While I was sceptical I was also very intrigued. So I started to look into options and right about that time I heard, that Helix Native is coming. I knew that the time has come for me to ditch the tubes. It felt so responsive, so deep, so diverse, so limitless. I do not want to convince anyone here, or say that this will be true for other people, but for my ears, the helix is the first Modeller I run into the PA and immediately fell in love with. My problem so far was, that I never liked to tone of going direct to PA from a Modeller. Anything else will always somehow compromise the vision of dialling in totally different amps, cabs and microphones.

Let's just say, I believe now that the true 'ultimate' setup with Amp Modeling can only be going out directly to a PA. I could go on a long time to try to explain my current understanding of what was wrong, but this would be a different post. I somehow got used to it over the years, but there was always this itch in the back of my head leaving me slightly unsatisfied. and still something always felt just a tiny bit off when I played. I don't know whether my expectations just grew over time or whether I was not tuning in the patches correctly but I have spent hours and hours reading forum entries, tutorials, the MeAmBobbo PodHD Guide (what an awesome guide!), etc. Unfortunately, this was somehow the setup I was the least happy with tone-wise. When POD HD came out, I was intrigued by the solution of running it into the Line6 DT25 hybrid amp because it seemed the perfect combo of modeled pre-amps and tube power amp with adapting analogue circuitry. I pretty much stuck to this solution until and including PODX3Live. There I was very happy with the tone, even though there was always a Fender colour in it. For a very long time I was not happy with the sound of the direct PA solution and so I settled with running my PODs into Fender Amps. My L6 amp modeling journey has started around 2000 with POD2.0 and I have had numerous setups over time, going through tube amps and also trying direct into PA. You can skip this and directly check out my setup below, if you are not interested :) Some background because some people might wonder why I am even doing this (and not just buy a Helix hardware unit for example).

Being so happy is in fact one of the main reasons why I am writing this, because maybe it makes some of you happy as well :) A quick spoiler: While I am not in any way claiming that my solution is the perfect one or my decisions were particularly smart (and I am happy for any kind of input and feedback) I am absolutely loving what I have achieved so far.

I will first quickly say a few words about why I decided to try to make this work and then present my (current) setup. This is my first post in this forum and the reason I wrote it, is because firstly I wanted to share my experiences with this new adventure and secondly maybe get in touch with other people who are thinking about going down the same road. I wanted to share with you my my setup for using Helix Native as a live rig (band practice and gigging).

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