Helix rack, now what?

    Got one of these with a fender super sonic 60 combo in a trade, what to do now?


    I suppose I could just use it as a 4cm with my Kemper but to be honest, with blending custom IR's in it, I can get some pretty sweet sounds. I keep a/b comparing it and the Kemper still wins but damn, the helix sounds pretty freaking good considering. It's almost like I've kinda missed that grainy digital-ness? Sounds a lot better than my hd500x ever did and the routing is insane.


    Guess I'm wondering if getting the foot control and wiring everything up in 4cm mode plus making new presets is gonna give me a headache or a boner when I could just as easily use one or the other and that's the crisis, I kinda hate to think that I'd use just the helix on its own given the time and money spent with my Kemper. Tonal and gear identity crisis.


    I feel most of you will tell me the obvious. "Dont be silly! Suck it up and do the 4cm or just use the Kemper and keep everything as it is."


    Open to ideas and criticisms, chairs!

    Well Kemper does two things better. First is amp / cab tone. Second, in my opinion is equally important. Remember the old days in multi-effect/modeling gear pre kemper when you had to adjust volume on all your presets? On the Helix, and every other product out there besides Kemper, the moment you touch the gain knob your volume is all over the place and now your going back and forth between presets trying to match output volume. As soon as you have a bank of presets that match volume-wise, you bank up or down and discover that the presets you adjusted last week in those banks are much louder or softer. On the Kemper, all you have to do is adjust your clean sens and you never have to worry about patch volume ever again. However, if you use the Helix with the Kemper in one of its effects loops, you could just use the Kemper for its strength, it's profiles and patch volume matching, and use the helix for its strength, it's flexible routing.

    Play with it. See how you settle with your various gear.


    IF you find in 3-6 months you aren't using it. Sell it.


    If you are, keep it.


    Sell gear you don't use. Let the "usefulness" be the guide.

    I do gear purging fairly often. I totally support this.

    Update, easiest 4cm method ever. And it's awesome. I used some preamp models in the helix as dist stomps for the kemper and it among other things sounded pretty amazing. The loop in the helix kept my kemper tone integrity intact and it was easy to a/b comparison what I thought I had made as decent helix sounds compared to kemper tones. There's a lot of useful possibilities here. Guess I'm gonna get a helix controller now. ;)


    Sounds like a good trade, imo! Don't worry too much about the time spent with the Kemper, press forward and try to figure out how to get the most out of both pieces of gear working together.


    In fact, I wouldn't even try 4CM personally. Get a stereo A/B/Y box and punish both rigs simultaneously. Bet it sounds huge. You can dial the Profiler for the lower end of your tone and the Helix for the higher end, for example.