Helix Native

octatonic

ruoma said:

octatonic said:

ruoma said:

For a very very very very good SSL bus comp, you should definitely try out Acustica Audio SAND.

I've heard about Acustica but I haven't bought anything of theirs yet.
I'll give them a go.

Incredible sounding, but quote a messy company organizational and installation wise. Just try the demo's first!

Ah- you see organisation trumps anything for me.
Plenty of plugin companies lose traction in the market and then stop updating- I am thinking URS here as one example.
I need companies to be in it for the long term.

Same with guitar plugins, to bring it back on topic.

guitarfishbay

I remember there being something about Podfarm and Protools AAX, but it doesn't affect me in any way not being a PT user

Also I guess they were working on Helix instead

octatonic

guitarfishbay said:

I remember there being something about Podfarm and Protools AAX, but it doesn't affect me in any way not being a PT user

Also I guess they were working on Helix instead

That probably would have been in the change over from 32bit to 64bit.
Quite a few companies dropped the ball with that but it was a massive change.

Gulliver

Going to bump this as I finally downloaded Helix Native today - I must be doing something wrong as just about everything sounds muddy and flubby...   Any thoughts on how I can make it sound not-shit??

octatonic

Gulliver said:

Going to bump this as I finally downloaded Helix Native today - I must be doing something wrong as just about everything sounds muddy and flubby...   Any thoughts on how I can make it sound not-shit??

What is your signal chain?

guitarfishbay

Check your input level first.

Also what are you comparing to and what sounds are you trying to get?

Gulliver

octatonic said:

Gulliver said:

Going to bump this as I finally downloaded Helix Native today - I must be doing something wrong as just about everything sounds muddy and flubby...   Any thoughts on how I can make it sound not-shit??

What is your signal chain?

Guitar is going straight into the interface - then I tried a bunch of the presets and tried a bunch of amps but no matter what I tried they all sounded muffled

guitarfishbay said:

Check your input level first.

Also what are you comparing to and what sounds are you trying to get?

It wasn't clipping on the input - I will check again though.

I'd like to start with a warm but not flabby clean sound. I tried the 2204 for a gain sound as I've seen people say it's good...  It feels basically unusable as there's no clarity or definition, it's just muddy...

normula1

What interface fo you have? My first gen Focusrite 2i2 has a 10k input impedance which is too low to plug straight into so I stick a Boss pedal in front to take advantage of its buffer

Gulliver

normula1 said:

What interface fo you have? My first gen Focusrite 2i2 has a 10k input impedance which is too low to plug straight into so I stick a Boss pedal in front to take advantage of its buffer

I'm using a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 - I'll throw my loopstation in front of it and see if it wants to play that time

normula1

And just for any other gen 1 2i2 users, the gen  2 drivers works with it too snd reduces the latency. I think the same is true with the 2i4 as well. The bigger ones won't work.

I also discovered a couple of weeks ago that running at 96k plays a lot nicer with a smaller buffer size and works way better than the 44.1k I was using. It made a lot of difference.

guitarfishbay

Gulliver said:

normula1 said:

What interface fo you have? My first gen Focusrite 2i2 has a 10k input impedance which is too low to plug straight into so I stick a Boss pedal in front to take advantage of its buffer

I'm using a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 - I'll throw my loopstation in front of it and see if it wants to play that time

I've got one of those for when I use my laptop (I have the Clarett 8preX for desktop), you almost definitely need to adjust the input meter inside Native as the DIs come in very hot. Even with the pad on the interface I've had peaks beyond -5db with hot pickups and loud notes, which is way too hot for Native unless you use the input trim inside the plugin - keep it in green and definitely below red.

 I'd recommend a DI box anyway, I've got an Orchid DI and it sounds nicer than the inbuilt DIs. Plus will give all the headroom you'd need.

CHrisP86

I'm struggling with IR's.

All I have is the free Ownhammer Mesa 4x12 one.  When I select the IR it then gives two options of IR 1024 or IR 2048, then the IR select has 128 different selections.  They all sound pretty bad to me so am I doing something wrong?

Should I mess with the low and high cut?

Jonathanthomas83

With IR's remember that mic placement and mic choice is important. I'm guessing those 128 different selections are all variations on those themes. Go with how you'd mic the cab in the real world. Redwirez has a great PDF explaining where to start, and it's usually with a 57 at roughly 0.5" from the cone...ish! Work your way from there. That's how I do it anyway, YMMV. 

CHrisP86

Thanks, I just realised that you are right, the 128 is the total number of IR's that can be uploaded.

What about the high and low cut?

Jonathanthomas83

It may/may not be needed if you experiment with mic and mic placement. However, I'll caveat that with the fact that we "normally" stand at a completely different angle about 3 feet away from our amplifiers/amp speaker...you need to approach IRs differently as they are essentially a microphone at an inch or so away from the speaker...which, in turn, is an inherently different sounding experience. It'll have more bass etc, so high and low cut will most likely be essential. That is usually adjested to make it sound more like an "amp in the room".

normula1

The Celestion IRs include some room mic placements and I quite like adding a touch of one of those IRs in parallel to the main one when I'm using phones. 

octatonic

Gulliver said:

octatonic said:

Gulliver said:

Going to bump this as I finally downloaded Helix Native today - I must be doing something wrong as just about everything sounds muddy and flubby...   Any thoughts on how I can make it sound not-shit??

What is your signal chain?

Guitar is going straight into the interface - then I tried a bunch of the presets and tried a bunch of amps but no matter what I tried they all sounded muffled

I was hoping for a bit more information than that.

For instance this is mine:

Guitar -> unbalanced into Groove Tubes Vipre's Instrument DI-> balanced into Focusrite Red 8 Pre and into Helix then out of Red 8 Pre into SPL MTC2381 monitor controller -> balanced into Dynaudio BM6a monitors & Tannoy TS10 sub.

Forget the Presets- just create a new patch with an amp and a cab in it- I'd suggest an AC30 style thing- imho these are the trickiest to model
I reckon the Helix has a great AC30 sound.

guitarfishbay

The Helix AC30 is nice.

I actually wish I'd waited a while for more updates before I tried the demo, there are some obvious improvements to be made still to how the plugin works (the resizeable window being a major one, scrolling for amp settings isn't especially enjoyable) and I'm sure the modelling will improve too.  As of currently it doesn't work for me.

Ampeg SVX 2 was pretty much the nail in the coffin.  It doesn't do the cool gritty/drive stuff the Helix bass stuff can do, but I can get the grit from other sources (I'm enjoying Cytomic's The Scream a lot for it's mix and HP/LP), however the clean and dynamic deep low end you can get from the V-4B model in particular is fantastic, and the GUI is preferable for me anyway.  I do rate Native for bass, but the price makes it unjustifiable for me right now.

For guitars I'm not hearing anything in Native that is better than S-Gear or TSE's X50, like for like.  Native does a bunch more stuff, but doesn't add anything for me when I honestly think the Axe FX high gain models are better than any of the software I've tried and by quite a margin when playing dynamics and volume pedals get thrown in to the equation (most of my transitions are via volume pedal to go between higher gain and glassier/gritty cleanish sounds).

digitalscream

Since I'm on here having finished the database maintenance...just thought I'd mention that I spend a good portion of this evening mucking around with it, and I've actually got Helix Native running under Linux.

It does mean running a compatibility layer, and it also means that I have to use a native Linux DAW (so Ardour, Mixbus or Reaper - yes, there's a fully-functional Linux-native version of Reaper now) because Helix Native only works with the non-realtime versions of WINE.

However, that's not actually a problem at all. Latency isn't increased (because WINE is only doing processing, not dealing with the audio interface directly), and I genuinely couldn't tell the difference between using Native as a plugin or using my Helix LT with the DAW monitoring. As an aside, there's definitely a smidge more latency playing with DAW monitoring when using Mixbus in comparison to Reaper.

EDIT: Oh, and when using a patch which would max out any of the Helix hardware units, Native uses around 25-28% of one of the eight virtual cores of my Core i7 6700 CPU.

Sporky

I bought Native in the sale that's on at the mo. Probably not going to use it for guitar seeing as I have a full-fat Helix for that, but $84 seems a bargain for an effect plugin that does so much stuff.