Line 6 Helix Stadium

Honestly this sounds like a whole lot of extra work for inconsistency of UI/UX,.

I don't think the opportunity cost of this is worth model fidelity and an inconsistent experience.

The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that what one calls a quirk, the other might call a feature. Calling something a "quirk" seems to have a bad connotation, but it's not always bad.

I think the example given has its upsides where I'd argue some quirks replicated on a few models on Helix right now have zero upsides.
 
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The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that what one calls a quirk, the other might call a feature. Calling something a "quirk" seems to have a bad connotation, but it's not always bad.

I think the example given has it upsides where I'd argue some quirks replicated on a few models on Helix right now have zero upsides.
It just seems impossible from a manufacturing standpoint to pinpoint what is a quirk to some and not to others. The manufacturer needs to make that decision imo
 
It just seems impossible from a manufacturing standpoint to pinpoint what is a quirk to some and not to others. The manufacturer needs to make that decision imo
100%. I said it earlier, there's no 1 correct answer. Every said "quirk" it's a decision made to keep or change it. What I think it's that some have a good reason to stay while others, some that are on Helix right now, have no good reason to be there.
 
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No sweat L6, you just need to make us all happy.

Melting Hot Dog GIF
 
Outside of this thread, sure.

But within the context of Helix Stadium's UI/UX/GUI, which of the following goals should Line 6 strive toward?
  1. To educate people on the myriad operational quirks and foibles across hundreds of different amps and effects pedals, the vast majority of which they'll never encounter in real life? Or...
  2. ...to give people tools to get great sounds as quickly as possible?

3. Add a way to watch porn on the screen, and laugh as roughly 99.85% of customers forget about options 1 or 2.

No, I would suggest 2, it is the Line6 way and that is a differentiator that's harder to copy. Accuracy is easy and requires little thought on the part of the designer, which means anyone can play that game equally well.
 
The more I think about it the more I come to the conclusion that what one calls a quirk, the other might call a feature. Calling something a "quirk" seems to have a bad connotation, but it's not always bad.

So, out of the current set of availble amps, stomp boxes and FX, which quirks exactly are you missing that would be a real QOL update to your sound design?
Besides, wasn't all that discussion about UI things at first?
 
This is often an advantage. It would be a nightmare if HW looked the same regardless of what it’s actually doing. I’m not sure being slowed down is always a bad thing either, particularly if it means you make less mistakes and do things with more purpose. Speed can sometimes mean doing things unnecessarily or making mistakes.

If you have one fairchild 670 in your studio and it’s on your lead vocal, you’re probably not going to adjust it by mistake. If you have 8 1176’s or channel compressors, maybe you’re more prone to adjusting the wrong one. There’s a lot of instances where more gear with fewer controls beats less gear that is more flexible.

With your 2nd point, I think it’s MUCH easier to learn the quirks of different pieces of gear when they look more distinct and have fewer controls. This is where the benefits of a visually unique design really pay off, and why it’s often worth copying them when making a digital model. Learning the nuances of an SPX90 or 480L are not particularly fun - lots of menu diving, looking for parameters, and they’re annoying to adjust.

If it’s an EMT140 or a spring reverb or a DM-2, you can learn what it’s about instantly and the controls are dead simple to familiarise with. Digital models that take as many visual cues as possible from the HW, and make sensible decisions on what controls to give the user really take the benefits of the HW design.
Funnily enough, most modelers are actually "look the same regardless of what it's doing". One of the problems with most is that you can't tell the difference between e.g Drive block A vs B without opening it up first to see what model is used. Helix doesn't even make a distinction between the blocks so you have multiple identical looking blocks of the same type. I hope HX Stadium fixes this by giving e.g numbers/letters if multiple blocks of the same type are in a preset.

Then you have the generic nature of the controls, in an abstract user interface. To tell a Mesa Mark IV model apart from a Fender Twin you have to look at what controls are presented, or the model label. HX Stadium's pictures will help a lot in this differentiation, but I don't expect we will see an actual graphic EQ for the Mark IV model but the same slider types that suck at representing the relations of those controls on the hardware. In HX-Edit they look fine, just horizontal instead of vertical.

On the other hand, a single user interface can help with familiarity. The only difference between most of my Strymons is the color of the pedal and the labeling. It's all the same 4-6 knobs arranged the same way. Some use larger knobs for a few of them, others use the same size for all.

I agree with @Digital Igloo about the Logic Pro compressors. Those combine the "same user interface, so everything is in the same place" with some visual identity to differentiate them at a glance. It's easy to try the different models and focus more on listening to it, rather than feeling you need to use it exactly like its hardware inspiration.

Your "eight 1176 compressors" scenario is easily solved by giving each of those compressors some visual identity. It can be anything from colored tape to stickers to painting the front panels. See e.g the UA 1176 collection, each variant is a bit different:

1176_classic_limiter_collection_feature_sm_1.jpg


Let's not forget that a lot of hardware design is based on things like "what can fit into this chassis", "let's put this pot here so there's short wiring for less noise" type compromises rather than some grand plan for ideal usability. Like imagine if a digital model of a Lonestar Classic required you to flip the virtual amp around so you can access its spring reverb controls. That would suck just as much as it does on the real amp.
 
So, out of the current set of availble amps, stomp boxes and FX, which quirks exactly are you missing that would be a real QOL update to your sound design?
Besides, wasn't all that discussion about UI things at first?

Pull up a memory man or ce1 model first in chain like going in front of an amp and your tone gets much darker. It mimics the stock pedal's low input impedance which is widely considered a bad thing for these effects. You may check analogman's website and see it's a common mod. Howard Davis, the creator of the memory man, also offered a mod to increase the input impedance. Input impedance on modern MMs are 1M.

The tycobrahe model has the default value close to 200k while most vintage and most vintage replicas are closer to 10k like fuzz faces. Stock model sounds a lot more piercing compared to most pedals.

UI discussions will always get intertwined with UX, which I think this is more related to. And I was not the first to mention UX in this discussion.
 
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I agree with most of your post until we get to:

Those combine the "same user interface, so everything is in the same place" with some visual identity to differentiate them at a glance. It's easy to try the different models and focus more on listening to it, rather than feeling you need to use it exactly like its hardware inspiration.

IMO this is a backwards way of looking at it. If I’m compressing drums, I’d know before I add a compressor what I want to achieve and I’d pick an appropriate piece of gear. I might just go straight to a dbx160 or 1176 or distressor. If I need to do something that none of those were ever designed to do, I’d reach for a flexible digital compressor. As soon as you strip away the original controls, look, ranges and layout of the originals, you may as well just use a typical versatile plugin compressor.

As we know, the difference between different compressors and EQ’s can be pretty small if they’re set the same - the main differences come from how we interact with them, and what controls have been exposed to the user. Making them more flexible and unified takes away at least 50% of the point of character models in the first place.

There isn’t a single instance where I’d reach for the stock logic compressor over dedicated models because none of the tweaks made improve them at all. Unifying the look of different models that are supposed to be different makes no sense to me - I’d even say the opposite is true. I’d find it more useful to have the different models as visually distinct as possible, with each having an optimised control set and layout for its intended use. As soon as you start trying to unify stuff, I’d rather just use Pro C2 (or whatever).

Your "eight 1176 compressors" scenario is easily solved by giving each of those compressors some visual identity. It can be anything from colored tape to stickers to painting the front panels. See e.g the UA 1176 collection, each variant is a bit different:
No. The different 1176 models are different circuit revisions and sound and behave differently. They are not interchangeable with just different paint. Typically you’d put masking tape and label them. Regardless, gear looking different is useful to the user, not a hinderance. If all analog gear had the exact same look, regardless of what it’s doing, it would be a nightmare.
Let's not forget that a lot of hardware design is based on things like "what can fit into this chassis", "let's put this pot here so there's short wiring for less noise" type compromises rather than some grand plan for ideal usability. Like imagine if a digital model of a Lonestar Classic required you to flip the virtual amp around so you can access its spring reverb controls. That would suck just as much as it does on the real amp.
Again, not really. It might happen on some amps or valve gear with high voltages but if we look at studio gear and music gear on the whole, it’s rarely at the expense of the users experience. The product simply wouldn’t hit the market if they thought of the controls and layout as some kind of afterthought. Guitar amps are somewhat of an anomaly because the the size, voltages, need to be portable, and other constraints that are somewhat unique to them.
 
This sounds great. Something nice is happening with the top end and the pick attack. Also seems like a finer gradient on the clean to edge of breakup territory maybe?

I can’t put my finger on it but it feels like there’s more life in those cleans than I’m used to getting out of Helix. I don’t use the twin at all currently so it’s also possible the current model is great and I’m totally ignorant.
I agree with all of the above but... you should definitely check out the HX Twin. :)
 
IMO this is a backwards way of looking at it. If I’m compressing drums, I’d know before I add a compressor what I want to achieve and I’d pick an appropriate piece of gear. I might just go straight to a dbx160 or 1176 or distressor. If I need to do something that none of those were ever designed to do, I’d reach for a flexible digital compressor. As soon as you strip away the original controls, look, ranges and layout of the originals, you may as well just use a typical versatile plugin compressor.

As we know, the difference between different compressors and EQ’s can be pretty small if they’re set the same - the main differences come from how we interact with them, and what controls have been exposed to the user. Making them more flexible and unified takes away at least 50% of the point of character models in the first place.

There isn’t a single instance where I’d reach for the stock logic compressor over dedicated models because none of the tweaks made improve them at all. Unifying the look of different models that are supposed to be different makes no sense to me - I’d even say the opposite is true. I’d find it more useful to have the different models as visually distinct as possible, with each having an optimised control set and layout for its intended use. As soon as you start trying to unify stuff, I’d rather just use Pro C2 (or whatever).

I strongly agree with you here.

I don't care about an SSL buss compressor with a tweakable auto release or an API eq with an added q control, that makes no sense at all to me.

You learn what a certain hardware does with the controls it has and once you've learned it you choose that model to get that result.
If you need a different result you don't look for additional controls you simply change model.
 
Pull up a memory man or ce1 model first in chain like going in front of an amp and your tone gets much darker. It mimics the stock pedal's low input impedance which is widely considered a bad thing for these effects.

But you can change that. So the quirk is there and you can both have it and not have it. I don't see the issue.
 
But you can change that. So the quirk is there and you can both have it and not have it. I don't see the issue.

In some cases there might be a work around, but not all of them. And that was the case before the new setting for the auto input impedance change, and yet it was added - because it just makes more sense. If ease of use for the regular guy is the goal here, I see absolutely no reason for these default values be the way they are.

There's one thing I think should be changed, but there's an actual work around. I don't think the default setting for the volume block should be linear. Volume pedals are logarithmic. But in this case, yes, very easy work around... But I personally think it's odd to have linear as default.
 
As we know, the difference between different compressors and EQ’s can be pretty small if they’re set the same - the main differences come from how we interact with them, and what controls have been exposed to the user. Making them more flexible and unified takes away at least 50% of the point of character models in the first place.

Yep!

In my head, there are broadly two types of compressors: compressors that are immediately good at specific things because of their interface and the decisions made for you, and versatile utility compressors. I will go for the latter 90+% of the time, easily, and I find a lot of the former way overhyped for practical, informed use... but there are certain situations (acoustic guitars, electric guitars in the case of pre-amplifier, sometimes drums, vocals, etc) where those specialized compressors just immediately get you That Sound in a way that is pretty hard to mess up, and in the digital realm that's their whole point of existing (for me anyway). So, I tend to agree that keeping the available parameters (basically) authentic is the best bet here.

I do think there are good arguments for having a few extra adjustment parameters hidden away for edge cases though, especially in the context of a modeler where a lot of layering and sidechaining tricks are clumsy (or impossible) to do, and I guess in this case I'd prefer for them to be "hidden" away on another page like many plugins do, or only visible with something like an "authentic vs ideal" toggle... though my ideal there would just be an extremely versatile compressor block with various presets based on famous compressors (e.g. like DC8C, or how Fractal approaches some things).
 
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