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.
No comments:
Post a Comment