Creating a Helix Electric Guitar Patch

[amsdenj]

See blog post Creating a Helix Electric Guitar Patch for an in depth look at approaches to designing patches and the details of my goto electric guitar patch. The patch and the IR are attached The patch ends in .txt to get it to upload/download. Remove this extension before attempting to import into Helix. 

 

This patch may not be that useful for you. But the thought process for how the patch was designed, the effects chosen, their configuration, and their order in the signal chain might be useful in helping you design your own patches. 

 

There's also an explanation of the Mod/Chorus Echo Scale and Spread parameters which are not documented in the Helix manual. At least this is how I think they work.

 

Electric Guitar.hlx.txt

[djy8131]

Thanks! I just got my helix for Christmas and your post really helped me to get started.

[aepoc]

Very helpful Amsdenj, thank you. :)

[tommasi]

Great tutorial.

 

I'm curious about the IR, which is something I haven't started to dig in yet. I presume (though I might be wrong) that the stock cab models are based on IR themselves. Are 3rd party IR's like the one you use giving much better results, or is it just that they model your own preferred cab unavailable in stock?

[amsdenj]

The stock Cab models are IRs, but have additional processing including mic choice, distance, low cut, high cut and early reflections. Its likely some of those choices are implemented using different impulse responses for the same speaker, possibly by merging IRs as the parameters are changed. Probably not the low cut, high cut though, but I'm just guessing.

 

With IR blocks, these choices have to be included in the Impulse Response itself, and cannot be changed without using a different IR block. 

 

To some extent, 3rd party IRs are just different. They may have different speakers, more speaker model choices, different cabinets, more or different mics, more placement choices, different room, different IR capture process, etc. That's not better or worse, just different. Sometimes those little differences can make a big difference in tone.

 

Its also possible to use IR utilities on a Mac or PC to blend different speaker, cabinet, mic, mic positions, EQ curves, impedance curves and room mic IRs into a single blended IR that can be loaded into Helix. That is how the JOOSTALNICO-G12M-R121-U67  IR JazzInc provided, and that I used in the blog post patch, was created. In my case, I was looking for a warmer tone for my Strat to better fit with our bands overall sound. The use of ribbon and condenser mics, positioned close to the speaker to emphasize proximity effect that JazzInc used created just what I was looking for. I really appreciate the effort he put into exploring all those speaker and mic combinations to come up with such a nice IR.

[djy8131]

Today I spent another session implementing some of the other recommendation you had. What a difference! I'm wondering if a lot of it had to do with the eq. All the was gone. I did change amps but most of your other recommend parameters worked great

[amsdenj]

By the way, that patch has Channel Volume set pretty low to match my mandolin and acoustic guitar patches. You might need to adjust for your setup.

[amsdenj]

Based on thing I learned from Joost's SVR patch, I've updated Creating a Helix Electric Guitar Patch (updated). This version uses a Studio Tube Pre for the Drive gain stage, another for warming the tone after the amp and speaker models, and an LA Studio Comp compressor at the end of the signal chain to add its unique color. The blocks are also reorganized a bit to level the DSP load on the two paths, and to put most of the mono locks in Path 1 and stereo blocks in Path 2.

[AeroUSA]

Any chance we an have a copy of the patch to load in ourselves please?

[PMJNugent]

Yes I'm also keen to download the updated patch if you could post it. Thanks