Line 6 Helix Stadium Talk

[[Nathan]]

I think it great to strive for that. Is it possible? I don't know. Roll the tubes on your amp.. it sounds different... change brand of tubes.. old tubes/new/bias... its different.. incoming power to the head 110vac, 118vac, 120vac, starve it in the same cicuit as everyone else fiighting on stage its different... Its humid wet speaker/new speaker/old... dry as a bone... an amp cant even be itself day to day.

The goal of the capture is to sound like that amp then and there. All of those things are about the life of an amp over time.

 

[Gary_W]

As someone who wants to have the best amp replication possible, accuracy matters
As someone who wants to give people the best captures possible, accuracy matters
Having a good starting point with a highly detailed model for people to push and pull to their hearts content, accuracy matters

Being able to take a capture and tweak it to your liking is a secondary task. Having accurate and high quality models is the foundational starting point which benefits everyone.

For someone who owns the original amp, accuracy matters otherwise they’ll feel like they are compromising when using a modelled / captured version of the amp. Of course, that compromise might be acceptable because you can record at 2am if you feel like it rather than putting a mic in front of a speaker cabinet and upsetting the entire street. But, that aside, making the person who owns the amp feel like the compromise is as small as possible is important.

I think accuracy is also important for people who don’t own the originals; the fact that there’s money in selling profiles / captures tells us this. I already have amp models in the Stadium that make me entirely happy for every conceivable part of the tone spectrum I could want. If ‘tweaking to make something I like’ is the only thing that mattered to me, I’ve already got too much choice!!

I’ll still end up buying some captures….. why? Because I want to know what it sounds and feels like to play through an amp that I will never own. And to do that, I need to have the belief that it’s accurate. Otherwise, why bother buying that capture when I’ve got something that makes me happy already? Of course, you’ll always tweak to your own taste but there must be a ‘need’ to do more than that otherwise profile sellers would make far less money than they do IMO.

I have no way of knowing if any given amp capture is accurate or not as I’ve never heard me playing my guitar in my room with (eg) a Bad Cat. I can read up on the amp architecture and get online opinions which might ground me by saying ‘it’s a bit like a Vox but also not’. But that’s all I have to go on without a direct comparison. So I have to have faith in the people who make the capture in terms of their ability to dial in an amp at it’s sweet spots and to mic it correctly. But the ability of the capture maker is watered down if the capture device can’t do a good job as well. That is where accuracy comes in for us folks who don’t own 20 amps - we have to believe our capture device / modeller can do the job pretty much perfectly so our endless curiosity can be satisfied by commercial makers who know what they’re doing. If we don’t believe it can do it accurately, we may as well have stuck with the original Pod from 25 years ago as you could still tweak something decent enough to use out of it :)