So.....

Stone

Rock Star
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So been enjoying this Forum a lot lots of great folks and lots of laughs
as you Know I'm a Helix user, but I've come to notice a lot of folks here and a lot of discussions revolve around FAS, more so than any other modeler ....
have I crossed over to the Dark Side Forum wise

QpOG.gif


:guiness
 
Ehhh; it's a pretty good cross section I'd say? Some good Helix chat, lots of FAS chat because the recent avalanche of GOT. No cheap stuff (other than what @Bob Zaod buys from time to time). Not much Boss talk because they are stupid and can't create simple IR loading/playing in 2023. Kemper people just play for the most part.
 
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I don't know about dark side, light side, heavy side, trippy side, outside, inside, beside, B-side, on the side, or my mean side.

All's I know is a little over 2 years ago I wanted some rack-mount, high-quality effects, and came across modelers because they were also multi-effects processors. I couldn't shake my experience hearing former Line 6 gear, plus it seemed from everything I read, Fractal was da shit. So I got one as an early 2020 Christmas present to myself.

It has inspired me to play/practice more than any other piece of gear I've ever bought, and today I'm probably 3x's better as a guitarist than I've ever been. It's very rare that I get disappointed in my abilities any more, and I'm having an absolute blast. And I've never once in those 2 years wished I had gotten something else!
 
So been enjoying this Forum a lot lots of great folks and lots of laughs
as you Know I'm a Helix user, but I've come to notice a lot of folks here and a lot of discussions revolve around FAS, more so than any other modeler ....
have I crossed over to the Dark Side Forum wise

QpOG.gif


:guiness

No I don't think so. I hope we don't have as many modeler flame wars as other places and shouldn't have as many jerks as the admins are active participants. I think it's probably small sample size at this point.

We may have more gear whoores here too who are on the latest and greatest, and if there's a Helix 2 then a bunch of us may start talking about that. Helix is I think 8 years old now? Not to say it's outdated but we can be a fickle group.

Personally I was really close to selling a ton of gear to get a Helix Rack system this fall, then pivoted to Axe FX 3 instead. I like both systems, just prefer the Fractal. And I have Helix Native to scratch that itch where Fractal doesn't have a plugin.
 
If you came from the Other Forum™ you are probably used to that forum being dominated by Helix threads. So far IMHO this forum has a well balanced representation of the different manufactures which is nice, I hope it stays that way. When I joined the Other Forum™ many years ago it was dominated by Fractal people and that was kind of a bummer for various reasons.

Thanks for hearing my out, I'll shut up now :grin
 
@Stone If you'd caught me talking about my modeller anytime between late 2017 & early 2022 it would have been all about my Helix. I had it for years until buying my first FAS product.

Gear talk and ownership is cyclic and I suppose the FAS stuff is on a peak right now?

Most gear forum regulars have owned all of the modellers at some point, I think.
 
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The other place shifted from being fractal heavy to helix heavy as the helix firmware support grew and more users converted over.

Here, people haven’t totally seen the Helix light yet. You haven’t gone to the dark side, a lot of people here are just stuck in the dark ages…

D
 
So been enjoying this Forum a lot lots of great folks and lots of laughs
as you Know I'm a Helix user, but I've come to notice a lot of folks here and a lot of discussions revolve around FAS, more so than any other modeler ....
have I crossed over to the Dark Side Forum wise

QpOG.gif


:guiness
Most of the folks here have a fair bit of experience with a whole lot of stuff.

Some of us (well, me at least) wound up here in large part because other forums got frustrating with how often you'd have folks posting not from firsthand experience but from "when I was shopping for my X, I did all the research and although I've never even seen a Y in the flesh, I'm going to go ahead and tell you about Y as an expert having read 5.2 million posts (4.3 of which are just posts by other people that have never seen a Y in the flesh but are just, like me, regurgitating lore, hence making it seem like it's a "consensus").

That wound up most frustrating for anything non-Helix related because the conversation was one part sharing experience to three or four parts dealing with the "opinion" of folks that was not at all based on real life experience.

To the extent I talk more about Fractal here it's in large part due to the fact that it's nice to have a place to talk about it without knowing I was likely going to be dealing with an annoying side conversation correcting an inaccurate assumption, that would then turn into a childish argument (childish by everyone involved, myself included).

A lot of us keep a foot in more than one pond (be that via multiple modelers, pedals+modeler(s), modeler(s)+amp(s), or all of the above) because through hands on experience we've figured out there is no magic box that does it all perfectly.

Some of it is nitpicky - I liked the tremolos in Helix a lot when I first got one years ago. Later I got a Strymon Flint; and then had the fortune of owning and playing quite a few amps with various types of built-in tremolo. Now...I can tolerate the tremolo in the Helix and it'd work fine for just about anything, but there are other terms (including Fractal's) that bring me a lot more pleasure when playing and would be icing on the cake to a lot of listeners in some recording and live playing contexts.

I like almost everything in Fractal. I even think it can make great dirty/sauce-drenched delays. BUT, I find it only works well for static settings of those kinds of delays. Any knob-tweaking/noise making with an analog delay, or attempts to do tape-style sound-on-sound looping and forget about it. I'll take a Helix or better yet a pedal (or three).

But all of this has been a many-years path. And while if you buy used, flip wisely, etc., you can make sure no single transaction results in four figure cash outlay, an honest accounting for any of that have been at it a while would show thousands, possibly pushing $10k (for a few outliers...several $10k), lost overall, that will never be recouped.

If your goal is making music, just enjoy your Helix. If your goal is exploring/experiencing guitar gear...I know plenty of folks with an annual wine/beer/spirits budget that easily competes with my gear budget, and gets them nothing more than a mildly-intoxicating experience that they can wax philosophically and critically about with other con-a-sewers.
 
I think there’s a good mix here between Helix and Fractal.

I talk about Fractal more recently because I recently got the FM9 and as a new user, still have a lot to learn and am having fun exploring it.

But I also have an HX Stomp and have had a Helix (Floor, and LT) for the past 6 years or so. I just don’t have any new questions there and am not currently using it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not an awesome piece of gear!!
 
If you came from the Other Forum™ you are probably used to that forum being dominated by Helix threads. So far IMHO this forum has a well balanced representation of the different manufactures which is nice, I hope it stays that way. When I joined the Other Forum™ many years ago it was dominated by Fractal people and that was kind of a bummer for various reasons.

Thanks for hearing my out, I'll shut up now :grin
It was Helix heavy for a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time. Then it evened out. Then something else came along and, well; the rest is history :rofl
 
That wound up most frustrating for anything non-Helix related because the conversation was one part sharing experience to three or four parts dealing with the "opinion" of folks that was not at all based on real life experience.

Oh, you have hit the nail on the head there. I listened to the opinion (as fact) of those people for so long over at The Other Place™, saying that there was no difference in the modelling of the top modellers and I believed it, because I only owned one of them. So I held off buying anything else for long time. I now know that that was a crock of shit!

Also - good shout out for the tremolo models. I'm a tremolo lover and my experience has been the same. The FAS bias tremolo is brilliant (I also had the Flint at one time and enjoyed that too).

And of course, I have a real bias tremolo in the gorgeous Princeton Reverb, if I want some of those hot tubes (and bloody hell, does it get frighteningly hot!).
 
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People can have preferences. Certainly. But again and again and again and again some dipshit who has never played an actual guitar amp saying "OH I USE THE HEDRUSH ENGULL AND IT'S JUST LIKE THE REEL THING" is an imbecile. Full stop.
 
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