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Whammy always affects the signal?


EooN
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I wanted to play around with the Whammy effect and I can't seem to set it up to work nicely with my preset. I want to make it go +12 in toe position and stay at 0 in heel position. In the heel position I want to have my signal unaffected by the pitch effect.  

I place the pedal first in my chain: whammy -> TS808 -> Mesa DR -> 2 IRs on parallel paths -> reverb -> parametric EQ.

 

I turn Whammy on with a separate footswitch instead of stepping on the toe switch. FX mix is at about 50%.

When I have the exp pedal at 0% (which = heel position) I still hear that the Whammy is doing something to my guitar sound. It does so even when I turn the effect off. I get "normal" signal only when I remove it from the preset.

Am I missing something? Maybe that's the "realistic" behavior of the modelled whammy unit? If so, then can I cheat and have my signal unaffected in the heel position? 

 

PS. I am using Helix LT and the built-in exp. pedal. 

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1 hour ago, EooN said:

If so, then can I cheat and have my signal unaffected in the heel position? 

Yes, you can cheat yourself and us. You can even be convinced this is the case. ;)
But seriously what is bypassed in Helix is bypassed.

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1 hour ago, zolko60 said:

Yes, you can cheat yourself and us. You can even be convinced this is the case. ;)
But seriously what is bypassed in Helix is bypassed.

 

I think he's referring to the fact that as long as the Pitch Wham is not bypassed, even if the settings would seem to indicate it shouldn't impact the tone (because the pedal is completely floored and the pitch setting at floored = 0) it still impacts the tone. He is correct that that's how it works. 

2 hours ago, EooN said:

 

Am I missing something? Maybe that's the "realistic" behavior of the modelled whammy unit? If so, then can I cheat and have my signal unaffected in the heel position? 

 

PS. I am using Helix LT and the built-in exp. pedal. 

 

I've never owned the older Digitech Whammy that it's based on, so I can't speak to whether this is how the original works (though I assume it is). However, you're correct that if the pedal is activated in the Helix, even if the alleged amount of pitch bend is 0, it still colors the tone.

 

The solution to that is to bypass it when you aren't using it. If you would rather not use up one of your stomp boxes to do that, then I would assign the footswitch to activate the pedal once it moves past a small position (like 5%) and see if that works for you. 

 

In the mean time you can pray to the Helix Gods, as I do every day, that someday Line 6 releases a model of the newer polyphonic model (though it may still have this behavior - I want it because it tracks better). 

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Thanks Kilrahi, I'm glad you understand what I mean :) I'll try to make the effect activate by moving the EXP pedal, this sounds like a pretty good solution.

If anyone else wants to share their way of using the whammy, then please go ahead! 

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yes that is what I have mine set to. I have it opposite (toe = 0, heel = -18), and have it set to auto engage at 98%, so that when its toe down position the effect is bypassed.  I make sure to set the time it takes to engage/disengage the effect to about 100ms or less, to avoid any awkward delay with the effect kickin in or off. 

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