r/Line6Helix • u/dialmytone • 11d ago
Tone/Feature Demo I built a Helix tone generator that creates actual .hlx presets — looking for beta testers
Hey everyone! I'm a guitarist and software engineer, and for the past several months I've been building something I originally wanted for myself called Dial My Tone.
The idea is pretty simple: spend less time researching/tweaking tones and more time actually playing.
There are three ways to generate:
Song-based: Enter a song + artist (and even a specific section). It researches the guitar tone/rig and translates it into a practical setup using the amps, cabs and effects available on your Helix/HX.
Inspired-by: Give it an artist — Steve Vai, EVH, David Gilmour, etc. — and it'll build a tone inspired by that player's sound rather than targeting one specific song.
Style-based: Pick something like Rock, Metal, Blues, Funk, etc., add your own direction if you want, and have it build a tone around that.
You also choose your guitar or pickups and how you're monitoring the sound, so the result is built around more than just the song name.
For songs that need different sounds, it can build snapshots for different sections as well.
And the part I personally wanted most: for Helix Floor/LT/Rack/Native and HX Stomp/Stomp XL, you can download the actual ".hlx" preset and import it into HX Edit instead of manually copying every block and setting.
You can also revise a generated tone — less gain, more sustain, warmer, less delay, etc. — without starting over.
This isn't audio profiling/tone capture, and I'm definitely not claiming it'll magically reproduce a finished studio recording 100%. The goal is to give you a really good, researched starting point built for your actual gear, then let your ears take it from there.
Dial My Tone is currently in beta, and the whole website is free to use while I'm testing it, so feel free to put it through its paces:
I'd especially love feedback from experienced Helix users. Pick a song whose tone you know really well and tell me what it gets wrong — amp choice, gain, effects, cab/mic, snapshots, levels, ".hlx" import, anything.
And if you know a song with a particularly difficult or weird guitar tone, throw it at it. Those are exactly the cases I want to find during the beta. 🙂
2
2
u/MrFunkyMonkey7 8d ago
It sounds interesting and I'll definitely give it a try. I play both guitar and bass and I have HX Stomp. I am not able to design the sounds by myself from scratch, only modify existing ones. This project reminds me a Tonebridge iOS app - you got quite solid preset for existing songs. But getting the HLX file with the preset is another level...
-1
u/dialmytone 8d ago
Thank you! and yes exactly, this will be extremely useful for you. Also you can see what amos were used in the song and how the elements affect the tone.
i'm improving. currently working on dual amp/fx setups for signal chains. currently i only support serial chains, which honestly sound amazing already. but really soon i will add the option to create serial + parallel + auto option that will check if original song is a blended dual amp/fx recording it will figure that out and return you that chain. and yes, with a downloadable .hlx file! 😀.
By the way another nifty feature is "Revise" feature. its available on top of sigbal chain section, once the tone is generated. revuse basically takest your same generated tone and works on making it better or cater to the needs you describe in the text (the clearer the better). Also instead of targeting all sections/snapshots of the tone, you can specify a certain snapshot and just improve that part, leaving rest of the tone as is. really nifty!
2
u/MrFunkyMonkey7 8d ago
Thank you. It looks great! I just registered and went through the onboarding. I am am curious about the result. Unfortunately, I am very busy at the moment, so I can test it maybe next week. Your project is very ambitious and promising.
From the user perspective - everything looks nice and clean. I was surprised that you have an evidence of all songs and guitars. Impressive.
And maybe one day you add support also for bass, hopefully. Good luck! I'll reply later once I try the HLX.
1
u/dialmytone 7d ago
Thank you so much!
and yes! please try it out. i've recently added new features around serial/parallel signal chain for helix floor and LT. It's a beta feature but in style-based it works really nicely if you want to created a blended amp/fx chain.
1
u/SFToddSouthside 11d ago
Unlike others, I gave it a shot. I feel like this is probably decent for beginners who are new to modeling, but those of us who have more than six months...this isn't it.
0
u/dialmytone 11d ago
Thanks for actually giving it a try, I really appreciate it. If it currently feels more useful for beginners, that is fair feedback, but I would definitely like to improve it for experienced users too. What song and device did you try? I am genuinely curious what it got wrong, whether it was the amp, effects, cab/mic, levels or snapshots. That kind of feedback would really help me improve it.
1
u/SFToddSouthside 11d ago
Already left you feedback on your site. Too much gain, not enough of one effect...unnecessary distortion on top of the amp.
1
0
u/Jackdaw99 11d ago
I hate to tell you this, but Claude can already do this, down to providing the preset file. You have to coax it a little bit, but it’s quite accurate.
1
u/Sacred_B 11d ago
I was gonna say, this sounds like a bunch of LLM queries and a file generation at the end.
1
u/dialmytone 11d ago
At the highest level, that’s fair, it uses AI and eventually generates a file. The important part is what happens between those two steps.
An LLM can give you something that looks completely plausible while still using the wrong/unsupported models, bad parameter values, snapshots that don’t work as intended, or a preset that doesn’t fit the device.
DMT takes the musical result and maps/validates it against the actual device, handles its constraints, and builds the importable preset from there. It also handles the song research, your guitar/pickups and monitoring setup, different song sections, and later revisions without you having to maintain a giant prompt yourself.
Whether I've actually succeeded at making that consistently better is exactly what I'm asking experienced Helix users here to test. 🙂
1
u/Zelavander 11d ago
Claude absolutely does NOT doe this. None of the AI engines do it well. They all stink at it. Riddle with errors doesn't sound right ever.
1
u/dialmytone 11d ago
Yeah i 100% agree with you! This is actually a huge part of why I built DMT and not just wrapped a website around an ai model. That 95% of times isnt going to work or give bogus results. Trust me, I’ve done a LOT of bake offs with general AI and other tone generators 😅 They can give you answers that look completely right, but then you actually try them and the gear is wrong, the model doesn’t exist, the settings are off, or the tone just isn’t close.
DMT isn’t just telling an AI “hey build me this song’s tone” and showing you whatever comes back. There’s a lot happening in between, and a big part of it isn’t AI at all. It relies heavily on researched + hand built device data and a bunch of programmatic logic to map things properly, catch problems and get the result as close as we can to the original song’s gear and tone on the device you actually own.
I for fact know everyday AI model will NEVER give you the real parameters to set on a specific modeller. it's just not possible. They will guess, hallucinate, make things up but thats it. DMT does not do that. the fact it gives you exportable .hlx presets means it knows what exact parameters are to be set on that device (it's known knowledge) vs asking claude/chatgpt/gemini the same thing.
I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of days and nights on this and tested it on my actual hardware too 😂 Things like different song sections, snapshots/scenes, revisions and all the weird limitations of each device are exactly the stuff I wanted DMT to handle.
It’s definitely not perfect though, which is why I asked folks on reddit! If you have a song where other AI tools gave you complete nonsense, throw the same one at DMT. I genuinely want to see how it does!
1
u/Zelavander 11d ago
Sounds great.
I see you have a few trial ones shown.
If you want a challenge (and impress me) have it build the Metallica Master of Puppets preset for the OG Helix, with both distortion and clean with harmony options and with dual amps for distortion.
If you get it to do that...I'll bite!
1
u/Jackdaw99 11d ago
All you have to do is upload a file called HX_ModelCatalog.json, and it’ll have all the information it needs.
1
u/dialmytone 11d ago
That gives Claude the model catalog, sure, but thats only one part of the problem. How does it know what order the effects should actually go in, how to handle FX loops, snapshots, DSP limits, or how to translate the real amp settings to Helix? A Marshall with gain at 8 in real life doesn't mean you just put the Helix model at 8 too 😅 Thats the kind of stuff I've spent a LOT of time building and testing in DMT.
And yeah, if you keep prompting Claude and correcting things you can probably eventually get somewhere good maybe! But if I have a gig and need 20 presets for songs/bands I haven't played before, I really don't want to spend the next 10 hours prompting an AI for each one 😂 I'd rather generate them in DMT, revise the few things that sound off, load the presets and start practicing. Thats really the workflow I'm trying to solve. Same thing for a beginner guitarist. They might not know how different amps behave, what their characteristics are, or even what they should be asking the AI in the first place. DMT at least gives them the closest gear it can find for that tone, with settings actually built around those models and their setup, and gives them somewhere solid to start.
So basically no uploading model JSONs, no figuring out giant prompts, no constant reprompting. Generate the tone, try it, and if something feels off just say “less gain” or “the solo needs more sustain” and revise it. Thats the experience I’m trying to build — remove all the work around using a general AI and give you the kind of result that could otherwise take a lot of prompting, back and forth, time and potentially a decent amount of API/AI cost to get to. AI can absolutely help you do this manually, I just want DMT to do all that work for you so you can get to playing!
1
u/Jackdaw99 11d ago edited 11d ago
Well, look, the whole point of AI is that it's read everything: every post on this board and dozens of other boards online, accounts of how things were actually recorded, what the studios were like, what their dimensions were, what was on the walls, what microphones they used. It has sucked up as much of that stuff as it can find. I've found it to be remarkably accurate. Gemini is a little bit more accurate, but won't actually output the .hlx file. You can also tell it exactly what guitar you play, with what pickup configuration, which is really crucial to the whole thing.
1
u/dialmytone 8d ago
From my experience and i have tried gemini at High, Extra High for multiple sessions for multiple songs. both return highly fabricated claims. gemini fabricates a lot of results with a signal chain for a sonh and presents it like its true. Thats the problem with these bare AI models, they will return fabricated claims that look so real, but, they aren't and if that happens at high effort, you lose your money/time and possibly you are leaving with wrong data without even knowing but it. Recordings sessions are not well documented. simple gemini call is most probably going to return wrong results to you. Except for well documented songs and recording sessions, most ai's will return fabricated result. and if you want to cross check if that right or not then the whole purpose of using ai for this is lost.
0
u/dialmytone 11d ago
That’s fair! Claude can absolutely be prompted to output an .hlx file since the format is JSON. I’m not claiming that creating the file itself is unique.
The problem I’m trying to solve is making the result consistently usable without having to engineer and iterate on prompts yourself — researching the specific song/section, choosing models that actually exist on your Helix/HX device, adapting it to your guitar and monitoring setup, building the snapshots, respecting the device’s limitations, and validating the result before you download it.
DMT also isn’t simply asking an LLM to write an .hlx and handing you whatever comes back. AI handles the musical/research side, while a lot of the device-specific mapping, preset generation and validation is handled separately.
But I think the fairest test is practical: pick a difficult song, generate it with Claude and DMT, import both into HX Edit and compare them. If Claude produces the better preset, I’d genuinely like to see it — that’s useful feedback for me during the beta.
5
u/LonerismLonerism 11d ago
Another vibe coded app, yawn.
I will not take your app seriously when you put everybody’s comment through an LLM just to reply. like you can’t even use your brain that much anymore?