I really love and hate this thing.
I was noodling around and found a few progressions I liked last night, still trying to put at least one song together or find my new groove, and ran downstairs to setup the Helix and get a sound going. With my Pod HD500 this would take 10 minutes, if that, and I'd be onto recording. 2 and a half hours later I was done writing my patch and was too tired to lay tracks... that and my ears turned to mush.
I have come up with with what I believe to be a very versatile patch. I should be able to do a lot on this and there is still some tweaking to be done. I need to adjust some EQ stages to just tweak the sound a bit to get it where I want it. But I'm pretty happy overall... and it's the power of the Helix which really showed up in these 2 hours of tinkering...
This thing is powerful, and once I made the mental disconnection with the POD HD I was really able to dig in and figure that out myself. I've done some reading of other sites but never really took notes, luckily my brain somehow retained some of this info and I was able to use it in my patch creation process... So like everything, lets start at the foundation. I plugged in my Telecaster and went to work.
I grabbed a clean amp, normally I go straight for an AC30, but today I decided to grab the Archon clean channel. For a cab I went with the Orange 412 box, because well... I need some citrus in my life. Good for a healthy life you know? I tweaked the bejesus out of it and got what I thought at the time was a nice smooth modern clean.
I wanted a good drive tone to go with it, but as I mentioned on the last blog post I wasn't thrilled with the distortion options on tap, and I'm still not overly happy with them. The Archon reacts very differently than the AC30 so I did give them a go, but still didn't really like what I was hearing. So I decided to add the Archon Lead channel to the mix. I created a second path and now my signal chain splits before the amps and the rejoined before heading out the cab.
The Archon Lead is super powerful and I really dig it! I think I may want the real thing, this is a fantastic sounding patch. Really thick and heavy. Makes my Telecaster sound like a humbucker equipped lead machine! I decided to run both amps in tandem for my lead tone and just have a foot switch take the Archon out of the signal path. At this time I put a reverb behind the clean amp only.
Ahhh... the clean Archon and the Lead Archon get pretty thick and heavy together but loosing a lot of definition... thus the heavy tweaking commences. I swapped out the clean side for a bright Fender Bassman patch and edited it until I got some nice chime in with the lead tone. Very complex and dynamic tone. I adjusted the lead tone some more and started diving into bias and sag settings to get a good feel and response. I then went clean... holy ice pick!
I played with the Bassman some more. I really like this amp, but I don't know if its idea for what I'm trying to do... So I swapped it for a blackface Fender Deluxe normal channel. I don't like how the drive control gets this amp dirty so quickly, so I have it set to 1.0 or below to get what I'm looking for. A lot more EQ tweaking to get the clean sound I wanted but still retain some top end definition. Merged with the Lead channel I was super happy.
I wanted another gain stage however, so I started to go back to the overdrive and distortion pedals. I put these in front of the Deluxe so they wouldn't affect the Archon. I don't know how long I played with the, but I never got something I overly enjoyed... I figured it was the Deluxe itself and how the pedals interact with that amp. This is where I threw out the Pod HD mentality and wondered if I could create another amp path... I was right.
I took an AC30 Essex model and threw it in behind the Deluxe along the same "clean" signal path. I setup a foot switch to hot swap between the two amps. Dialed in a chimy crunch from the AC30 and done. I added a little boost with the Exotic EP Booster and the foundation was done.
There is some bottom end flub I get from this patch that I need to go in and fine tune with some EQ patches, but overall I'm really liking the tones I'm getting from it. So it was time to fill in the rest.
I added a trem, put the speed on the expression pedal, then added my usual phaser and delay pedals. Reverb got moved to the master channel, and all done.
All of a sudden its midnight and I have to work in the morning... so it's time to pack it up and record tomorrow.
But before I do that I look at my signal chain for recording that I've fine tuned and slap myself a little bit....
My signal path is:
Guitar -> TC Electronic Hyper Gravity -> Ernie Ball Expression Overdrive -> ABY Box
ABY Box A -> TC Sub n' Up -> Maxon Ad999 delay -> Orange Rockerverb 50 -> Cabclone
ABY Box B -> Helix
The compressor was on the whole time.... oh well, it sounded fantastic.
You can download the patch from my dropbox at the link at the top of this post. I'll be updating that folder as I add patches as you come with me on this journey. Thanks for reading.
Saturday 7 July 2018
Music - upward helix
I got a little extra on my paycheck so I went and picked up a Line 6 Helix LT for a month rental from my good friends at Long & McQuade to check out... Well now I gotta figure out how to not give it back to them.
I haven't played with it much, it's actually been a very busy weekend, but it sounds amazing. Lets start with a comparison with the POD HD500.
First things first, I hate the interface on the HD500, I never edited patches on the board itself, I always used my computer to edit patches. I've always found the interface slightly cumbersome and I could just do it a lot faster through the editing software anyways. I'm very happy that the interface and ease of on board editing hype of the Helix is warranted. Without reading the manual I dived right in and setup a basic patch based on my most common live rig... an AC30 with a compressor, 2 overdrive pedals (OCD/Rat), phaser, flanger, trem, 2 delays. I had that done in about 15 minutes.
The interface is also beautiful. It really is. They really outdid themselves here on the presentation, and the interface is probably the most important thing aside from tone on a system like this. I was really impressed with after figuring out what the buttons were supposed to do how intuitive it was. I was changing effects block and scrolling like a mad man thinking "it would be nice if there was a menu with all the FX instead of scrolling through them all". Sure enough, that exists and I found it really easily as it was exactly where I would put it. Assigning foot switches, exactly the same, just really simple.
There is a lot in here, there really is. One thing that I wanted from my POD HD500 was the Orange amp expansion, but wasn't going to pay $50 USD for it. Luckily, the updates with new amps are free! Even today, Line 6 just added the clean channel from the Mesa Lonestar. I'm pretty excited to play with all of these wicked amps and the long term viability of this product due to the release cadence of new gear.
So here I am dialing in my AC30 tone using the Fawn version and I decide to play with some of the other settings... like SAG and BIAS. On the POD HD500 they claimed they did something... I could never hear or feel it unless they were at the extremes, so I never bothered playing with it. But I can see myself doing it a lot with the Helix... and thats good and bad.
The idea behind the SAG is that your essentially changing the amp from a solid state rectifier to a tube rectifier and adjusting to taste wherever you want in the middle. Essentially this changes how the power amp would react and compress your tone. The lower the value in the helix the less compressed and more responsive feel while a higher value gives it much more compression and can even get a muddy, but provide a lot of sustain.
Bias changes the clean headroom and how tight the amp feels. Higher values are class A while the lower values are class A/B. You get more of that push/pull compression feel from A/B bias which gives you that tighter and more dynamic tone while a class A is a more open and warmer feeling amp.
So my AC30 Fawn preset had both the SAG and the Bias centered. My real, 1973 AC30 is a solid state rectifier class A amp. So I shoved the Sag hard left and the Bias hard right. It changed the feel quite considerably. After a few minutes of tweaking I got it right where I wanted it, improving the feel of my vintage amp slightly and getting a really warm, jangly clean tone with a lot of clarity and punch. A/Bing with my real amp it sounded very similar and reacted very similar to playing dynamics.
I wanted to see how the helix would react to putting a drive pedal in front, and I'm happy to report that shoving the Ernie Ball Expression Overdrive (my new favorite pedal!) it responded very well. Not as well as going into a real amp, but it pushed into a nice thick wooly overdriven tone that sounded a bit muffled compared to my real amp, but still very usable. To be honest, I'll probably just take the Tube Scream pedal model and assign the gain knob to the expression pedal to get a similar effect. Having the gain on the expression pedal is just flipping cool!
There isn't much I can say about the chassis or quality of life features that others haven't already said. But I'd like to just compound on them that the hype is true. Now I have two friends who owned helix and sold them because they spent too much time tweaking, not enough playing, AND that they found some tones just wouldn't work in a band mix and it was too much of a PITA to edit them to work on the fly. Luckily... I don't need to worry about that in my present situation.
I'm very impressed with this, and I can see how one can really just fall into an endless rabbit hole of tweaking. I'm lucky that with my current project that I have no one other than myself to set tones for so I can fall down that rabbit hole as deep as I want. But I know that I will probably just focus on a few different amp tones and go from there. I'm excited to fire up the PRS Archon, Fender Deluxe Reverb, and Mesa Lonestar tones. Mostly because these are amps that I normally don't play through and I'm looking to develop a new tone and a new sound, what better way than having a studio of amps at the touch of a button.
I haven't played with it much, it's actually been a very busy weekend, but it sounds amazing. Lets start with a comparison with the POD HD500.
First things first, I hate the interface on the HD500, I never edited patches on the board itself, I always used my computer to edit patches. I've always found the interface slightly cumbersome and I could just do it a lot faster through the editing software anyways. I'm very happy that the interface and ease of on board editing hype of the Helix is warranted. Without reading the manual I dived right in and setup a basic patch based on my most common live rig... an AC30 with a compressor, 2 overdrive pedals (OCD/Rat), phaser, flanger, trem, 2 delays. I had that done in about 15 minutes.
The interface is also beautiful. It really is. They really outdid themselves here on the presentation, and the interface is probably the most important thing aside from tone on a system like this. I was really impressed with after figuring out what the buttons were supposed to do how intuitive it was. I was changing effects block and scrolling like a mad man thinking "it would be nice if there was a menu with all the FX instead of scrolling through them all". Sure enough, that exists and I found it really easily as it was exactly where I would put it. Assigning foot switches, exactly the same, just really simple.
There is a lot in here, there really is. One thing that I wanted from my POD HD500 was the Orange amp expansion, but wasn't going to pay $50 USD for it. Luckily, the updates with new amps are free! Even today, Line 6 just added the clean channel from the Mesa Lonestar. I'm pretty excited to play with all of these wicked amps and the long term viability of this product due to the release cadence of new gear.
So here I am dialing in my AC30 tone using the Fawn version and I decide to play with some of the other settings... like SAG and BIAS. On the POD HD500 they claimed they did something... I could never hear or feel it unless they were at the extremes, so I never bothered playing with it. But I can see myself doing it a lot with the Helix... and thats good and bad.
The idea behind the SAG is that your essentially changing the amp from a solid state rectifier to a tube rectifier and adjusting to taste wherever you want in the middle. Essentially this changes how the power amp would react and compress your tone. The lower the value in the helix the less compressed and more responsive feel while a higher value gives it much more compression and can even get a muddy, but provide a lot of sustain.
Bias changes the clean headroom and how tight the amp feels. Higher values are class A while the lower values are class A/B. You get more of that push/pull compression feel from A/B bias which gives you that tighter and more dynamic tone while a class A is a more open and warmer feeling amp.
So my AC30 Fawn preset had both the SAG and the Bias centered. My real, 1973 AC30 is a solid state rectifier class A amp. So I shoved the Sag hard left and the Bias hard right. It changed the feel quite considerably. After a few minutes of tweaking I got it right where I wanted it, improving the feel of my vintage amp slightly and getting a really warm, jangly clean tone with a lot of clarity and punch. A/Bing with my real amp it sounded very similar and reacted very similar to playing dynamics.
I wanted to see how the helix would react to putting a drive pedal in front, and I'm happy to report that shoving the Ernie Ball Expression Overdrive (my new favorite pedal!) it responded very well. Not as well as going into a real amp, but it pushed into a nice thick wooly overdriven tone that sounded a bit muffled compared to my real amp, but still very usable. To be honest, I'll probably just take the Tube Scream pedal model and assign the gain knob to the expression pedal to get a similar effect. Having the gain on the expression pedal is just flipping cool!
There isn't much I can say about the chassis or quality of life features that others haven't already said. But I'd like to just compound on them that the hype is true. Now I have two friends who owned helix and sold them because they spent too much time tweaking, not enough playing, AND that they found some tones just wouldn't work in a band mix and it was too much of a PITA to edit them to work on the fly. Luckily... I don't need to worry about that in my present situation.
I'm very impressed with this, and I can see how one can really just fall into an endless rabbit hole of tweaking. I'm lucky that with my current project that I have no one other than myself to set tones for so I can fall down that rabbit hole as deep as I want. But I know that I will probably just focus on a few different amp tones and go from there. I'm excited to fire up the PRS Archon, Fender Deluxe Reverb, and Mesa Lonestar tones. Mostly because these are amps that I normally don't play through and I'm looking to develop a new tone and a new sound, what better way than having a studio of amps at the touch of a button.
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