Rockman X100 Patch Demo for Line 6 Helix
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ธ.ค. 2020
- After reverse engineering the EQ and gain stages in the Tom Scholz Rockman X100, I have re-created the 4 vintage X100 tones in the Line 6 Helix. The tones replicated are Clean 2, Clean 1, Edge, and Distortion.
While Def Leppard used Rockman modules (the rackmount big brother of the small X100 headphone amp) on the Hysteria album, this is NOT an attempt to replicate the tweaks used for that album. Instead, I was shooting for a faithful as possible reproduction of the original X100 headphone amp tones that many of us young guitarists used for demo recordings in the 80's and 90's.
The Helix presets and impulse responses can be found on the Line 6 Custom Tone shop, and is free to use... I'm just sharing this because I love to learn and share how these vintage tones were created.
line6.com/customtone/search/?...
Did you download the patches and IR's and find them useful? Have any ideas you'd like a bored engineer to take a crack at? Feeling generous and want to support geeky reverse-engineering videos? Please donate! www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Just to clarify for those just discovering this video...Def Leppard did in fact use the Rockman X100 during recording of the Hysteria album, NOT the rack unit mentioned in this video. You can actually see Phil showing the original X100 used in this video: th-cam.com/video/6pli9XTPHR8/w-d-xo.html
Stumbled upon this by searching for "Rockman X100" and "Helix" - really nice work on these, sir. Incredible how exact these are! And huge thanks for making this free to all of us. This is endless hours of fun to use. So thanks again!
Thank you for this! You’ve given me hours and hours of fun with these 4 presets. They sound amazing!!!
If you have (or ever get a wild hair to) RE-ed the Rockman Sustainor, I'd be hugely interested in weaving that into my Helix Floor presets. Thanks for this video, well done!
Lonnie...thanks so much for these patches and the above video...stellar work !!
Thank you so much for this! I am impressed with your reproduction. I have an original classic Rockman. It was my entire rig when I was a full time guitarist in the 80s. My classic is wrapped in a plastic bag sitting in storage and I was considering sending it out for a refurb to a company that specializes in resurrecting Sholz gear. Now I don't have to. You nailed it. The only thing that sound a little different to me was the chorus. The original Rockman had a chorus that was a little more lush and I think the delay was a little more "there". This is easily tweaked though. It was also nice to learn about the underlying tech in Tom's gadgets. There are other expositions around that explain how his toys worked and I always come away impressed at how he approached things. I will get a LOT of use out of these. Thanks again.
This is epic and so helpful! Thankyou!!!
Holy crap that sounds great! Nice work!
I just bought a used Helix floor a few weeks ago and this preset was already loaded. It's absolutely perfect....I used to have the original Rockman and the original modules as well.
Dude you really nailed these.. super, super impressed.. again thanks so much for your work on this project!!
I get a weird level of enjoyment of using my old-school electronics knowledge (which is mostly useless in today’s digital world) to reverse engineer these old analog circuits. Hoping someone will have suggestions for other vintage circuits to take a shot at.
@@AgingEngineer That's awesome. I was getting a degree in electronics but changed it because I saw that computer networking was the future. I still love building electronic devices though, but yes, most of it's just programming DSP now. You've done a masterful job on reverse engineering this though! Keep up the great work.
Man - I'm brand new to Helix but loving this. I actually have an X100, and don't use it often but being able to use this and sample before I "print" will rock! Thanks for all the work, and for sharing.
Incredible Breakdown !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GREAT RE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! now, if we could only simplify for the HX STOMP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Great video
Your skills are really impresive
Wow, Lonnie. You've done an excellent job here! Thanks for taking the time to go through the process block by block.
Do you have any plans to model any more SR&D products? (Would love to see a Rockman Sustainor emulation!)
Again, thanks for sharing all this. \m/
Not a bad idea as it shares a lot of the same tone circuits as the X100!
Really awesome info!!!
Thanks, man! What I learned about creating Impulse Responses makes me think it would be fun to see if we could capture the response of your old half-stack cabinet so we could replicate that sound in the Helix.
Amazing! Thank you so much!
In the 80's my buddy and I joked that the Rockman was the world's cheapest guitar synth/sampler combo. Because you can just about put anything through it and it still sounds like Hysteria.
That's why I stopped using it back in the day. Used it for demos all the time and was so much easier than trying to mic up my amp in my parents house, but yeah... it all had that 80's hysteria sheen to it. Now that the fad passed, I miss the tone thought.
Great tones! Reminds me of Andy Summers.
This is amazing! I was wishing the Helix had an X100 and now it does thanks to you! In regards to the "optional" blocks you say are more for your preference, would you say that it's a more faithful X100 emulation with or without those block on? If I was just going for the most accurate X100 model possible? Specifically that block where you say you have rolled some lows off. For the most faithful recreation should I remove that roll off? Thanks!
There were some compromises made here because the Helix does not have exactly the same distortion circuit or compression as the X100. The distortion that was used was a similar circuit (eg. gave the same type of distortion) but that block was based on a pedal that ALSO had it's own tone shaping. So with that shaping, it sounded closer to my ear with the optional blocks OFF. Also, I did not not have an X100 for a true side-to-side comparison, so was relying on my memory of it and a bunch of other TH-cam videos demoing the X100.
Hei, can you please try to make an helix 6 stomp patch with the most essential settings? That woul be just like a perfect Christmas gift for all your fans out there :-)
Also sorry to barrage you with questions but I'm fascinated by this stuff. Did the original X100 have that really high end hiss that comes in if you let something ring in Cln2 or play very staccato? Just wondering if that's a Helix limitation or if the original would have done the same!
No, the original didn't have that hiss. It still had hiss, but not as much as this model does. There are two things you can do to manage that. One is to use the Helix's input gate (which is excellent and operates similar to an expander), or you can adjust the compressor settings, which is really where the hiss is brought in. I believe the Rockman compressor had a non-linear compression curve, so very low signals were not boosted and compressed whereas "normal playing" volume were very highly compressed. I could not find a compression setting that exactly replicated that, but with a bit of experimentation you can probably find a combination of expansion + compression will get you there.
Hello Lonnie. Thanks for these Rockman patches!! For the last 3 months since I downloaded them I've been addicted to playing through them on my Helix LT. I want to use them at my church but I can't figure out how to adjust the crunch away and at the same time keep a decent "cleaner" tone. Can you give me some direction on that?
After I made these patches, I moved straight into creating the LHZ Vintage Bass Preamp (a clone of the infamous HazLabs bass preamp used on the Spector NS2 and a signature sound in late 80's and 90's rock) and didn't tweak these patches for usability any further.
I would approach it like this... Make a chart of the 4 patches where each row is on of the 4 presets, each column list a unique block in the preset. You'll notice the same blocks and structure appear in all 4 patches. You should be able to create a single patch that has all the blocks, then assign foot pedals and expression pedal parameters so you can toggle blocks and fade between settings.
One of the really powerful things is that you can assign multiple parameter to the Helix expression pedal. For example, a favorite trick I like to do is is assign the pedal to a preamp gain AND an master gain AND a compression threshold AND and EQ band cut/boost... That allows me to have the expression pedal sweep from a glassy clean tone smoothly into a focused high-gain tone.
How did you get it to be so clean on Cln2 patch? +10db on the first volume is hiss city for me. Is your gate cranked?
Great work though! I assume I need to alter some of the settings to play nice with my setup?
I never looked at it (because it is on by default and was transparent enough that I never noticed it) but there is a gate setting on the input of the Helix... Mine is ON with the default -48db threshold with a 750ms decay time. When I turn it off there is hiss, which seems to vary a LOT depending on the guitar I am using.
Weirdly enough, the one guitar with active pickups has WAY more hiss than the guitars with passive pickups.
vERY cOOL Thank YOu
I saw that the release time on the Compressor is around 2 Seconds. Can you help me how you calculated 50ms.
The actual compressor builds do not have R106 in same place as in the Patent.
Thank you !!!
Thank you for the patches. Great Job! Where can I get the IR's?
Just needed to read the patches description... I'm feeling dumb! lol
Hi great can you do a patch for the HX stomp 3.01 it now has 8 blocks, thank you
HX Stomp is limited to only 2 x 1024 or 1 x 2048 IR’s per preset.
Can we use this with Line 6 POD GO?
Pardon my ignorance, but can anybody answer whether or not these IR can be used with other IR loaders or hardware other than line 6?
Where are the IR's? Sorry needed to read, got the IR's Thank You
I have a Yamaha Montage Keyboard. Is it possible to play the rockman guitar samples on the keyboard.
The Rockman Patents says that the delay of the Doubler is 15 to 20 ms. Does the Helix have capability to accept delay of the Chorus as a parameter ?
Depends on the chorus model you use. Some chorus let you specify that and some don't. I just chose a chorus that sounded closest. I believe the chorus in the Rockman use the old analog bucket brigade tech and there isn't an exact match of that in the Helix.
How come the compression settings you have listed on the spreadsheet don't match the ones on the actual helix?
I was trying to balance a faithful recreation while also working within the limitations of the options available in the Helix blocks. The Rockman's compressor was not really linear and I was not able to replicate that exactly with the Helix compressor models, so I tweaked them until it sounded close to my ear.
I'm a little curious why you used IRs for your filtering instead of just a handful of EQs. My understanding is that (aside from IRs needing to be loaded separately from the patch _and_ the patch's IR indexes need to be pointed to where each user was able to store them on their own Helix) IRs are pretty hungry for DSP capability, whereas EQs have some of the lightest DSP budget of all.
My original attempt tried to use multiple EQ stages to do this, but I could never get it closer than "sort of" like the Rockman. The X100 filters were very specific curves that he tuned for a specific sound and the general EQ models just don't have that same level of detail to replicate them. You are correct, the IR's are processor heavy, which limits the amount of other blocks that can be added to these presets. I keep hoping Line 6 will either model the Rockman in the future, or provide a "surgical" EQ module where you can draw a specific curve to apply.
Hi friend, your 4 rockman sounds can't be recorded in HX Stomp. Do you know why? I would love to make these sounds. Rockman is my favorite sound. Thank you for your answer.
Maxa
Unfortunately the limitation is that the IRs are very processor heavy. That's why they are arranged to you BOTH paths on the Helix: there is too much IR processing to be done on a single path. The HX stomp has exactly 1/2 the processing power of the full Helix, so if a patch has to used both paths on the Helix, it will be too much for the HX stomp.
That said, you can try to replace the IR blocks with EQ blocks that follow similar curves. It won't be the same (the Rockman EQ was very specific and the EQ blocks in the Helix don't have that same level of control to exactly replicate them) but might be close enough.
You should try somehow to do the same for the XPR
Ada mp1 next?
HX Edit was unable to import presets in this set due to following errors:
-8701 - Preset translation not supported, dsp block constaint
I get the same error. I got my Helix stomp brand new, updated the Editor and the Stomp - but still get this error. I have no idea what I do wrong - maybe someone can help what to do to get around this problem. I bought the Helix Stomp more or less to be able to have the Rockman X100 sounds again (after some decades without)!
Where’s it at? I want it!
Hello, is it possible to create or adapt a preset like this one on Pod Go?
I’ve created similar sounds (not as close as this though) but it takes up every effect block and uses EQ’s instead of IR’s. Sounds close but very limited working in the constraints of the pod.
@@alexhiggin Is it possible to download these sounds somewhere?
What about his actual "sound machine" I asked Chad and he laughed and said something like... good luck, we have all been trying to figure that out forever... no chance to reverse engineer because only 2 were made and word the second one went with alot of nds/copywright forms.