VGuitar Helix owners?

Started by vtgearhead, October 21, 2017, 02:22:06 PM

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Elantric

#25
Quote from: sixeight on November 18, 2018, 09:49:28 AM
It took me three months before I was happy with my tone from the Helix. It really takes time. The default settings of the amps have improved with the latest firmware.

But when I play my GR-55 for a while and go back to the Helix, my ears have to readjust to the Helix tone. Really weird. Almost disturbing...

Agreed

And one wonders about other conditions or factors

My Headrush on Beyer DT880 250 ohm cans sound like crap , but with ATH - M50X cans  its smoother and workable.

Current plan is keep my top gear ( Roland, Boss, Line-6 , HeadRush , Kemper, because its a bit like the same excuse why I own a Tele, a Strat, a Les Paul, an ES -335, a Godin LGSA

each deliver specific sonic signatures   

But some gear you land on feat with great tone right out of the box

Others require patience and waiting a couple years for firmware updates , and then you still must craft your tones  from scratch to achieve workable results.

Smash

#26
Quote from: Elantric on November 18, 2018, 09:36:59 AM
Last night I played my Helix on ATH-M50X headphones and had a good experience editing the patch
"11A  Cali IV Rhythm 1"

I moved the 63 Spring reverb block  in front of the Amp and found Helix provided all the controls so I could micro surgically control all aspects of my sound , I must have spent an hour going through a partial array of available parameters and being knowledgable about Audio I could see where Helix provides far more parameters for control and has become the industry standard as a tool.

So heres a basic fundamental  difference I see betewen Helix and Headrush at this hour ( Nov 2018)

For a given 2 hour evening with either and a pair of  Headphones and an electric  guitar and  laptop running your favorite DAW of choice ( Reaper)   I recorded more demo songs with Headrush because I accepted its tones as acceptable "good enough for rock & Roll" and moved on recording Bass parts and Lead parts on three demo tunes in least amount of time.

While in Helix I could spend 1 hour refining my rhythm tone and another hour refining my Lead tone and I admit I could achieve tones with effects which I cant get out of Headrush

So if you are an audio geek and understand audio engineering and want a tool which provides microsurgical control of your reverbs , delays Amp ( sag,  bias) and output routing to several destinations including SPDIF I/O    ( to bring new life to your Roland VG-99 ) go with Helix

but It takes discipline to dial in a Helix patch and keep it under a minute , because of the order of magnitude more parameters for control that Helix privides vs Headrush .

And I'm  finally able to make sense of the Helix User interface with touch sensitive foot switches .
My lesson with Helix is if you are put off by its sound, just wait a couple years and the Helix Team with Ben and Eric will listen to users with firmware updates which will eventually deliver a more than  usable professional tool for those who seek more control of their guitars audio  - or want to learn

Back in 2015, my  Helix went  back in storage because I could not escape its nature to be brittle and cold - today with current firmware its night and day improvement , but you must have a handle on audio engineering , because you can easily dial in unacceptable tone as well.

While Headrush I found I was more willing to accept its editing limitations , find a tone that works for typical guitar tones  and concentrate my available time composing demo tune music

Totally agree. And I've only just learned the verb in front of amp trick since doing a blues duo - it's a great tone.

Yeah I always thought the Helix was very capable - I just think they didn't get the initial defaults right - largely on the cabs. I'm not sure I've seen any patch creation vids where they didn't high and/or low shelf the cab. Always thought the Mic choices strange as well.

Doesn't matter though - I'm still buying another one lol!

sixeight

Quote from: Smash on November 19, 2018, 10:50:00 AM
Doesn't matter though - I'm still buying another one lol!

You have a tendency to buy gear several times before you keep it. Did we just lure you back into buying another Helix. (Devious  ;D)

AlakaLazlo

Quote from: Elantric on November 18, 2018, 09:36:59 AM

...

So if you are an audio geek and understand audio engineering and want a tool which provides microsurgical control of your reverbs , delays Amp ( sag,  bias) and output routing to several destinations including SPDIF I/O    ( to bring new life to your Roland VG-99 ) go with Helix

but It takes discipline to dial in a Helix patch and keep it under a minute , because of the order of magnitude more parameters for control that Helix privides vs Headrush .

...

Back in 2015, my  Helix went  back in storage because I could not escape its nature to be brittle and cold - today with current firmware its night and day improvement , but you must have a handle on audio engineering , because you can easily dial in unacceptable tone as well.

While Headrush I found I was more willing to accept its editing limitations , find a tone that works for typical guitar tones  and concentrate my available time composing demo tune music

This is a very well thought out post and it got me thinking why I am so pleased with my Helix while others seem to hate it. (I'm not referring to Line-6 haters, but guys that claim they gave it a real shot and didn't like what they heard).

By way of background, I've been playing guitar, synth and synth guitar (these really are 3 different instruments!) for more than 40 years. (Used to be a pro, now I'm just a home studio weekend warrior.) I've also been an audio (and video) engineer.  But (in my opinion) my main talent is sound design which I achieve through (mostly analog) modular synthesizers. This requires an understanding of (among other things) signal flow and gain staging. Being able to select modules that do specific things, placing them in the correct configuration (what I call the gozintas and gozoutas) and gain staging to taste allow for an almost infinite sound palate.

When I first heard the Helix, I was impressed by the sound improvement over my old PodXT.  But as I dug a bit deeper, what knocked me out about it was the ability to move things around in the signal chain and tweak pretty much everything to taste. (The patch editor is pretty great too!) The more I played with it, the more I got a feel for the various effects and how they interacted with each other. IRs were a game changer for natural sounding amps and then when I finally wrapped my head around the snapshot functionality, I was good to go.  Because I approached the Helix as a modular synth nerd, I had the patience to dig into it far enough to get stuff out I really liked. (I wish my analog modular synths had a "save" feature!)

One has to approach something like a Helix in a different way than most guitarists approach pedals. (I mean no disrespect to guitar players!) Most guitarists buy a pedal because it does something they like really well. E.g., an old FuzzFace has a particular sound and only a few controls.  You get one because you want that sound. You put a battery in it, and plug it between your guitar and your amp, and play. Maybe you try it before the wah, or after the wah, but its a FuzzFace and its going to sound like a FuzzFace.  A Helix is like buying 200 pedals and 100 amps, but also different power tubes and 20 mikes and a bunch of rooms and a power soak, and a bunch of transistors and capacitors you can solder in (or not) etc.  But it takes time and discipline to come up with "just the right" sound for a particular part. As Elantric said, understanding audio engineering makes all the difference.

I know there are many people who disagree and I'm not going to try to convince someone else to buy a Helix. There are plenty of people out there with magic ears who have different opinions. All I can say is I'm very pleased with my Helix. I've spent many many hours just tweaking patches looking for sounds I like... and I've found a bunch.

I'm actually thinking about buying a Stomp to use just with my synth rack. I ran my Mini Model D through the Helix and it sounded really good!

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admin

Thanks for posting and sharing your thoughts!

Vaultnaemsae

I'm about a hair away from trading up my Axe-Fx II and going for a Helix. Even if the 'tones' were only 80% as pleasing as the Axe-Fx (highly subjective/personal) the audio and MIDI I/O versatility looks extraordinarily appealing.
Vaultnaemsae's SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/vaultnaemsae

arkieboy

Quote from: germanicus on October 31, 2017, 12:27:37 PM
Redwirez. Big Box Series. Its a large library of impulses using multiple cabinets, mics at multiple positions, at multiple distances.
You can sit with a single helix amp and go through thousands of impulses if you want, or just match up traditional amp/cabinet combinations.


Thought I should add a big +1 to this, and also to the 'you need to have more than a smattering of engineering to use a Helix'.  Here's an excerpt from my post to SoS Guitar Tech Forum on the subject


https://www.soundonsound.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=62733


Quote from: arkieboy

For me the difficulty had been in understanding how to mic up guitar cabs. No scrap that. My difficulty had been understanding, that with everything else going on in the patch, (virtually) miking up the cabinet was where I was going wrong.


I don't know how we got there but at some point towards the end of a long conversation that started with Max berating my guitar sound, I asked him 'how would you go about getting a good sound in the real world' and he said something like 'I'd get a SM57 and I'd point it to the edge of the dust cap off axis and then I'd move it away from the speaker until I got the sound I wanted. Usually half and inch or so. Everyone does it that way'.


Aha! Thought I. Surely amongst the vast array of free IRs I've acquired from the internet there must be one that fits that description. There were none. Neither were there any professing a R121 2" from cap edge. Or a U87 2" from cap edge. Or Sennheiser 4x1s 0.5' from cap edge. There =may= be several that were miked up in that way, but none had the metadata so I could find them. Or maybe they don't exist in (legal) free archives because these are the money, and no-one gives them away. Probably both.


(I type that like I knew what a cap edge actually was and its significance in guitar cabinet recording before last weekend. I didn't).


At this point I decided to throw caution to the wind and actually fork out on a set of IRs. I'd heard that Shuffham - love the plugin - used Redwirez so I thought I'd try those first. I found a modern Marshall 1960, noticed that the component files were named exactly as Max specified, spent the princely sum of $9 and copied the appropriate '0.5" SM57 cap edge off axis' file into my Helix.


Bingo. In one. Even I could tell that it had worked.


I sent Max a wav of a riff: 'Spot on, I just needed to roll off a bit of low end. Should have bought the Orange cab though - they sound better'. Well you can't win them all! ;-)


Anyway then I found this on the redwirez website https://www.redwirez.com/ir/DialingInYourTone.pdf. 'I'll just load all their recommended IRs and see how that goes' I thought. Every IR mentioned here sounded as expected - as near as damn it like my beloved JMP1/GMajor/EL84 20-20 rig plugged into a 1960 cab with that mic: the Royer indeed had air; the 57 aggression; U87 was good but not me; do you think I could treat myself to a 421 for Christmas? ... I could even hear through the sound to immediately realise I needed to pull back the mids on the amp model
Main rig: Barden Hexacaster and Brian Moore i2.13 controllers
Boss SY1000/Boss GKC-AD/Boss GM-800/Laney LFR112

Other relevant gear: Line 6 Helix LT, Roland GR-33, Axon AX100 MkII
Oberheim Matrix 6R, Supernova IIR, EMu E5000, Apple Mainstage, Apple Logic, MOTU M4

aliensporebomb

#32
From the sounds of it, if you enjoy "VG-99 programming" (which can be a bit intense) you probably would enjoy the Helix?
I keep going back and forth between it in my head and the headrush to augment the VG99.

Some guys just want to play - they want to get a patch that sounds good and go to town.  Great, I like that too.

But there's something special about "stumbling across" the kernel of a sound and then "sculpting the stone away from it to get the sound underneath".  So maybe the Helix would work nice on the programming methods I'm already well familiar with in the 99.
My music projects online at http://www.aliensporebomb.com/

GK Devices:  Roland VG-99, Boss GP-10, Boss SY-1000.

admin

#33
Helix provides an order of magnitude more paramaters to tweak vs Headrush

But it requires  discipline not to spend days cultivating a Helix patch to " perfection" 

And Helix has the Important SPDIF I/O - to connect VG_99 SPDIF Out> Helix SPDIF IN

arkieboy

Quote from: admin on November 20, 2018, 07:44:13 AM
But it requires  discipline not to spend days cultivating a Helix patch to " perfection"


For me, the way around this is to think of each preset as a virtual rig for a particular band and then use snapshots to coordinate the amp selection and effects toggling necessary for a bit of a song.


For my originals band, I started with a preset with my JCM800 and AC30TB with IR blocks for speaker impedance and the speaker mic combination with the IRs for the cabs I wanted loaded and added those effects I use a lot - stereo delay, electronic mistress, the trinity chorus, one of the reverbs (I forget which) post amp, and wah, MXR compressor and a boost/OD pedal (hedgehog I think) before.  I tweaked that until I had basic clean/chorus/crunch/lead snapshots as I wanted, and then copied the preset across for each song, customising the snapshots for each bit of the song I wanted a different sound for.


That doesn't mean I don't have never-ending scratch areas experimenting with different amp models, or wacky ambient stuff* - but the bread-and-butter stuff is done and dusted and I don't need to go there again for a while.  I have a new setlist coming up for my annual theatre gig - I want to be able to turn the pages of ForScore with pedals and I probably will swap out the JCM for a blackface twin and use the AC30 for crunch and lead.  But I'll do the same approach - get the basics right in a preset and copy out as many versions as I need for the set.


*I'm waiting for ASB to buy a helix to get some serious ambient presets going ... :-)
Main rig: Barden Hexacaster and Brian Moore i2.13 controllers
Boss SY1000/Boss GKC-AD/Boss GM-800/Laney LFR112

Other relevant gear: Line 6 Helix LT, Roland GR-33, Axon AX100 MkII
Oberheim Matrix 6R, Supernova IIR, EMu E5000, Apple Mainstage, Apple Logic, MOTU M4

sixeight

Quote from: aliensporebomb on November 20, 2018, 07:36:27 AM
From the sounds of it, if you enjoy "VG-99 programming" (which can be a bit intense) you probably would enjoy the Helix?
I keep going back and forth between it in my head and the headrush to augment the VG99.

Nothing comes close to the creativity of sounds and the wonderful possibilities of the VG-99. But the augment the VG99, the Helix is the best option.  An important part is the command center of the Helix, that allows for six midi messages to be sent on patch change and for any button or expression pedal to sent a midi message. Also snapshots can send 6 messages each.  This way the Helix controls the VG99. You can make your setlist in the Helix and never have to worry about the VG-99 as it will follow the commands sent by the Helix. This really pulls the two devices into one.