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Reference
Reference

Clones

The Stadium can capture your own amps. Here is what that means in practice — and the mono rule that catches everybody.

Line 6 call it PROXY cloning, and it arrived in Helix Stadium firmware 1.3. It is the Stadium’s answer to the capture features on competing devices: you play a test signal through a real amp, the Stadium listens, and you get a block that behaves like that amp at those settings.

Once made, a Clone behaves much like any other Amp, Preamp or Distortion block. You can set your own defaults for it and save one with your settings as a Favorite. No earlier Helix can do any of this.

What it captures

Any physical amplifier, preamp, amp-and-cab combination, or distortion pedal, at whatever settings it is on when you capture it.

How many per preset

Four, and no more than two on either path.

What one costs

About the same processing as a full Agoura amp model. Clones are not a cheap block.

Mono or stereo

Mono, always. Any stereo block placed before a Clone gets summed to mono.

Which firmware

1.3 and later. Earlier Stadium firmware has no cloning at all.

The one that catches people

Every Clone is mono

This is not a setting you can change. If you put a stereo chorus, a stereo delay or a stereo reverb before a Clone block, its output gets summed to mono at the Clone and the stereo image is gone — silently, with nothing on screen to tell you.

Watch out

Put your stereo effects after the Clone. If you need something in front of the amp, keep it mono — which, in front of an amp, is what you wanted anyway.

Budgeting

Two clones on one path is a full path

Because a Clone costs roughly what an Agoura amp costs, two of them plus effects will exhaust the processing available to Path 1. Line 6 say so directly. The answer is not to economise — it is to remember that Path 2 is sitting there empty, with its own chip.

Blocks, paths and DSP →