My Helix settings for "The Corruption Within"

I'm going to talk about my helix settings that I have used while recording "The Corruption Within". I like to keep my chain fairly simple, but keep lots of room for adding extra weirdness to the chains if I feel it is needed. This chain tends to be my starting point regardless of which guitar I use (if you follow any of these settings you may need to make slight tweaks to better suit your own guitar of choice). The guitar of choice here is my 7 string Harley Benton with it's stock pickups (I will be upgrading them to a shiny set of EMGs soon) which is going direct into a Focusrite Scarlet 18i6 1st Gen interface.

Moving into Helix Native the chain is as follows:

Distortion - Amp - Hi/Low pass EQ - Dual Cab - EQ Ignore the bottom two signal lines here, they are all turned off so that the EQ is the last thing in the chain.

Let's look at the distortion pedal first.

I've gone with the Horizon Drive; there's no real reason for it other than the "extended" gate range. I do love having this rather than the Helix version of a tube screamer; I'm not really sure why, but I can never seem to get a tone I like from that particular pedal. I try to keep the drive itself fairly low as I'm not actually going for distortion, just a little boost.

Next up is the Amp, I've gone with the Line 6 Badonk, why the Badonk? Because it's a funny word (honestly that's the main reason I use it). The drive level changes depending on if i need clean etc, but I find around 5-6 to be the sweet spot for what I like. I keep the bass low so that we don't start to muddy things up too much in the mix and I push the mids, Treble and presence to around 6 or 7, and the master tweaked to taste - just to keep the levels balanced (change it for clean/lead/rhythm etc). The only other setting I touch on the Amp section is the "sag", I don't really understand what it does or what its for but I much prefer how it sounds when I pull it down or set it to zero.

The first EQ is set between the amp and the cab, I find a low cut at around 75-80hz, and a high cut around 13-14Khz tidies up the frequencies going into the cab and just gives a nicer sound.

For my cab selection, I went for a Dual cab set up, and blended a 4x12 Cali V30 (I believe the helix version of a Mesa Cab), with a 57 Dynamic mic with no other settings changed.

For the 2nd Cab, I went for the 4x12 Uber T75. I felt it blended with the Cali perfectly when using an 84 Ribbon, so I pulled the volume/mix back a little on this one as I only wanted it to help accent the Cali v30 cab. The mix changed on each song depending on what other instruments I had in the song.

Finally I placed a parametric EQ, I only used this for one cut, as I found my guitar produced quite a horrible flubby sound. This turned out to be at almost exactly 130Hz, using the highest Q setting I could. I had to pull this frequency almost fully out of the tone; as that was causing the flubby sound, luckily the High Q only effects a tight band so we lose the flub without killing the tone.

Check out how these settings sound in a mix by listening to this playlist!