Pedalboard modellers: Whats your pick?

[Rhysyrhys]

Ah further review/rant:

Why the fuck do all Boss pedals have some weird 1990s shit going on with how you update the firmware? Like with the L6 stuff I install a driver, connect the beast to my PC, install the patching software and IT TELLS ME if my firmware is old and pushes the update to the device over the wire. With the Boss thing when you install the patch management software it complains until you install the most recent firmware and to do that you have to set the device to a mode, then drag and drop a file into the mounted drive it becomes on your computer.

I work in tech and I'm also fairly stupid at normal life stuff if smart at other things, so y'know there's that, but I fucked it up twice. Not ergonomic. Not fun to do. It's 2023 - I know how to do this sort of thing so it's kinda maddening that I have to do this shit... Works nice when you have it set up, just not very conceirge-y feeling for no reason feels like when you play Final Fantasy 8 on the PS1 and you get 4 hours in and have to change the disk... if ur a nostalgia nerd maybe you'd like this but tbh at this point if the installer.msi doesn't immediately blow me while installing the software then its a 6/10 at best.

[Rhysyrhys]

Tuner is really good the tuner in the Helix is fucking shockingly bad. It's really accurate and easy to read. Big thumbs. Sad face because I just spent like 90 bucks or whatever it was on a Sonic Research.

They really did just sit down at a meeting table and say "put all of our pedals into one pedal, jack the price up a bit over the 500 series". I just wish that Boss would get over this fucking dot matrix screen style, they have infinite money and all the other brands now have touch screens and capacitive knobs and stuff, Boss delivers on the sound but the feel is just a bit antiquated overall.

My other observation is that you can create some really weird sounds on the Helix because you can put anything anywhere. So like if you want to run your amp model in front of your virtual pedal board or have your amp be in a reverb thats the size of the albert hall or side chain a delay and have that go through a different amp but then have that amp and speaker combo fed through a chorus pedal, then you can. With the Boss setup they give you a bunch of slots, 24 slots to be exact but its like a very traditional guitar -> pedals -> amp sorta deally. So I'm pretty sure thats how they can do so much with so little, the software is overall more rigid and covers less cases. It's fun. I sound like early John Frusciante so make of that what you will.

[dots]

if ur a nostalgia nerd maybe you'd like this but tbh at this point if the installer.msi doesn't immediately blow me while installing the software then its a 6/10 at best.

this is good intel as -- after spending a king's ransom on pedals the last few years and getting tempted to go down the GigRig route -- i'm considering whether i just need a floorboard. CHANGE MY MIND.

[mickie08]

if ur a nostalgia nerd maybe you'd like this but tbh at this point if the installer.msi doesn't immediately blow me while installing the software then its a 6/10 at best.

this is good intel as -- after spending a king's ransom on pedals the last few years and getting tempted to go down the GigRig route -- i'm considering whether i just need a floorboard. CHANGE MY MIND.

You need a floorboard. You are welcome to come check mine out. Makes life so easy.

[Rhysyrhys]

Oops, mild correction: You can move any block anywhere in the signal chain and it even has cool things like parameters ramps (so like ur tremolo starts slow and ends fast etc.) that you can stick in the chain, I dig it. It seems like most people build patches online seem to take advantage that you can have two amps running at the same time as everything else, so most patches I've stumbled across have a splitter then two models then a combiner to mono out, if you're plugged in mono (which I am at the moment).

Starting to feel pretty good about the setup pictured below. The MIDI Commander sends CC in one mode that is predictable per bank, so you can plug the GT-1000 in to a PC and setup the controller input to map to those, bit tedious but once it's done it's done. There is some homebrew python project that I wanna try where you provide it a CSV with mappings of MIDI note to value per bank and then it flashes the firmware for you, but for now this works ok.

What I do really like is that because changing between patches is seamless I kinda just have a bunch of patches that are like "CE-1 Chorus with some reverb n shit" and then the next one is like "Script phaser with some other shit" whereas on the Helix I had a "pedalboard" of "pedals" which I'd use the Instant Snapshot feature to turn on/off, change parameters and shit. IDK if one is particularly better or worse, just depends on what you like, I guess it's probably arguable that the Boss way of things is more flexible cos you aren't bound by 8-10 effects/amps, or even really 24, you can have 24 things in one patch and then just move to another totally different 24 things. What an age to be alive.

Signal chain is: Comp -> GT-1000 -> FX send 1 -> BBpreamp -> Black Sails -> Superfuzz -> Moonphase -> FX return 1 -> Amp. Been messing with things like having one patch where my distortion is all in front of a wah, then the same identical patch but with the FX after the wah etc. is lotsa fun!

[Rhysyrhys]

if ur a nostalgia nerd maybe you'd like this but tbh at this point if the installer.msi doesn't immediately blow me while installing the software then its a 6/10 at best.

this is good intel as -- after spending a king's ransom on pedals the last few years and getting tempted to go down the GigRig route -- i'm considering whether i just need a floorboard. CHANGE MY MIND.

I do have that Helix LT hanging around if you wanna borrow it? I've had no bites on anyone wanting to buy it off me yet (granted I have not put it on Reverb, just Offerup and here).