Wah and Whammy on Exp 1 and Exp 2 (onboard foot pedal) w/ autoengage?

[guitarhiromu]

Hello all, new Helix owner here. I have been unable to make the above work properly. I am only using the onboard foot treadle here. I have both the wah and whammy set to autoengage, which works just fine for me, but the problem is, once I hit the toe switch to go from exp 1 (wah) to exp 2 (whammy), i not only get the whammy effect w/ autoengage, but also get the now unbypassed wah effect. Of course, once I switch back to exp 1 (wah w/ autoengage) I get the now un-bypassed whammy as well as the wah. Is there any way around this, or am I forced to add a 2nd, external expression pedal to make this work? The reason I'm trying to accomplish this is, I'm very much trying to make one large "Snapshot" preset work for my entire live set in a simple manner, without a lot of button pushing. Any suggestions to what I am doing wrong, or ideas would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[duncann]

Sounds like you've run into a limitation of the onboard expression pedal.

 

You've already thought of plugging in an external pedal, which is probably the best solution.

 

Another thought is using snapshots. One where the wah is enabled and another where it's the whammy. May or may not work for you, I don't know.

 

Or assign both the wah and whammy to the same switch such that it will toggle between the blocks. This wouldn't work if you want both effects enabled at the same time, though.

[phil_m]

I think using snapshots should be a viable workaround. You can now save the state of the on-board expression pedal in a snapshot as either EXP1 or EXP2, so if you have the wah assigned to EXP1 and have it set to auto-engage with EXP1 that won't affect the whammy if you have both its functions set to EXP2 in another snapshot. I think the only drawback is that you'll only have access to either one in any given snapshot. Beyond that, getting an external expression pedal is really the only way to go. If it were me, I'd just get the pedal, as it would probably be much less confusing in a live situation.

[HonestOpinion]

I agree with duncann and Phil_m, using the snapshots to get you there should work just fine. Just setup and label the snapshots to indicate that they are wah or whammy and you should be good to go with a minimum of confusion.

[guitarhiromu]

Thanks for the replies. I tried, but I could not get this working with Snapshots. Sometimes, the wah would be on w/o bypass and sometimes vice versa with the whammy on w/o bypass when switching scenes. Could be user error, but the whole auto-engage implementation, when using both exp 1 and exp 2 on the onboard foot treadle seems buggy. At any rate, for now, I created 2 separate presets with every thing being the same in each preset except for having the wah on one of them and whammy instead on the other. This works fine for now. Would have been nice to have one preset that did everything I needed via scenes, but having to use two presets is not too bad. Any other ideas, or thoughts on if I did something wrong would be appreciated.

[jbuhajla]

I use snaps to switch between volume/wammy on EXP2 with snapshots. Don't use auto engage, just snaps to turn one on, the other block off. 

[duncann]

As jbuhajla says, if you use snapshots for this, auto-engage can start messing things up. Here's a preset to help demonstrate: WHAM_WAH.zip

[guitarhiromu]

Thanks for the thoughts and suggestions guys. I will try the preset.