Did an acoustic gig last night and tried using helix as an fx box for both my vocals and guitar.
At home it sounded great. In the real world the guitar translated nicely but the vocal was horrid. Muddy, dark and slightly distorted.
Played around in soundcheck with mic in gain and reverb settings but it was horrible.
Ended up going into desk with the desk fx.
Anyone had good results and what did you do?
Also had looper issues halfway through. Looper started juddering / stuttering on 1st ms when hitting record. Had to reset helix. Almost like footswitch engaged and disengaged instantly.
Comments
Helix's mic preamp is the same (really) expensive one from StageSource M20d. They're used on high-end audio interfaces and are better than the mic pres found on pretty much all popular digital mixers south of $2-3k.
Was not using the pre amp block, but had to use a tonne of input gain to get above the acoustic.. 25db boost!
Need to figure it out.
I'm going to try a different mic with DI's suggesed path next chance I get.
Getting a mic up to line level requires a lot more gain than getting a guitar up to line level.
Going over 25db gain just distorted the vocal.
I had reverb in series after, so will try the parallel path you mentioned next chance I get.