Just bought Helix...

[Lazarus1140]

Re: Just bought Helix...

The whole IR thing is something I know nothing about. Sometimes I grow weary of the need to learn new things but the pursuit of tone always rules.

I have to say that when you switch to the Altos satisfaction with your purchase will skyrocket. The tone quality achieved by bi-passing a guitar amp's pre-amp stage only hints at how great your modeler can sound.

The only thing I haven't been able to do to my satisfaction with the AX8 is achieve a great clean tone at low volume, and maybe that's just because the speakers need to be pushed a bit more to get in the zone. IDK ... also, I have done no deep tweaking.

By the way, congratulations on your purchase!

[P.A.Foholic]

Re: Just bought Helix...

The whole IR thing is something I know nothing about. Sometimes I grow weary of the need to learn new things but the pursuit of tone always rules.

I have to say that when you switch to the Altos satisfaction with your purchase will skyrocket. The tone quality achieved by bi-passing a guitar amp's pre-amp stage only hints at how great your modeler can sound.

The only thing I haven't been able to do to my satisfaction with the AX8 is achieve a great clean tone at low volume, and maybe that's just because the speakers need to be pushed a bit more to get in the zone. IDK ... also, I have done no deep tweaking.

By the way, congratulations on your purchase!

Thanks man!

Our other guitarist bought the Altos just about a week ago. They sound ridiculously good in our rehearsal space. I already love them even if I don't have them myself.

I've noticed too that clean patches have to have a bit of volume behind to get the grip of the dynamics. They always tend to sound really sterile with a very low volume.

You might already know this about the IRs but I'll give it a brief go if someone else is interested Someone can correct me if I'm wrong:

All the cabinet modelling blocks in Axe and Helix (and whatever modeler you take nowadays) are basically a certain kind of IR. However, what for example Ownhammer, Celestion & Redwirez do is that they the concept a bit further by making several IRs of one cabinet. In a package you get around a couple of hundred IRs per cabinet including already blended combinations of several IRs named as Mixes or Quick Start. In the IRs they define the distance from the speaker and the type of the microphone used. So if you buy a package from Ownhammer that has a Bogner cabinet for example one of the impulses could look like this: 412 BOG-ST 421-07. So in this sample they have made an IR where the mic is Sennheiser 421 recorded 7 inches from the speaker and the cabinet used is Bogner Standard 4x12.

The biggest problem with the IRs in my opinion is to try to find the best ones for your use. And that requires a looooot of testing and tweaking But nothing really special about them, they are just cabinet models basically

[Hank-]

Re: Just bought Helix...

I think some of the free ones from dedicated brands like ownhammer & stuff are really good to start. I forgot if Celestion was giving away a free sample earlier this year but there was talk about it being very good. Fractal had IR packs available separately or something for sale I think, or they replaced the stock ones with those in firmware updates.

Its another rabbit hole of tweaking though, worth it with the paid ones out there I guess but with the user submitted ones it can take hours wasted auditioning each. They probably sound different with different amp models too, thus more time spent.