Helix Stadium Native is on the way. Kurt Ballou from Converge mentioned it on the Garza Podcast while walking through how he uses the Stadium, and you can hear it around the 58 minute mark.
By the sound of it he’s been using it already, because he talked about shifting tones between his touring floor unit and the Native plugin inside Pro Tools at his studio. The desktop editor matches the plugin, so he isn’t rebuilding patches from scratch every time he moves between stage and studio.
The part that got my attention was the timing. He said he’d been told the Native version was expected to land about a month after they recorded the episode. The episode only went up today, and podcasts like this usually sit in the can for a few weeks before release, so his month-after estimate lands somewhere around June. That’s not a vague someday on a roadmap. It sounds imminent.
The obvious question is whether it’ll be full parity with the hardware, and honestly I think that’s close to a given. Helix Native has always been the complete plugin version of the original Helix, every amp and effect sitting in a window on your computer. There’s no reason to think Line 6 would suddenly do it differently this time. We won’t know for certain until release, but I’d put money on the core being all there.
The bit I’m curious about is the new stuff. The Stadium does things the old Helix never could, and the big one is Proxy, the amp and cab capturing feature. Will Proxy even be in Native? And if it is, will it let you create captures, or only load ones you made on the hardware? Capturing means running real signal through a real amp, which is a hardware job, so I wouldn’t be shocked if making clones stays a Stadium-only thing and the plugin just plays back what the box recorded.
There’s also the DSP angle. On the hardware I keep bumping into the ceiling once a couple of Proxy clones are in the chain. A computer CPU doesn’t have that limit in the same way, so Native could end up the better place to run a stack of clones, even if you still need the box to make them. Funny result for the company that also wants to sell you the box.
What’s a bit odd is the order of all this. We’ve been waiting ages for an official mobile editor for the Stadium, the kind of thing you’d expect a WiFi unit to ship with, and instead the next big release is a desktop plugin. I get why. Native is a proven product line and probably the easier win. But I can see plenty of Stadium owners being miffed that the phone and tablet app people keep asking for keeps slipping while a plugin jumps the queue. It’s very possibly different teams on different jobs, so I won’t read too much into the priorities. The optics are still a little funny.
The other thing I’m hoping for is some love on the price for people who already own a Stadium. A discount would be the decent move, and free would be even better, though I’m not holding my breath on that one. Plenty of us bought in early and rode out the bugs and the missing features while Line 6 sorted them out. Tossing early adopters a Native licence for sticking around through all that would be a nice way to say thanks. I doubt it’ll happen, but I can dream.
None of the Proxy stuff is confirmed, obviously. Line 6 hasn’t even officially announced Native exists, let alone said anything about how it handles captures. The only word we’ve got is one offhand mention from an artist who’s been using it.
That’s enough to go on though. It’s coming and it’s close. I’ll grab it the day it drops and see how much of the Stadium made it across.