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I'm looking for just a crisp Fender Twin style clean tone that I can use as a starting-point for my patches. I've played with all of the factory presets, and a LOT of the clean-tones I've found on the forum, and so far I haven't been able to find anything that just sounds like a regular old CLEAN Fender Twin. They all seem to sound like 1 of 2 things: either just too squashed (they all sound like there's already some gain happening- if you just play a chord with any force, they already seem to start breaking up); OR they're those super ambient reverb-delay type clean tones (which don't get me wrong- those sound super cool and all, but I need just a good flat CLEAN tone). I play in a band that covers a LOT of different styles of music. Right now I get about 90% of my tones on-stage from just my clean Divided by 13 JRT 9/15 (think SUPER clean like a Fender Twin) with an Analog Man King of Tone in front of it, all mic'd by an SM57 pretty close to the grill. That's IT. And that's basically what I'm looking to replicate with the Helix, but I haven't even been able to get CLOSE, yet. Now, I know that's a "boutique" amp with a "boutique" pedal in front of it, but really I'm just looking for ANYTHING that's super clean, and NOT squashed. Like a clean tone where if you just strum an E-chord with some force, you can hear the fullness (headroom?) of the low AND high E-strings, without any breakup. Again nothing wrong with some killer break-up, but that's just not what I'm going for, here. I want it to be CLEAN as can be, until I put on a distortion pedal. I'm SURE the Helix is capable of this kind of clean tone, but apparently I'm too freaking dumb to make one myself! Every "clean" tone I've downloaded seems to sound like a Fender Twin.... only with like a blanket over it. Please- SOMEONE help me find a NOT-squasehd, BIG, crisp clean tone! Lastly- not sure how much this matters or not- but I'll be using this tone directly to/through the PA. We play a lot of big rooms, and I need a clean tone big enough to fill the space. That's where I've run into a lot of problems- a lot of the Helix clean tones sound okay until I have them going through the PA, at which point they seem to go from a little-squashed to "why aren't you just using an amp, you chump" squashed. THANKS, everyone!

I don’t know if anyone else has mentioned this, but I run my guitar into a external wah then into the helix and one of the analog outs goes into a fender twin reverb reissue, everyone knows this is a loud amp but with the helix in front I can run it a bit hotter and use the volume on helix to tame it to bedroom levels! I know better not to use cab sims with a real amp but with how clean the twin is, I find I get great representations of various amps using the pre blocks as a gain stage pedal. I know this is all obvious, but it’s like finding the toothpick in your Swiss Army knife.

The Helix LT is awesome. Not had it long, but damn is it impressive. There's just one thing bugging me about amp emulation. Example… Fender Deluxe Reverb. On a real one (excluding the built in Vibrato and Reverb) the only pots are VOLUME, TREBLE, BASS. Note that there is no MIDDLE pot, unlike a Fender Twin. However, on the Helix Deluxe Reverb model, I have DRIVE, BASS, MIDDLE, TREBLE, PRESENCE, CH VOL, MASTER, etc. I dislike how Helix amp controls seem to be a one size fits all approach. I find it very hard to dial in the sound of my real Deluxe Reverb into a Helix emulated version. There's effectively THREE pots that control volume! There is no DRIVE channel on a real Deluxe Reverb either, yet dialing down the DRIVE to zero gets you complete silence. Then there's the EQ issue. I could be wrong about this, but I've heard that the EQ on a Fender blackface only 'removes' frequencies and doesnt add any to the sound. It certainly behaves that way. So having both TREBLE and BASS dialed up to 10 is basically your guitar's original signal, and anything less is either removing bass or treble, depending on which pot you adjust. The Helix pots do not seem to behave like this though. It seems more like 50% is the normal signal and anything more will ADD to the signal. Again, frustrating. I realize that Line 6 can't really change this way of working without screwing up everybody's existing patches, but it would be nice to have an option in the preferences (or perhaps on a per patch basis) for 'Legacy' or 'New' amp controls. 'New' of course being a more faithful to what controls are on the actual amp. Strange that they DO appear to go all out on modelling the controls of effects pedals, e.g. I noticed that the OCD effect even has the HP switch and a switch to toggle between versions of the pedal! You may ask why I need to have the amp modelled so precisely, if I have the real amp, but there's a million obvious reasons why i'd want an emulated version too, such as for playing through headphones or recording direct to Logic. Anyway, i'm mainly just sounding off, but any thoughts or advice would be appreciated!