Digital Igloo (Eric Klein, YGG)

Congrats to you and the team on 10 years! I hope the rollout of Stadium goes well for you all.
Out of all the new features we know about, which has been the most fun for you to mess around with?
 
ragingplatypi said:
Congrats to you and the team on 10 years! I hope the rollout of Stadium goes well for you all.
Out of all the new features we know about, which has been the most fun for you to mess around with?
Click to expand...
Depends on the day.

I will say that Focus view surprised even me. We had to go in and create 5 distinct sounds for every amp and effect (absolute unit of an Excel spreadsheet), and revisiting and digging into the Legacy effects was an absolute blast. Nearly every effect I made zones for triggered a "Whoa, I never knew it could get this sound!"

If anything, instead of scrolling through a bunch of white text in the model list (click-strum-"no," click-strum-"no," click-strum-"no"), it incentivizes you to slow down and actually explore each model, because if the default doesn't wow you, one of the other 5 zones might, and it sort of teaches you the range of sounds you might be able to get with each amp or effect (and how those sounds were made because the sliders move in real time). The pretty 3D image is really just there to say "Look at me! Poke around here—You might find something you like."

I'm sure some people will complain about our choice of sounds for each Focus zone, at which point we'll just tell them to roll their own, which is kind of the point anyway.

There was quite a bit of pushback on Focus view because that meant Brandon F needed to create hundreds of 3D images, and collectively we had to program thousands of default zones, but everyone who's messed with it have now admitted that it's a lot of fun and was worth the slog.

Of course Focus zones are pretty dumb for something as simple as the Volume Pedal, Gain block or Wahs, but we made them anyway for consistency's sake.
 
Digital Igloo said:
Depends on the day.

I will say that Focus view surprised even me. We had to go in and create 5 distinct sounds for every amp and effect (absolute unit of an Excel spreadsheet), and revisiting and digging into the Legacy effects was an absolute blast. Nearly every effect I made zones for triggered a "Whoa, I never knew it could get this sound!"

If anything, instead of scrolling through a bunch of white text in the model list (click-strum-"no," click-strum-"no," click-strum-"no"), it incentivizes you to slow down and actually explore each model, because if the default doesn't wow you, one of the other 5 zones might, and it sort of teaches you the range of sounds you might be able to get with each amp or effect (and how those sounds were made because the sliders move in real time). The pretty 3D image is really just there to say "Look at me! Poke around here—You might find something you like."

I'm sure some people will complain about our choice of sounds for each Focus zone, at which point we'll just tell them to roll their own, which is kind of the point anyway.

There was quite a bit of pushback on Focus view because that meant Brandon F needed to create hundreds of 3D images, and collectively we had to program thousands of default zones, but everyone who's messed with it have now admitted that it's a lot of fun and was worth the slog.

Of course Focus zones are pretty dumb for something as simple as the Volume Pedal, Gain block or Wahs, but we made them anyway for consistency's sake.
Click to expand...
As a professional UX designer, seeing you introduce the Focus feature had me screaming ”yes!” at the screen. I think it will be a really big USP for Helix Stadium, especially when someone new to guitar gear uses it. Would love to see it trickle down to cheaper HW later on but regardless Focus and the other features are just awesome.
 
Progressive_disclosure said:
As a professional UX designer, seeing you introduce the Focus feature had me screaming ”yes!” at the screen. I think it will be a really big USP for Helix Stadium, especially when someone new to guitar gear uses it. Would love to see it trickle down to cheaper HW later on but regardless Focus and the other features are just awesome.
Click to expand...
Can't take credit for it. Focus view was largely inspired from our Stagescape M20d's smart FX screen, way back in 2012:

1749835050448.png
 
With Stadium, does Agoura/the new platform allow you to revisit any of the Helix or legacy effects and re-model them at a higher level of fidelity or did the old tools capture them as well as they can be captured? I'm guessing effects are down the list at this juncture, but I've got time to kill and was curious if there's anything special planned in that realm.
 
Digital Igloo said:
it incentivizes you to slow down and actually explore each model, because if the default doesn't wow you, one of the other 5 zones might, and it sort of teaches you the range of sounds you might be able to get with each amp or effect
Click to expand...
This answers my long request for amp/effects block presets — a way to explore sounds you wouldn’t otherwise know are hidden within a block’s capabilities.
 
quadgear said:
Looks like Stadium will be a killer looper.

Do you plan to make that full featured?
Click to expand...
If you don't mind, I'll use this as an opportunity to soapbox a bit to anyone reading this.

Exactly ten years ago, and several years after, Frank, Ben, Igor, myself, and others were stupid transparent about Helix, probably to a fault. If we knew something was coming or thought it might show up soon, we'd post "not at launch" with a wink and a nod. IdeaScale was wide open to anyone, and anyone could easily infer what we may or may not be working on. I waxed poetic at length about how yeah, we almost added wireless mobile editing to Helix, and yeah, we had an entirely different touchscreen-centric design, and all sorts of other internal goings-on.

The trick is that ten years ago, the usual suspects (Fractal, Kemper, BOSS, Atomic, Line 6, a couple others) generally operated in good faith. Sure, everyone's marketing toed the hyperbole line, but by and large, we stayed in our lane and focused on solving problems for our own customers. All I knew is that Cliff and Christoph were (still are, of course) geniuses and while the customer overlap was probably more than a tiny sliver on a Venn diagram, we strived to design, develop, and support gear on our own terms and appeared to be largely unconcerned with what "the other guy" was doing. In fact, Line 6 actively eschewed what the other guy was doing, and if the masses demanded a feature that existed elsewhere, we strived to understand the problem and solve it in a unique and novel way. Everyone did back then.

But over the years, the multieffects market feels like it's slowly devolving into opportunism, feigning credit for things you shamelessly ripped off, and obsessing more about stealing sales or market share from others than helping grow the market to lift all ships. One company executive apparently made their box all about cutting Line 6 off at the knees (due to a petty grudge from years previous), another very obviously slagged both Fractal and Line 6 (without specifying them) in the very first paragraph of their very first post-release interview and we caught their employees insulting our gear in front of visitors to our own NAMM booth. Yet another climbed the corporate ladder by falsely claiming they "created Helix," and their fellow employees even trolled Helix threads, claiming the reason 'Helix 2' didn't exist was because Line 6's brain trust quit years ago.:mad: And now there are a butt ton of cheap knock-off companies that embrace a specific cultural notion that innovation, design, and R&D are unneeded expenses. What's worse, some of the public not only defends these actions, they celebrate them. It's like this market is slipping more into do-you-even-lift-bro-crypto-startup douchebaggery and less real passionate people who just want to make cool boxes and buy each other beers at NAMM.

Also, it appears that every little thing Frank, Ben, Igor, or I say is not only picked apart by our customers, but by our competitors as well (who are much better at reading between the lines than our users), and given that Stadium won't be out for many months, that gives them ample time to embrace reactionary me-too development instead of good faith competition. This is a big reason why we shut down our IdeaScale—no need to do those guys any favors. And it's why we're very careful about what and when we divulge specific details about Helix Stadium.

And whether it's the political climate or what, gear forums have also devolved into... I'll just say it. There are a lot of straight dicks. "Oh, here's a thread about a new box. I won't read any specs or watch any videos or absorb any context whatsoever but I GOTTA :poop: all over it because everyone MUST hear my opinion!" Yeah, of course, it's not like this isn't like every other online community out there, but it's just... a bit less fun to be here now. Well, TGF is cool; others less so, especially when the mods decide to slap 30 pages of a sewage dump criticism thread onto the very front of a legitimate Helix Stadium discussion. EDIT: They fixed it. Thank you; you're cool again!

Joe, Steve, Simon, Ben, Brandon, and I were also extremely purposeful about what we did and didn't divulge at the June 11 keynote and subsequent videos/interviews. In fact, I sent the entire 10-page script to like 20 Line 6ers ahead of time to make sure no one was all "Whoa, mentioning that might imply to someone paying attention that we're working on..."

So that's a really long-winded, circuitous, old-man-yelling-at-cloud way of saying "we can't talk about any looper stuff right now." :D

/soapbox
 
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Digital Igloo said:
If you don't mind, I'll use this as an opportunity to soapbox a bit to anyone reading this.

Exactly ten years ago, and several years after, Frank, Ben, Igor, myself, and others were stupid transparent about Helix, probably to a fault. If we knew something was coming or thought it might show up soon, we'd post "not at launch" with a wink and a nod. IdeaScale was wide open to anyone, and anyone could easily infer what we may or may not be working on. I waxed poetic at length about how yeah, we almost added wireless mobile editing to Helix, and yeah, we had an entirely different touchscreen-centric design, and all sorts of other internal goings-on.

The trick is that ten years ago, the usual suspects (Fractal, Kemper, BOSS, Atomic, Line 6, a couple others) generally operated in good faith. Sure, everyone's marketing toed the hyperbole line, but by and large, we stayed in our lane and focused on solving problems for our own customers. All I knew is that Cliff and Christoph were (still are, of course) geniuses and while the customer overlap was probably more than a tiny sliver on a Venn diagram, we strived to design, develop, and support gear on our own terms and appeared to be largely unconcerned with what "the other guy" was doing. In fact, Line 6 actively eschewed what the other guy was doing, and if the masses demanded a feature that existed elsewhere, we strived to understand the problem and solve it in a unique and novel way. Everyone did back then.

But over the years, the multieffects market feels like it's slowly devolving into opportunism, feigning credit for things you shamelessly ripped off, and obsessing more about stealing sales or market share from others than helping grow the market to lift all ships. One company executive apparently made their box all about cutting Line 6 off at the knees (due to a petty grudge from years previous), another very obviously slagged both Fractal and Line 6 (without specifying them) in the very first paragraph of their very first post-release interview and we caught their employees insulting our gear in front of visitors to our own NAMM booth. Yet another climbed the corporate ladder by falsely claiming they "created Helix," and their fellow employees even trolled Helix threads, claiming the reason 'Helix 2' didn't exist was because Line 6's brain trust quit years ago.:mad: And now there are a butt ton of cheap knock-off companies that embrace a specific cultural notion that innovation, design, and R&D are unneeded expenses. What's worse, some of the public not only defends these actions, they celebrate them. It's like this market is slipping more into do-you-even-lift-bro-crypto-startup douchebaggery and less real passionate people who just want to make cool boxes and buy each other beers at NAMM.

Also, it appears that every little thing Frank, Ben, Igor, or I say is not only picked apart by our customers, but by our competitors as well (who are much better at reading between the lines than our users), and given that Stadium won't be out for many months, that gives them ample time to embrace reactionary me-too development instead of good faith competition. This is a big reason why we shut down our IdeaScale—no need to do those guys any favors. And it's why we're very careful about what and when we divulge specific details about Helix Stadium.

And whether it's the political climate or what, gear forums have also devolved into... I'll just say it. There are a lot of straight dicks. "Oh, here's a thread about a new box. I won't read any specs or watch any videos or absorb any context whatsoever but I GOTTA :poop: all over it because everyone MUST hear my opinion!" Yeah, of course, it's not like this isn't like every other online community out there, but it's just... a bit less fun to be here now. Well, TGF is cool; others less so, especially when the mods decide to slap 30 pages of a sewage dump criticism thread onto the very front of a legitimate Helix Stadium discussion.

Joe, Steve, Simon, Ben, Brandon, and I were also extremely purposeful about what we did and didn't divulge at the June 11 keynote and subsequent videos/interviews. In fact, I sent the entire 10-page script to like 20 Line 6ers ahead of time to make sure no one was all "Whoa, mentioning that might imply to someone paying attention that we're working on..."

So that's a really long-winded, circuitous, old-man-yelling-at-cloud way of saying "we can't talk about any looper stuff right now." :D

/soapbox
Click to expand...
Respect Reaction GIF
 
Digital Igloo said:
Depends on the day.

I will say that Focus view surprised even me. We had to go in and create 5 distinct sounds for every amp and effect (absolute unit of an Excel spreadsheet), and revisiting and digging into the Legacy effects was an absolute blast. Nearly every effect I made zones for triggered a "Whoa, I never knew it could get this sound!"

If anything, instead of scrolling through a bunch of white text in the model list (click-strum-"no," click-strum-"no," click-strum-"no"), it incentivizes you to slow down and actually explore each model, because if the default doesn't wow you, one of the other 5 zones might, and it sort of teaches you the range of sounds you might be able to get with each amp or effect (and how those sounds were made because the sliders move in real time). The pretty 3D image is really just there to say "Look at me! Poke around here—You might find something you like."

I'm sure some people will complain about our choice of sounds for each Focus zone, at which point we'll just tell them to roll their own, which is kind of the point anyway.

There was quite a bit of pushback on Focus view because that meant Brandon F needed to create hundreds of 3D images, and collectively we had to program thousands of default zones, but everyone who's messed with it have now admitted that it's a lot of fun and was worth the slog.

Of course Focus zones are pretty dumb for something as simple as the Volume Pedal, Gain block or Wahs, but we made them anyway for consistency's sake.
Click to expand...

Ok so we can create our own zones. Nice.

So, as you’re dragging away from one zone into the next, it’s doing some sort of interpolation of the two as you’re dragging and morphing the two sounds, or is there just a magic barrier where it “jumps” to the next zone?
 
Sascha Franck said:
Not being transparent about any HX Stadium development at least worked pretty well for your presentation event. As said before, that was quite a "bam".
Click to expand...
If one goes back to our Backstage With Line 6 videos over the past few months, we telegraphed a lot of Stadium hints. But yeah, they were pretty obfuscated because everyone thought we were only talking about OG Helix.
 
Whizzinby said:
Ok so we can create our own zones. Nice.

So, as you’re dragging away from one zone into the next, it’s doing some sort of interpolation of the two as you’re dragging and morphing the two sounds, or is there just a magic barrier where it “jumps” to the next zone?
Click to expand...
Depends on how many values the parameter has. For example, there's no tricky behind-the-scenes interpolation if straddling two zones switches the JCM's Input parameter from Low to High; it just switches. But any continuously variable parameters with many values transition smoothly. You can also just tap a zone's corner to instantly select it.
 
Digital Igloo said:
Depends on how many values the parameter has. For example, there's no tricky behind-the-scenes interpolation if straddling two zones switches the JCM's Input parameter from Low to High; it just switches. But any continuously variable parameters with many values transition smoothly. You can also just tap a zone's corner to instantly select it.
Click to expand...

Makes sense regarding things with defined off/on values. I was kind of envisioning something like say zones with different gain or tone stack values and when dragging from one to the other, maybe discovering a cool “in-between” tone as they are morphing between the two. Which might lead to some cool discoveries, especially with things like effects. Like morphing between delays and reverbs with radically different values.
 
Digital Igloo said:
Depends on how many values the parameter has. For example, there's no tricky behind-the-scenes interpolation if straddling two zones switches the JCM's Input parameter from Low to High; it just switches. But any continuously variable parameters with many values transition smoothly. You can also just tap a zone's corner to instantly select it.
Click to expand...

Pretty much as an XY-Controlpad on synths it seems.

Anyhow, already wanted to ask that (if you allow yourself to answer, that is): Can you route parameters of multiple blocks to that XY-Pad (in that case possibly displaying something more generic)? I went through quite some lengths to set up XY-Pads in some Zebra 2 patches. And while it required quite some setup time, it defenitely paid off. Would have to be a modulation thing (as in only controlling offsets or an otherwise limited parameter range) for that to work, though.
 
Whizzinby said:
Makes sense regarding things with defined off/on values. I was kind of envisioning something like say zones with different gain or tone stack values and when dragging from one to the other, maybe discovering a cool “in-between” tone as they are morphing between the two. Which might lead to some cool discoveries, especially with things like effects. Like morphing between delays and reverbs with radically different values.
Click to expand...
Oh, absolutely. That's a big part of it.
Sascha Franck said:
Pretty much as an XY-Controlpad on synths it seems.

Anyhow, already wanted to ask that (if you allow yourself to answer, that is): Can you route parameters of multiple blocks to that XY-Pad (in that case possibly displaying something more generic)? I went through quite some lengths to set up XY-Pads in some Zebra 2 patches. And while it required quite some setup time, it defenitely paid off. Would have to be a modulation thing (as in only controlling offsets or an otherwise limited parameter range) for that to work, though.
Click to expand...
Focus view is only per-amp or effect, but the separate XY controller (which even gets its own hardware shortcut button so you can access it during a gig) can control dozens of parameters across many blocks. And each axis can send out MIDI CCs to control external gear simultaneously.

Basically, Focus view is a programming tool, while the XY controller is a performance tool.
 
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