8️⃣ Blocks!!!

Finally. FINALLY. Finally I can say that HX Stomp is indispensable in my life. It already was the moment I laid eyes on it and this new version 3.0 update just made it even more awesome. Here's a post solely dedicated to why the HX Stomp is so important to me, and the different ways I'm using it to spice up my life.

Firstly, bass guitar. On the full Helix Floor, my bass guitar patch just consists of only 8 blocks. Back before 3.0, I could only fit 6 blocks into the Stomp and I had to forego a distortion and a reverb. But now, I can fit the entire patch in, which means that I no longer need to activate the full Floor when I'm on bass.

Then, there is the acoustic guitar patch. Before 3.0, I had to forego the chorus and reverb effects. Chorus sounds superb with some acoustic songs. Now that I can fit all 8 blocks into the Stomp, here is another reason to use HX Stomp instead of the full Floor on acoustic guitar. Although most of the time I only do rhythm tracking on the acoustic.

Here's a funny one. On the Helix Floor, there is XLR input with phantom power option available. This means that microphone-in would be of professional quality. Sadly the HX Stomp doesn't have this feature. I hesitated to include a vocals patch in the Stomp but since I have one extra slot in the first preset page I might as well put this in. The Stomp doubles as an audio interface after all.

Now to the main star of the show. I struggled to fit most of my guitar patches in due to DSP limit in the Stomp. They may have increased the number of blocks but now the total DSP is divided by 8 instead of 6. Most of my dual amp patches can't go in because of that.

The Lincoln Brewster patch by Worship Tutorials uses just 1 amp block and 1 IR block, which is ideal because I can add 2 levels of distortion in it. This patch sounds amazing and will be my go-to patch on the Stomp. It runs everything from clean to dirty very smoothly. This is by far the most amazing thing I can achieve on the Stomp.

As much as I can do a wide range of sounds with the Linc patch, I will still need heavier sounds. Enter the Planetshakers patch also by Worship Tutorials. This patch is unique in a sense that it uses only 1 amp but runs 2 IR blocks. They panned left to an IR and right to the other IR. As the basic tone is already "clean-ish", adding one dirt pedal in front brings the sound to metal industry. Very cool.

Lastly, how can I ever forget my old school favourite patch? This patch is made more for a single-coil. The Deluxe Reverb amp shines the brightest in old school country music. As much as the previous 2 patches covers a lot of grounds, this patch covers the sky too. It is tonally different from the other ones and I'll only use if I'm doing coil-splits on my EC-1000.

With the 8 blocks function, my HX Stomp was turned into a very powerful weapon, and at certain situations more powerful than the Floor. I'm still messing around but I hope to create a few more patches with whacky stuff like pitch and chorus effects. Version 3.0 definitely sparked a new era with home practice and light-weight travel.

Edwin Ang

1st December 2020