Eric Klein on Instant Gratification with Helix

by Eric Klein

In 2015 Line 6 launched the first Helix product, Helix Floor. The Helix and HX® family of products now encompasses eight formats and, to-date, numerous color options that liven up pedal boards on stages and in studios around the world.

Ten years ago, Helix launched with version 1.0 firmware, which included 46 amps, 30 cabs, and 76 effect models. Nineteen firmware releases later, now at version 3.80, Helix comes with 103 amps, 41 cabs, and 241 effects. If you jumped into Helix, at the beginning in 2015, you have now added a whopping 57 amps, 11 cabs and 165 effects — all for free! Not to mention the numerous features that have been added that simplify workflows, increase control, and enhance tone creation.

To celebrate our 10 year Helix Anniversary we are sharing some background of what went into making Helix and why we chose some of the features we did. To start with here is a video from Eric Klein on the Amp Button feature and the Favorites feature. If you prefer you can also read the transcript below.

Hi, I’m Eric Klein, Chief Product Design Architect at Line 6. Instant gratification is something that we sort of obsess about here and there’s a few ways to approach it. There’s the familiarity where you can sit down in front of a product and you instantly know how to use it, and there’s also the notion of once I learn a product, I can do something as fast as I can think it.

And unfortunately it’s very difficult to kind of meld those two worlds, so we do something kind of in the middle where there might be a little bit of hump and you read the cheat sheet that comes in the box. And once you understand a couple concepts you’re able to crank out stuff as fast as you can possibly think it.

There are two examples I can think of right off the top of my head. One is the Amp button. So we have this dedicated Amp button that’s there that kind of looks innocuous by itself, but what it stemmed from was originally in HD500X we had dedicated tone stack knobs.

With Helix we realized, well wait a second, there are a bunch of amps that might not have those tone stack knobs. They might be slightly different. The answer was well we can’t have dedicated tone stack knobs, but we need a shortcut because we want the user to be able to access them as fast as possible.

So now if you press the amp button, doesn’t matter what screen you’re in, it instantly jumps to the tone stack knobs of whatever amp you have in your preset. And if you have multiple amps or preamps, pressing it repeatedly will cycle through those amp models.

Favorites is another one. The advantage there is instead of having to slog through this model list—and we have what, 95, 105 amps—if you’ve dialed in your five, ten favorite amps, put them as favorites and then your five favorite distortions, your five favorite delays, your five favorite reverbs dialed in exactly the way you want, assigned to the foot switch you want.

It’s a matter of turning the lower knob, adding your amp, your cab, putting the distortion in front of it, your delay, your reverb. You’ve now instantly created the preset you want. If it’s not the delay you want, if your delays are in that order, you can just turn one dial and you now have your favorite delays without opening the model list at all. And that was really important to us as well.

It’s almost 10 years of Helix. Ten long years. We’ve added a lot. A lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about has been added since 1.0, and we’re always looking to see how can we make things easier? How can we make things smarter? How can we make things more fun?

How do we remove the technology from the process of playing music? And we clearly make pretty complicated, powerful products, but if the technology is just all sort of melted away and you were able to just play and have fun, that’s the most important thing.