My Helix is on it's way!

[jeff5x01]

Hey fellas, first post here. Thanks for having me. So I ordered a Helix last week. I'm no stranger to Line 6 products. In the past I've had Pod 2.0, Pod XT Live and Pod HD 500, Spider Valve MK2 along with various other Line 6 Pedals. Except for the Spider Valve amp I've been disappointed in the past. For the last 5 years I have been playing a Kemper and loved it. However in those 5 years, I've stuck with one sound. A Morgan AC 20 profile. Love it. However Im a frugal guy and having 2100.00 tied up in one profile just seemed pointless even though I loved that one sound.

 

I'm a church player so I have to go direct, no amps. I'm totally past the "amp in the room" thing and have embraced modelling despite my past "tubes are the only way to go" feeling. I have been watching a ton of videos on the Helix and was pretty shocked when I heard how great it sounded in videos. I'm hoping that translates when I get the unit. Are there any set up tips I need to know about that are going to make a night and day difference? As a mixing engineer, I know my way around a parametric eq which I'm so thankful Line 6 has incorporated in this unit. I've watched videos on snapshots, gain structure, multiple routing paths, using IR's etc. So I think I have a good idea of how to get around it without having actually placed my hands on it yet, but is there anything "special" I need to know about?

 

The first thing I plan to do is update the firmware. I have the Updater and Helix Editor already loaded on my computer.

 

Thanks in advance for any tips! Looking forward to being a part of this community once again. I was a member back in the old forum days.

 

Jeff

[DunedinDragon]

Probably the biggest thing you need to be aware of starting off and going direct to the board, is you'll likely experience more upper and lower end response than you're used to.  If you're a sound engineer it should make sense to you in that you realize the speakers used FOH are going to be full range flat response (FRFR) style speakers.  That being the case without any intervention on your part on your patches you may experience shrillness or boominess in your patches that you're not used to.  It's easily addressed, but don't be shocked by it.  It's all simply an artifact of speakers that respond more efficiently at the high and low end of the frequency spectrum than does a traditional guitar cabinet.

 

A lot of that will depend on the PA setup at your church.  If there's a subwoofer cut over or if they have the high pass engaged on your channel you may not see too much of the low end boominess, but you'll most certainly hear the high end shrillness.  This can be managed in a number of ways.  You may hear people talk about adjusting the global high and low cuts, but I think that's a bull in the china closet approach.  The amount of boominess or shrillness varies with the amp model and especially with the cabinet and mic model/placement that are being used.  You can always use the high and low cut parameters of the cabinet being used in the in the patch, but you can often mitigate it initially with a different mic and placement option.

 

Being a mixing engineer I'm sure this is no surprise to you.  What may be a bit surprising is the stock Helix cabinets don't provide a way currently to position the mic further from the cap into the cone of the speaker.  Instead you simply vary the distance of the mic.  But if you're more familiar with the effects of positioning outward from the cap as well as off-axis placements there are plenty of very good IRs on the market that provide those capabilities.  I personally use a combination of OwnHammer, Celestion, and Redwirez IRs.  Additionally, you can adjust some of these artifacts by combining different cabinet/mic arrangements using a split block.  That can very often get you where you want the sound to be without the shrillness or boominess.  Of course in the end you may end up tweaking things a bit with the parametric EQ for more precise control.

 

The issue that you will most likely encounter in this regard has been brought up by a number of folks that play in churches in that they setup their patches to sound fine at home, but are surprised when the plug into the main FOH system.  That's generally due to not having a way at home of sufficiently mimicking the performance behaviors of the main speakers at church.  Therefore it may be in your best interest to invest in a powered FRFR speaker to be used at home to dial in your presets so there's no surprises once you plug in at church.  I personally use a Yamaha DXR12 to dial in my patches at home and it's a pretty good match to our QSC KLA12 line array.  And if you do it right the sound man should be able to leave your channel completely flat because you've already adjusted for the FOH speakers.  If there are differences in the room I'd suggest using then using the global EQ to adjust for those differences.

 

That's really the main thing you most likely to encounter out of the box.

[jeff5x01]

Hey thanks for the response. Im quite familiar with the way a Kemper sounds through a pa, so I'm hoping that knowledge will help me. We have a Presonus Live mixer so I am able to capture the band at rehearsal and play it back through the pa and adjust. I generally high pass up to around 100 hz and low pass anywhere from 10k sometimes down to 6k. I hate fizz so Im thrilled there is a parametric eq on Helix.

 

My main concern was the stock cabs. I've seen different perspectives through the last two weeks of research on the Helix. Some think the cabs are totally fine and love that you can choose the mic. Others think they are not as good and you need IR's. I have purchased some packs from 3 Sigma, and Ownhammer so i can see for myself. In the past, I've always felt like Line 6 cabs (along with Elevenrack) were the weak link. However in watching so many videos over the course of a couple of weeks, I havent heard any stock cabs that I think sound terrible. So I'll just have to see for myself.