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I thought I knew gear......


harem_theater
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So a little backstory...

 

I’ve been playing guitar for 22 years. I’ve had many amps during this time as I’m an habitual gear-flipper (not for profit, but for tone chasing).

 

Some of my faves have included a Mesa Rectifier Roadster, Bad Cat Hot Cat 30r, Egnater TOL100 and Sherlock Fathead (small Australian company).I’ve also had my fair share of modellers and currently have an Axe Fx 2 and Helix LT.

 

The point of this post; I’ve spent the last 3-4 weeks ignoring my axe fx in favour of spending some dedicated time with the Helix.

At first I was trying to dial in the Helix in the same way I have done with the Axe fx with very little reward. It was like every tone the Helix generated was dull in the high end and washed with a boxy-sounding, papery mid range. 

 

I thought it was the internal cabs, so I loaded some of my trusty IRs and got back into it. The papery mid range had gone but then there was this slow, wooly attack on my high gain sounds.

 

Fast forward to tonight...

i uploaded a preset from Customtone (something I almost never do) and there it was!! 95% of the Recto tone I’d been looking for.

 

Looking at the settings, the amp is set way brighter than I had it earlier, TS808 in front is a must and, using the internal cab block, the annoying mid range was gone along with brightening everything up. All using settings I wouldn’t typically use because I thought I knew better (the real amp’s only needed a treble setting of about 5-5.5/helix treble is around 8/9.

 

The lesson learned?

Prior gear experience, preconceived notions and listening with your eyes doesn’t help.

 

HELIX ONWARD!

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15 hours ago, harem_theater said:

The lesson learned?

Prior gear experience, preconceived notions and listening with your eyes doesn’t help.

 

I'd like this statement to be required reading for everybody who comes in here whining that Helix (or modeling in general) sucks after playing with it for all of 12 minutes. All in favor?

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Honestly I think you've just barely opened up the possibilities.  It's kind of interesting to me that two products doing the same things as far as modeling amps can come up with such different results as far as settings.  Theoretically if you measure and model a circuit's inputs and outputs you would expect those results to be very similar between different products, but apparently they can be.  Maybe it's in the process they use to take the measurements.

In any case, I suspect you're going to find a number of other situations that will be different settings in the Helix from the Axe but will ultimately result in achieving the same target.  I would bet if you watched some of the Jason Sadites 'Getting Great Tone' YouTube videos you might be better able to more quickly identify the differences in his setups and what you were used to on the Axe. 

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