Transcription
I've got a wish list. I've got some questions, and I've got some other thoughts on it as well. So, let's have a quick look at what you get when you get the new Helix if you buy it on day one.
So, first of all, you get an old Helix. Well, okay. But you also get 16 new amps with the new amp modeling thing going on, which are meant to be very good. Then you get the focus view, which lets you slide between versions. So, you have four versions of the same amp and move your finger to wiggle between them. We know that we get a touch screen. We get better scribble strips on the XL. We get Bluetooth and Wi-Fi built in, which is great, rather than fuffing about with stupid USB leads. To just do it over Wi-Fi is great. Hype control, which lets you take your amp as it is, your hyperdetailed amp, but make it smoother, make it sit in the mix better, make it more idealized. That could be great if you're doing live stuff, especially, and you want things to sit in the mix and sound more like recording or recorded type of amps. You get extra knobs, make your own gags up. You get a new master volume that lets you control all the different outputs at the touch of a button. And you can bypass it all together. You get an EQ on every output. So there's outputs for the XLRs, the jacks, the headphone outs, but you get a full EQ, and it's a parametric EQ on all of them. You get showcase mode, which we'll come back to. And the editing software has been updated a lot. So you get descriptions when you touch things and all sorts of stuff.
What's the elephant in the room? Well, at the minute, nobody's heard these new amps. Nobody. Unless you were actually at the launch. And the other thing, of course, is how fast will the updates come? This is Line 6. So, you know what? I think they're going to stick to the word. Line 6. Line 6. You have the trust of the community in your hands. But no pressure.
What you don't get, what you don't get, you don't get capture tech just yet, but it's coming. You don't get new effects yet. There's a mountain of mystery stuff that they're talking about that we don't really know anything about. So, you know, you don't get that. Okay. Right.
Some questions that I've got. These are just my questions that, you know, maybe you have similar questions as well. I don't know. But my questions are: This is a mystery. What are the actual specs and the DSP of this thing? Because obviously the first thing you want to do is compare it to other units. So how does it compare DSP-wise and spec-wise to the other big boy units on the market, to the FM9, the AX Effects, and to the Quad Cortex? The Fender one? Well, maybe as well, but you know. Will Agora be integrated into Native and will captures? So Helix Native, we've heard nothing on that yet. Nothing. Um, now the new amp tech, I'm assuming it'll be in Native, and I'm assuming that there will be captures, but we can't assume that completely. Maybe they'll do the captures or something separate. Don't know. That's a big mystery. A big mystery. Um, the editing app, will that be a standalone editing app as it is, or will that be incorporated into Native?
Here's what I would like. Here's what I... This is a bit of a wish list, but early. So, I gig a lot, and it drives me mental to have to go fish out a flight case that's got my pedalboard in, drag it up here, get my pedalboard out, set it up, plug all the leads in, just to tweak a sound or to change something. That drives me mental. What I would love to be able to do, and this is possible, I would love to be able to have Native be exactly the same as my pedal, just the sounds on it. That, that will do. But then to be able to then go into Native, make my changes, make my tweaks, set up new things, and then transfer that to my Helix, but without getting my Helix out. How would you do that? Well, Helix has got an SD card reader. So, if I could then drop my new presets somehow onto my SD card and then shove that in the back of my Helix and have my new updates done without actually having to mess about getting the thing out and putting it away again before I go to work. Okay, that would be a huge, huge plus for me. Huge plus.
Okay, so my wish list. I think we've covered number one already, haven't we? But straight NAM captures. No messing about, no turning them into something else. No strange formattings that degrade them. Just, just let us put NAM captures as we've got from the websites and from NAM straight into Helix. If they're going to do their own versions, their super NAM, if you like, then fine. But let us just drop some NAM captures in because they're good, and they're already there, and there's already a big community around them. And I think it'll be a big plus for Helix to be able to say, "Oh, look, you can take all the NAM captures in the world already on day one of our launch, and you can put them straight into Helix and away you go." That would be great.
VST plugins. Now, we keep getting Helix being talked about as a platform, and really it is. It's a platform, and it can do all sorts of things. So, if it's truly a platform, then how about Line 6 lets us use it as a VST platform? Could you imagine that? Then you wouldn't need a separate NAM thing. You just load the NAM VST. You could take, for instance, if you don't want to use the Helix reverbs, and they're great. But you could also take, for instance, I really like my Valhalla reverbs. If I could take my Valhalla reverbs in Helix to a gig and play with them, that would be great, using it as a VST. Suppose you there's things like the Bogner digital amp knob. We're back to knob gags again. But then to be able to take that on a gig with you when in the real world it's a plugin, you can't do it. But put it into Helix and take it away with you. That would be powerful, and that would be great. So, will it happen? Will we be able to do that? You know what? At some point, I've got a feeling that somebody is going to do that. Now, it can be Line 6, one of which is one of the big boys, if not the biggest boy in the game, or we can sit back and let the Far East companies do it, because let's face it, the likes of Valeton and Mooer are already allowing NAM captures to be dropped into their devices. Okay, they're swapping them to their own format, which is probably very similar, but that's halfway there to getting us to dropping VSTs in. So, if we can drop VST plugins into Helix, that would be amazing.
Will there be a marketplace? Now, we've got new sounds. Is there going to be a marketplace where, just like ToneX, where all the people who make ToneX sounds have a marketplace that you can go to to get the sounds? Will there be a marketplace for Helix sounds and for the Helix NAM captures, or whatever captures they're going to call them as? Are they going to have something better than NAM? Because that's a thing, because already, is it HeadRush are doing these super captures where you have three or four or five different captures of the same amp with a different gain stage, all sort of linked together that smoothly get you through from one to the other. Are Line 6 looking at something like that? And with the morphing thing where you've got four different versions of a sound, will you be able to morph between them in that focus view? Is that going to be a possibility? Because focus view with captures, that would be interesting.
And I mentioned Native earlier, but we've got HX Edit and we've got Native. Can we have them merge, perhaps? Because it's a really... I know it's Native, but it would be really nice, especially in a two-and-a-bit thousand pound unit, if the plugin came with it. I don't know, is that possible? ToneX do it. Maybe, maybe Native could be free or could be included.
And some other random thoughts. So, we've got the showcase module, which is a completely new module. Are there going to be other new modules? Because showcase seems to be like a completely different product added into Helix. And I've heard comments on other videos, might actually saying, "Well, what's the point of paying for showcase mode in my new Helix when I'll never use it?" Well, you know what? That's one way of thinking about it. But the other way of thinking about it is this: When you buy Helix, you get a free showcase mode whether you want to use it or not. Okay? Now, who might use it? Well, look, you might use it, you might not. But think about this: Keyboard players for decades have had something similar in keyboards with sequences and all sorts of things all baked into the keyboard as you buy them. Is there any reason why as guitar players we shouldn't be given the same thing? I think that's a useful way of thinking about it.
A live editing app. That would be so much... A live editing app so that when you get to gigs and you want to tweak something, first of all, you're not bending down every five minutes to change something because I hate that. You can just stand up. That's amazing, how to be able to stand up. You can put your iPad on a clamp on your stand, and a lot of us do that anyway, and you can do whatever minor little twiddlings you need to do at a gig because most of us don't really need to do anything if you've planned it. You shouldn't really be needing to mess about at a gig. However, if you do, or if somebody says to you, "Can you make your lead sound a bit louder?" then you can do that. But you can just do it and listen standing up, or if you've got an app on your iPad on your phone, you walk out front and you listen rather than bending down, having a tweak, walking out front, listening, think, "Oh, it's now." You tweak a little bit more. Running back to your stage, bending down, showing the drummer your bum, and then tweaking it and running out front again. You just walk out front and go, "Ah, there. Look there." And that's it. So, you know, an app that lets you do all that kind of thing and do the full editing business, that would be great.
I'm curious to know what's on other people's wish lists. That's sort of mine. It will probably change, but let me know in the comments what you think. And, uh, don't forget, like and subscribe, and I'll see you in another video. Chets.