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 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.