Line 6 Helix Stadium Pre-Launch Discussion

[paisleywookiee]

I bet you would have said the same about the internet 30 years ago

No, I didn’t say the same thing 30 years ago about the Internet.

 

[Gary_W]

For what it's worth, I don't have a problem if Line 6 incorporates some form of AI into Stadium's future plans. It's commoditized now, and the expectations of it being in your product are hard to avoid. I'm kicking off a long push for the SaaS company I run content marketing for precisely to inform prospects and existing customers of how we'll use it to make their usage easier.

I'm expected to use it daily within my tech stack to optimize what I do as well. For all of the suckiness with deepfaked videos, AI slop and outright creative/intellectual property theft, we've kinda crossed the rubicon and have to keep moving forward. Then there's the fact that the entire US economy is perched upon a rather shaky house of AI cards....but, uh....moving on quickly!

Getting back to music, there are smart use cases for it enhancing Stadium. If Showcase will examine, flag and separate stems, it's only a matter of time before it EQ matches those stems, allowing you to recreate virtually any guitar tone you hear online. It should be able to compensate for tunings and pickups as well.

I can see an AI-natural language chatbot allowing you to parse the Customtone Cloud or whatever all of the wealth of free presets and Proxy captures will be called. LLMs are already great data synthesizers, so this makes perfect sense. When that happens, Stadium with Showcase will indeed become that mythical roadie that DI mentioned in the June 11 launch.

Agree with all of that. As we’ll be able to record our own guitars to audition, it will know what it’s starting with (our raw guitar) and where it’s going (the stem).

 

[mikah912]

Agree with all of that. As we’ll be able to record our own guitars to audition, it will know what it’s starting with (our raw guitar) and where it’s going (the stem).

My kinda crazy idea would be for Line 6 to have an AI Modder inside of Stadium (and maybe it's already on the roadmap for @Digital Igloo):

It would work like this: Line 6 would have every possible cap, capacitor, tube and voltage on an Agoura amp tweakable - but not to end users Fractal-style with page after page of arcane parameters. Instead, your AI Modder would tweak it with natural language queries. So if you wanted to "Jose Mod" the Plexi. it would look up what values he changed on the internet (or have them banked already) and just do that.

Or if you wanted to Caswell mod it for that Appetite/#34 type groove, you just say it and it does it. Change the preamp or power amp tubes to ____________? No problemo. Add a bright cap or take it away? Just say the word. Add a tube stage or diode clipping? Easy peasy. If it doesn't know it, it scours the Web for the deets.

Agoura gives Line 6 sound engineers all of the tools at their disposal to do whatever, but this would give customers the same power, but with convenience and guard rails so they just follow in the footsteps of people who've already done it.

Oh, and there should be an "FX Designer" too that lets you tell it how you want the existing reverbs, modulation, pitch and delays changed. Then it generates some weirdo mutant offshoots that you can save and share.

 

[ian_dissonance]

I bet you would have said the same about the internet 30 years ago

Do people really think this is a comparable technological move? Lol.

Anyways, having all the practice tools for speed up/slow down and stuff would be great. I’ve spent the last three days angrily trying to get my down picking up to speed. It’s been probably 20 years since I’ve have to play 16 straight measures of down picked 16th notes at 100 bpm.

 

[EOengineer]

I use AI every day and if my Stadium XL ever starts a response with “you’re absolutely right!” I’m throwing it out the fucking window.

I get the fascination with AI, but I’d prefer to avoid another bad, bolted on LLM agent if at all possible.

AI isn’t the solution to every problem.

 

[Whizzinby]

It would work like this: Line 6 would have every possible cap, capacitor, tube and voltage on an Agoura amp tweakable - but not to end users Fractal-style with page after page of arcane parameters. Instead, your AI Modder would tweak it with natural language queries. So if you wanted to "Jose Mod" the Plexi. it would look up what values he changed on the internet (or have them banked already) and just do that.

Presumably you’d want both though, no?

Why hide the parameters behind Johnny 5.0? If he butchers the config, you’d want the ability to just go flip the Saturation switch yourself and be done.

 

[molul]

No, I didn’t say the same thing 30 years ago about the Internet.

I lost the bet then.

 

[molul]

Do people really think this is a comparable technological move? Lol.

We could discuss in high depth, but to summarize my opinion: AI will transform life as we know it in a very similar way as the internet, TV or electricity. We're only seeing the tip of the head yet.

Even the things I could imagine now, I know they'll be nothing compared to what we'll see in 10-20 years.

 

[molul]

I use AI every day and if my Stadium XL ever starts a response with “you’re absolutely right!” I’m throwing it out the fucking window.

I get the fascination with AI, but I’d prefer to avoid another bad, bolted on LLM agent if at all possible.

AI isn’t the solution to every problem.

You know you can configure chatgpt to get rid of those silly responses, right?

And I agree, they're annoying. But not seeing the potential of AI generated Helix presets because you don't like how chatgpt replies sometimes, I dunno, man...

 

[mikah912]

Presumably you’d want both though, no?

Why hide the parameters behind Johnny 5.0? If he butchers the config, you’d want the ability to just go flip the Saturation switch yourself and be done.

To a certain extent. Fractal's "Saturation" parameter is basically a Jose mod for every single freakin' amp. Line 6 is already doing something similar for the Catalyst original amps with the "Boost" control, but what's cool about their implementation is that it's context-dependent (sometimes, it adds an appropriate hardware boost in classic config, others a tube stage).

I could see them extrapolating that to all Agoura amps as well. Saves a block. Fun to play with.

But no, I don't see them exposing plate voltage or other such bits. Runs counter to their "Make great guitar stuff approachable and engaging" philsophy of all of their products.

 

[paisleywookiee]

We could discuss in high depth, but to summarize my opinion: AI will transform life as we know it in a very similar way as the internet, TV or electricity. We're only seeing the tip of the head yet.

Even the things I could imagine now, I know they'll be nothing compared to what we'll see in 10-20 years.

I agree, it will transform life. For worse.

 

[Whizzinby]

To a certain extent. Fractal's "Saturation" parameter is basically a Jose mod for every single freakin' amp. Line 6 is already doing something similar for the Catalyst original amps with the "Boost" control, but what's cool about their implementation is that it's context-dependent (sometimes, it adds an appropriate hardware boost in classic config, others a tube stage).

I could see them extrapolating that to all Agoura amps as well. Saves a block. Fun to play with.

But no, I don't see them exposing plate voltage or other such bits. Runs counter to their "Make great guitar stuff approachable and engaging" philsophy of all of their products.

I don’t think it has to be either or. One thing I always thought Fractal could do was make an “Advanced Parameters” toggle. So, it defaults to only basic controls for those that have restless click syndrome and can’t help themselves. But, for those that wanted that sort of granular control you could enable advanced parameters to dig under the hood.

L6 is probably positioned to bridge that gap between users better than anyone since they are so clued in with UI and UE, but I don’t see why anyone would want less options. Seems you could have all three: basic controls, advanced controls, and some sort of AI/Interpretive control option.

 

[EOengineer]

But not seeing the potential of AI generated Helix presets because you don't like how chatgpt replies sometimes, I dunno, man...

Devs know that devs don’t use ChatGPT.

 

[mikah912]

I don’t think it has to be either or. One thing I always thought Fractal could do was make an “Advanced Parameters” toggle. So, it defaults to only basic controls for those that have restless click syndrome and can’t help themselves. But, for those that wanted that sort of granular control you could enable advanced parameters to dig under the hood.

L6 is probably positioned to bridge that gap between users better than anyone since they are so clued in with UI and UE, but I don’t see why anyone would want less options. Seems you could have all three: basic controls, advanced controls, and some sort of AI/Interpretive control option.

A small subset has been asking for more advanced controls for some time. I'm not saying it'll never happen, but maybe that's a bit visually messy and unwieldy for what they're trying to do with Stadium.

I can see them opening up more, tho:

• Selectable bright caps (on/off) on every Agoura amp.
• "Boost" parameter that either adds a carefully chosen pedal or tube/gain stages (up to two additional ones)
• Power amp tube selector

Probably would address 80-90 percent of what people want to tweak with just those three.

 

[EOengineer]

A small subset has been asking for more advanced controls for some time. I'm not saying it'll never happen, but maybe that's a bit visually messy and unwieldy for what they're trying to do with Stadium.

I can see them opening up more, tho:

• Selectable bright caps (on/off) on every Agoura amp.
• "Boost" parameter that either adds a carefully chosen pedal or tube/gain stages (up to two additional ones)
• Power amp tube selector

Probably would address 80-90 percent of what people want to tweak with just those three.

I’m all for the bright cap and power tube options. The boost option could be useful but I guess I don’t really see the point with the upgraded processing and abundance of blocks. Even if there’s a new stomp you have to assume it’s probably a non issue. What am I missing? I’m assuming the key driver is block limits.

 

[tdill]

Speaking of which, what would everyone want to see in a Stadium Stomp besides the obvious?

Others have mentioned what I think is the same thing, but something like block-based state machines/snaphshots would be cool! Similar to how you can currently cycle through snapshots using a single FS action (i.e. in snapshot, press FS1 to go to snapshot 2, in snapshot 2 press FS1 to go to snapshot 3, etc...). The change would be to create "snapshots" for each block...

For instance, on a drive block you would have, say, four "blockshots" - Off, Low, Med, High gain. Then you can assign a controller to cycle through these without affecting the other blocks. Kind of like "stompshots" but IIRC you basically just get two settings with those.

Or for my use case: I have an HX Stomp XL, and I use the snapshots to vary the amp sounds, cycling through them using a single FS. But I'd like to have the same control with my delay block, i.e. Off > dotted eighth > quarter > etc. I can currently get dotted-eight/quarter and then on/off but it takes two footswitches. I guess this isn't probably as big of a problem for HXS/HXSXL users, but could really add capability for a HXS Stomp.

 

[AlbertA]

Why hide the parameters behind Johnny 5.0?

 

[Digital Igloo]

What kind of dog is that?

The CDC has a program called the Dog Aging Project. In exchange for answering behavioral questions every year, they give you a free DNA test. Bill&Ted's a rescue mutt from the pound, but we found out he's:

• 29% Chihuahua
• 22.1% Unknown
• 12.9% Pug
• 10.3% Toy Poodle
• 7.7% Pomeranian
• 4.5% Dachshund
• 4.3% Jack Russel Terrier
• 3.4% Pekingese
• 3.1% Yorkshire Terrier
• 2.9% Miniature Pinscher

EDIT: Where's that guy who promised to pony up $500 for the Agoura Animal Shelter if a new Helix didn't drop by the end of 2023?

@Digital Igloo - when the stem separation thing comes for Showcase….

Will we be able to slow the backing track down and maintain pitch? This would be fantastic for practice. And for me in general as my fingers often disappoint me :)

If we will be able to do this, will it be a sliding scale / percentage of original speed? Or a simpler 1/4 - 1/2 - 3/4 - full thing?

Not at launch and likely never all 8 stereo tracks, as that would eat up at least half our coprocessor.

 

[EOengineer]

Movie used to crack me up when I was a kid.

 

[JiveTurkey]

REMEMBER EL DEBARGE?!?!?!?