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.
About six months ago I reviewed the Helix Stadium XL and came away cautiously optimistic. Great hardware, better amps, and a pile of missing features and first-gen bugs. Since then I’ve actually gigged the thing. Christmas shows, Sunday services most weeks, a couple of conference events, somewhere north of 30 shows all up. So this is the honest catch-up, and it starts with the time it nearly gave me a heart attack mid-song.
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.
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.
With Christmas approaching and work stopping for the year, naturally with more free time what does a developer with a brand new Helix Stadium XL do when they see the editor communicates over WiFi for editing? You go digging into how it works and here’s what I’ve discovered. I really should be drinking eggnog and doing nothing, but as other devs know it’s hard to stop sometimes, haha. I like to keep busy.
I owned the original Helix Floor and loved it. That thing could conjure tones that made my ears 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.