HX Stomp Audio Gap Between Presets

[chintesolo]

Has anybody been able to figure out how to not get the "elephant in the room" audio gap that happens when switching between presets on the HX Stomp. It doesn't happen with my very old X3 Live. So it seems like "new" tech should be better. 

[theElevators]

The short answer is: "that's just how it is, use snapshots".

 

Helix supports a specific workflow that I am personally using: each preset is for each specific song.  Within each presets you have snapshots, for each section.  On HX Stomp it's 3 of them.  In addition you can assign several stomp effects to external foot switches.  If you're playing in a straight-forward band, 3 sounds is all you really need: clean/dirty/solo with delay.  Then you can use the additional buttons for chorus/reverb. 

 

Long answer is: it's a bummer that some processors do this!  Not all, but some.  I know that Kemper does not have this issue.  Also my old Zoom processor pedal had no gaps.  If there was a CPU-consuming effect in the chain, rather than having a break, it would fade out one preset and fade in the next one.  But if you had two identical presets, there would be no silence whatsoever.  I am sure that Helix could easily accomplish the same, by comparing what is different between the two presets and consolidating them, rather than dumping everything out of memory and reloading it.  I also know for a fact that there have been rack processors from early 1990s that had delay spillover between presets--forget the name(s).  You would pay extra money to get that feature. 

 

BTW, on the Helix Floor/LT/Rack you can have gapless preset switching, but the tradeoff is that instead of two signal paths you will have only one.  That's because there are 2 digital signal processor chips, so one can be sacrificed and act as a buffer.  On HX Stomp, there's only one. 

[DunedinDragon]

Ultimately this all comes down to the time it takes to unload the blocks in one preset and load the next set of blocks in the next preset.  It affects all modelers that use higher definition DSP models.  It doesn't affect the Kemper because it's technically a sampler/modeler and doesn't operate under the same rules.  But everyone uses the same set of tricks if they're using higher definition models.

 

The only time this affects most people is in the middle of the song that needs a dramatic change and that was the reason for snapshots.  The delay is typically way less than a second so it doesn't usually affect people between songs when there's a natural break in the music.  I know I never had a problem when I was using my HD system, but that was several DSP processor generations ago.

[cruisinon2]

On 8/24/2024 at 7:56 AM, chintesolo said:

Has anybody been able to figure out how to not get the "elephant in the room" audio gap that happens when switching between presets on the HX Stomp. It doesn't happen with my very old X3 Live. So it seems like "new" tech should be better. 

 

Learn to use snapshots and you'll never have this problem again. It'll take some experimentation to figure out how to best utilize them to serve your particular needs, but I'd be stunned if you couldn't manage to use snapshots to dial in what you need 98% of the time.  Practically every patch I have can go from clean to stupid gain, with a variety of typical fx. I can count on one hand all the times I've hit the DSP wall, and I honestly can't remember the last tune that I couldn't get through using just one patch. There might be the occasional situation where you need to switch between two tones that are so radically different that it can't be achieved within one patch using snapshots, but those instances will be few and far between.

[datacommando]

On 8/24/2024 at 12:56 PM, chintesolo said:

Has anybody been able to figure out how to not get the "elephant in the room" audio gap that happens when switching between presets on the HX Stomp. It doesn't happen with my very old X3 Live. So it seems like "new" tech should be better. 

Yes, Line 6 figured it out a while back, but at the cost of sacrificing one of the DSP chips in the lager Helix units. Actually, this is exactly the same technique that was used by the old DigiTech GSP1101, 2112 and 2120 - as documented by Digital Igloo, in the Firmware 3.0 update release notes.

 

The way to handle this issue without losing DSP power is to use “Snapshots”, which allow you to control up to 64 different parameters within your preset. This means you can essentially have presets within presets, complete with true reverb and delay spillover trails. 
 

 

Hope this helps/makes sense.

 

[theElevators]

On 8/26/2024 at 7:20 AM, datacommando said:

Yes, Line 6 figured it out a while back, but at the cost of sacrificing one of the DSP chips in the lager Helix units. Actually, this is exactly the same technique that was used by the old DigiTech GSP1101, 2112 and 2120 - as documented by Digital Igloo, in the Firmware 3.0 update release notes.

 

The way to handle this issue without losing DSP power is to use “Snapshots”, which allow you to control up to 64 different parameters within your preset. This means you can essentially have presets within presets, complete with true reverb and delay spillover trails. 
 

 

Hope this helps/makes sense.

 

The only other thing is that depending on what you turn on/off with snapshots you may get audible pops/boinks.  For example I recently discovered yet another example of that when I bypass the compressor, I get that really loud pop.  Workaround: don't bypass the compressor, simply set it to a lower sensitivity setting in other snapshots, essentially making it useless.  Countless other examples of bypassing an amp block will also give you the same unfortunate artifact.  Sometimes you may want to reorder your blocks to minimize it, or use an A/B path with both blocks in question being on, just switching the routing.