Easy way to feed Helix Rack (with floor Control) + Variax into software modeling (Bias FX, Guitar Rig, etc..)

[urlordfu]

If you have a dream rig, and you want to play around with some alternate modelled guitar and amp sounds outside of your Variax/Helix rig... first off: 'WHY?'. You may be looking for more inspiration, or maybe you just want to goof around and see what is out there in 2025 for modeling guitars and amps. A little background; I have a dream rig with Helix Rack plus floor control and a Variax guitar. I tend to play with an extreme low latency stereo stage monitor into my cans which really just means I am listening and playing at night through my Helix Rack headphone out, mostly to not have my family yell at me late at night to 'keep it down, maestro!' (they don't call me that.. but never mind) . Since that is USB in to my DAW machine, I also receive audio back from my PC. If I want to play with something that does modeling on my PC such as Bias FX 2 or Guitar Rig, rather than simply selecting a factory clean patch, and setting the PC to only listen on port 7 (RTM, it's the USB clean Direct Out which you may need to enable first). But with that setup it will still feed in the clean(or dirty) guitar from the Helix to your headphones as well. This can be a creative way of layering more sounds, or it can be a nightmare. If you find that it is the latter for you, switching your floor TAP to tuning mode (holding down TAP button) turns off all input in your headphones from the Helix processor OTHER THAN your Helix DI input to your PC, and subsequent DAW/PC input clean into your headphones (with HELIX ASIO low latency). This way, if you are listening on your Helix Headphone out, you only hear the cleanest return processed audio from your daw, without an overlay of extra sound from your helix and without needing to do much tweaking in a Helix patch to kill audio or anything funky like that. And, while doing this, you still have options to select your Variax guitars into whatever it is you are messing around with. Since the Variax uses a Piezo pickup but you can't go 'clean' unmodelled out (can you?) so for something like Bias FX 2 where you can create the model to match your guitar, I just left Variax on rather than MAGS, and selected Les Paul Bridge and Les Paul Neck to set it up the first time for modeling. Your results may vary(ax).
Using the Variax for this other than MAGS means also that you will have zero buzz from your equipment. Also on the JTV-89F in my case, the mags are hot and I don't want to tweak them to work with the PC models. Easier to just use the lovely Variax out with a decent LP or Strat out and build the model to that. Right? I think so. But I may have more tech at arms-reach when messing in my studio than some of you. In that case, mags will likely be fine. You decide.

TLDR = When using headphones to listen to guitar/amp models from your PC into your helix, use port 7 DI to feed the DAW audio and switch helix to tuner mode to kill all effects from Helix directly. It is amaze-ballz. But I have to say, I want to help the community here so I posted this quazi-hack. However, after doing all of this and having fun with it, I still think that everything but Helix sounds like @$$. But you be the judge. You do you. I do suggest demo software versions of anything you can before buying and testing it in this way first. And this method is how you might test it with your dream rig for easy results with clean audio and very little hassle.