Looper to try different cab settings

[vcline6]

Hi all

 

I'd like to record a loop (bass) and play it back while changing the cab's settings (mic type, distance...) so I created the attached chain in which the looper is the first element.

It seems to me like the sound is different with the looper engaged than if I play the loop with the same settings. Am I doing anything wrong?

 

Thanks in advance

 

[sami568]

The looped sound with all loopers is never as high quality as the sound of the guitar without a looper.  I also want to know that answer to that question!  I have not tried the Helix looper yet (and cant now because everyone is sleeping in my house!) but I have tried so many loopers and they all have this issue to some degree.   (I noticed the same problem with the looper in my AxeFXIII).  The best looper I ever used was the Boss RC300, but it still colored the sound.  I currently use a Pigtronix Infinity which is almost as good as the RC300.  I use it in a parallel loop so it does not color my main signal and then use the wet-only signal out to blend with my unaffected signal (how I also used the much larger RC300).  Before blending back, I take the looped signal through a Pendulum 4 band parametric EQ in an effort to get the EQ closer to my main guitar sound - I get it pretty close using the EQ but never perfect. Why cant someone make a looper that does not color your signal?  The fact that the Helix converts your signal to digital is not the issue because  when I record my guitar in my digital DAW on my PC, the sound is perfect and sounds identical to the sound of my guitar - so it IS possible to have a perfect looped tone!   When we play through the Helix, our guitar signal is already converted to digital and it sounds fantastic - so it should be easy for the Helix to just store the numeric representation of our signal and play it back again.   Right???

 

 

[silverhead]

Two things to check:

- looper playback level. If this is less than 100% it will sound a bit different just due to the volume level change.

- looper record speed and mono/stereo. These settings can also affect the playback sound. For best comparison to guitar input use full speed mono.

[vcline6]

On 9/21/2019 at 2:55 PM, sami568 said:

(2^24 bits/sample) x (48,000 samples/sec) / (2^8 bits/byte) x (60 sec/min) / (10^9 bytes/gig)  = 189 GIGS of memory

 

 

 

Thanks for your reply Sami

I think your formula is not correct, instead of 2^24 it should probably be 24 since 24 bits (3 bytes) are sampled 48000 times per second -> ~8MB for 1 minute which makes sense since an audio CD is ~650MB for 44100Hz/16Bit/Stereo. I don't think memory is the issue in this case...

[vcline6]

On 9/21/2019 at 2:57 PM, silverhead said:

Two things to check:

- looper playback level. If this is less than 100% it will sound a bit different just due to the volume level change.

- looper record speed and mono/stereo. These settings can also affect the playback sound. For best comparison to guitar input use full speed mono.

 

Thanks for your reply silverhead

 

I did not change any of the default looper settings (screenshot attached).

My config is full speed mono.

 

[sami568]

6 hours ago, vcline6 said:

I think your formula is not correct, instead of 2^24 it should probably be 24 since 24 bits (3 bytes) are sampled 48000 times per second -> ~8MB for 1 minute which makes sense since an audio CD is ~650MB for 44100Hz/16Bit/Stereo. I don't think memory is the issue in this case...

 

Yes!   You are of course correct ....   Thanks for correcting my error...  (I just deleted my flawed calculation)