So I swapped out my long-standing pedal board rig for a Line6 Helix Floor just over a year ago. I play in a local band; maybe 65% covers, 35% originals - something like that. We usually play only a couple of times per month. We're decent, but not great by any stretch. We're also all old so it's just for fun.
All in all, I love the thing. It's really opened up a lot of musical avenues for me and is much easier to tote around than the pedal rig. However, there are a handful of software decisions that drive me bananas. So if any engineers from the company are reading this, I'd love you to weigh in.
1: SLOW PRESETS WHEEL: When you turn the knob through the presets, the preset will attempt to load with each click of the wheel. This is absolutely maddening and kind of insane from a software development POV. Why? Because the presets take some nominal amount of time to load. So when you want to use the wheel to get 30 presets down, something that should be almost instant winds up taking a good bit of time. It's extremely frustrating. Try it on your own. Try to go from 1A to 20A and notice how long it takes even though you know exactly what you need to turn to. You'll notice that every time you turn the wheel there is a brief pause as the preset loads itself up. Some models take longer than others for obvious reason. I really wish that it didn't do this. Instead, if the software just waited 0.5 - 1s after you finally stopped turning the wheel and THEN loaded the preset, the scrolling would be instant.
2: GLOBAL VOLUME: since we play a lot of covers, it's reasonable that we might have completely different tones and effects between certain songs. Not to fear, this thing is a beast with that very thing. So I make certain presets for specific songs. The problem is that preset A might be at some volume and preset B might be at some other volume. I do my best to normalize them myself, but it's pretty difficult to do with the visual equalizer. I tend to use an external dB meter to get them as close as I can. So I cannot understand why they wouldn't just introduce a global volume normalization whereby you could then set all presets relative to that normal. In other words, I don't want preset A to be at some volume combination and preset B to be at some other one. I want preset A to be at 100% of my normalized volume and preset B to be at 110% of my normalized volume. Then when I soundcheck, I leave it at 100% and voila, every preset is correct. Yes, there are some global EQ functions, but they will not accomplish this. Seems an easy setting to add IMO.
3: LOOPER: I find it strange that you can only place a looper pedal in each preset. I'm unclear why they didn't (or don't) introduce some kind of global looper so that one could use any number of their presets to build their layered sound. Kind of understanding the limitations on the models, I can't think of anything that would restrict them from making it global - it's basically just recording audio. As it stands, I wind up having to plug an old Line6 looping pedal downwind of my very fancy and very expensive Helix Floor just so that I CAN record using different presets. For the price and complexity of the thing, it seems like I shouldn't have to rely upon additional, outdated equipment.
4: PEDAL: I think I've seen other posts on this, but I do find the pedal kind of weak. It works, though requires maintenance to prevent it from squeaking. This one is pretty low priority to me and is a physical hardware change, but I do wish they'd use a heartier, more robust pedal that doesn't so easily squeak.
That's all I've got!
