HX Stomp audio interface routing

GP for Guitar and Bass Players
1

Hi!
Bass player here.
I’ve been a GP user for a while now, started with an RME interface, audio patchbay, midi foot controller, fader controller etc, at the same time I was using a small pedalboard whenever I was doing gigs or rehersals requiring a basic setup (ie finding the PC/interface/controller situation too cumbersome to bring along)

I little while down this road I added a Helix stomp to the mix on my pedalboard. Then it struck me that I could have a setup combining them, and tried to sort out a setup of the pedalboard into the PC and out into either a bass amp or in ear/monitor.
After some troubleshooting of some noise issues (computer USB jittery sounds that were not present using only the pedalboard obviously) I had a great doooooh moment. The HX stomp is also an audio interface with a set of ASIO drivers. If only I had thought of this before. This looks like an excellent middle ground, albeit with less flexibility in inputs/outputs of vaious instruments and monitormixes.

I am having trouble wrapping my brain around the audiointerface ins/outs and how to best setup GP with HX as the audio interface.

I normally have patches involving 3 main type of rackspaces:

  1. Only the pedalboard, so no USB roundtrip, all sounds coming from the pedalboard. But controlling midi in the HX from within the rackspace in GP, turning effect blocks on/off, changing settings with CC controls etc

  2. Effects from VST plugins in parallell with the pedalboard. Like reverbs, delays and other suitable parallell efx. Giving me zero latency of my direct sound.

  3. Effects from VST plugins in serial, monitoring then only the output from GP, but INCLUDING andy HX stomp efx blocks. So signal flow would be pedalboard wet into GP with no dry bass sound, only whatever dry sound is present in the GP mix.

Can someone walk me through a best practise to achieve this? Would I be able to setup a rackspace with these three main signal flows with some sort of local rackspace control of with routing to use, or should I scrap the idea of using the global rackspace for this?

Any pointers, ideas, input most welcome, sorry about the rather lengthy post.

Frode

2

Does the HX Stomp act like a proper interface? For example, you can use the analog outs to go to FOH in all of the scenarios you’ve listed?

3

Yes, or so I’m hoping.
Trying to wrap my head around it though, as I want to keep hearing my “dry” uncomputerized-and-un-latencied signal in scenario 1 & 2 and live with the latency, but then not hear any uncomputerized signal in scenario 3. So far it seams I have to map a controller to the HX stomps output control and mute this when in scenario 3, still searching for the most efficiant way to balance between dry latency free signal and the computerized signal in scenario 2, will get there eventually. :slight_smile: