshots (That was my next try). Right now Variax (JTV89F) is changing correctly with patches. Once the global reset went I did have to go back and reinput the variax patch changes.

Also make sure the Editor and Firmware match. I had some trouble awhile back where my setlist names seemed to be off by one. I would call up a certain patch and the name would be the patch 1 number up.

Very Nicely Done!

Scatto, the key to how I run our system is that I have access to a mixer onstage. This is from years in an 80s cover band where played a lot of places where we had to bring the sound system and mix from stage so I had access and at that point was monitoring everyhting coming out of the board. There is a way to set the M2 receiver so that you can send two signals into it such as the Helix and the full band mix. The beauty of this is that you will get a mono signal in your ears but can boost the Helix over the main mix by adjusting the pan on the receiver itself. SO your idea of the wearing a mike and feeding it to the one side of the other of the M2 might work very well.

At the moment we are only running vocals,keyboards, guitar (HELIX) and bass, no drums since we can hear them acoustically but at a lower level (as in save our ears) I am also the sound guy for the band when we run our own PA so I usually monitor the full mix. We send the buses to a headphone amp and then out to each musicians headphones. Since I have signal amplifiers on the headphones and then more signal amperage on the my personal IEM we have not yet run in to the distortion or compression problem that you describe

Audio Technica M2L

Behringer Powerplay

I use a stereo wirless in ear system that runs off of the auxiliarry bus system on an X18 Air console. This allows me to customise my in ear mix so I can ear the rest of the band. We built up an in ear monitoring system that we both rehearse and play live with since we kept running into clubs with variable quality and quantity of monitors. When used in conjunction with a behringer 4 channel head[hone amplifier and split snake this allow 4 custom monitor mixes for each musician regardless of what the front of the house is doing. We just allow the front of the house to tap into our split snake to get Keyboards and guitar signal and get direct feed of the Vocals without our onstage mixer affecting anything other than our personal monitor mix. We also rehearse with this system and it can be accessed via wi-fi from a cell phone so if anybody needs to goose their personal mix they can do it on the fly. Believe me the effort in designing this system was well worth it and only set us back 700.00 bucks. The Behringer X AIR also serves as our computer recording interface and allows us to have multitracking rehearsals and acts as a main mixer if we have to supplay PA etc.

Like some of the other forum embers in this thread I started my Line 6 "career" with the AX212 and worked my way through POD XT Live, X3 Live, HD500, HD500X, VAX 700, VAC700, JTV59, JTV89F and finally Helix. I used custom tone many times over the years to give myself a starting point and have purchased from various people such as Glenn and Chris after seeing demos of the patches etc. These have been very helpful to me and have given me a jump start into some of the nuances and capabilities of the Helix. Especially the use of IRs. Most if not all of these guys offer free patches also with demos of the sounds they are producing, which quite frankly is what would entice me into paying for the marketed collections. I can understand the OPs original point and query but I am a little confused at some of the "pushback" against this I am seeing in some of the comments.

I have a JTV59 and a JTV 89F and use them with the Helix. I am also a past owner of HD500X, X3 Live etc. One thing that is extremely impressive to me is how the Helix reacts to the different Variax models and volume roll off. The system "feels" or reacts much better to the dynamics of my playing than the previous systems. Me personally I use the models much more than the magnetic pickups or I will use them in a combination patch (such as having a good acoustic variax patch and then use the magnetics for a distorted tone in the same Helix patch and switch using the pedal.

In the past I have used custom tones as a template to get where I want the sound to be on X3 Live, HD500s etc. Like you said there is a lot of fairly bad presets up there or they are tuned to specific user's guitar etc. For HD500 custom tone was pretty much the only hope you had since the factory tones for the most part were unusable since they were more meant to show off the effect capability of the unit vs. recording and/or live playing. In the case of the Helix I have downloaded some of the acoustic patches but find the factory presets to be very useful as templates and the Glenn Delaune presets very informative and useful.

Phil M why do you feel that using this with a variax acoustic model they would sound bad?

Hey stupid question probably but I am away from all of my Variax's and I would like to know if both the VDI and quarter inch outputs can produce output at the same time. I am asking because I use the VDI to control my patches and and use the output to my Helix but would like to send the dry signal (1/4) output to a TC Helicon voice harmonizer. I know I could use the helix to send an out but just curious as to whether the Variax could do it also. Thanks in advance! Lefty

Brentwade, this statement I made was in reference to what others had posted in this topic. I personally prefer the new jtv acoustics, but others do not.

I did the hard reboot procedure and it went back to normal.

So I started the update for 2.01. Unit rebooted and started rebuilding presets. It is now hung up on rebuilding preset 495. Should I just let it sit or power off and hard reset (Holding buttons 9 and 10)

I am definitely happy I upgraded, all the amp sounds were instantly recognizably more "authentic"