I recently ran into a fun little problem with the Helix Stadium XL and Streamlabs Desktop. And by fun, I mean the kind of problem where you spend a stupid amount of time wondering why the thing you can hear perfectly fine in your headphones sounds completely wrong in the recording.
The Stadium was connected to my Mac over USB-C. Streamlabs could see it. The audio meters were moving. I hit record, played a bit, listened back, and instead of hearing my processed Helix tone, I got the dry DI.
For fifteen years I played guitar in my bedroom. Noodling. Learning the opening riff of songs and never finishing them. Playing the same power chords I learned in 2005. I owned nice gear. I watched YouTube tutorials. I told people I played guitar, which was technically true in the same way someone who owns running shoes is technically a runner.
Then I started playing at church and everything changed.
In six months I learned more than the previous fifteen years combined. Not because church music is particularly complex (it is not) but because I finally had something I never had before: a reason to actually get better.
The guitar world has spent the last few years treating capture tech like a holy war. One camp wants modelling. One camp wants captures. One camp wants to shout AI a few more times and hope that somehow counts as innovation. It is all getting a bit silly.
That is why Helix Stadium has my attention right now. Not because Proxy is already out in the wild and flattening everything in its path. It is not. As of March 7, 2026, the latest public Helix Stadium firmware notes Line 6 has posted are still 1.2.1, and Proxy is still preview territory. The Stadium Floor itself only started shipping in mid-February, so plenty of people are still in the honeymoon phase with the hardware before any of the capture stuff even enters the picture. But the strategy around Proxy looks smarter than the usual race to see who can scream capture the loudest.
I have been playing guitar for twenty years. I am not bad. I learned plenty in those two decades. I can play songs. I know my chords. My power chords are tight. I have decent timing and I can hold my own in most situations.
The catch is that I spent those twenty years playing metal and hardcore. Downtuned riffs. Chugging palm mutes. The occasional breakdown where everyone in the room loses their minds. I got very good at a very specific type of guitar playing. The kind where subtlety goes to die and the only dynamic is loud versus louder.
Neural DSP have dropped a teaser image and the guitar community is losing its collective mind. The silhouette shows an amp head with a wide, low profile and a centred leather strap handle sitting on top of a matching cabinet. No visible top vents. No boxy rack ears. No angled sides. If you know amps, you know what that shape is. It’s a Two Rock.
Ever since John Mayer was spotted playing through a Quad Cortex at Coachella back in April, speculation about a Neural DSP collaboration has been bubbling away in forums and comment sections. Mayer surprised everyone when he joined Zedd on stage and instead of wheeling out his usual Dumble-loaded rig, he plugged into Neural’s flagship modeller. The tones were reportedly spot on, and that kicked off months of “what if” conversations.
I owned the original Helix Floor and loved it. That thing could conjure tones that made my ears genuinely happy. The amp models were solid, the effects library was extensive, and the workflow made sense once you wrapped your head around it. But there was always this nagging limitation that drove me absolutely nuts: DSP. The Helix Floor is incredibly DSP limited, and if you’re someone like me who loves pitch effects, you learned to compromise pretty quickly.
I’ve been using automatic guitar tuners for years now. The concept is simple: you place the device on a tuning peg, pluck the string, and the motorised tuner detects the pitch through vibration and rotates the peg until you’re in tune. No pedals, no cables, no staring at a screen while you turn the peg yourself. It should be the fastest way to tune a guitar, especially when you’re constantly switching between tunings.
If you’re like me, when you play a song in different tunings (especially ridiculously low tunings), you can’t always go as low as you can because of string gauge or scale limitations. I play a lot of low-tuned stuff, especially thall, and those tunings are crazy.
Whenever I tune down, sometimes I’ll have a guitar that is, say, in Drop D or Drop C tuning. Instead of messing with my intonation, I’ll use a pitch shifter to tune down instead. Pitch shifters like the Digitech Drop (an awesome polyphonic drop pedal) allow you to go down a whole octave.
I saw my favourite band, Thrice, recently at their Brisbane show, and unlike other Australian tours, they did a VIP thing where you could pay extra to meet the band, a Q&A, and a couple of songs.
Naturally, one of the questions that came up at the Q&A (presumably at all of their VIP meet and greets) is the subject of Horizons/West, the long-awaited sister record to Horizons/East, released in 2021.
Neural DSP are hosting one heck of a Black Friday (like years prior) where all of their plugins are 50% off. There is a lot of overlap between their Archetype plugins especially, so what should you buy if you can’t afford them all?
TL;DR buy the Gojira, Henson and Fortin Cali plugins (if you can afford all of them). Can only afford one? The Fortin Cali is a solid purchase.