With a Line 6 Helix, you can conjure up just about any wild effect that you could ever want. Unless you’re Deftones guitarist Stephen Carpenter – that man sticks with the presets and he’s got a good reason for it!
In an interview with Rock Feed, Carpenter said that outside simply enjoying the factory preset effects, he also likes relying on them in the event he’s gotta go get a new one in the studio or out on the road. Because y’know, if you don’t tweak ’em, then every factory preset is the perfect Carpenter effect.
“My position has been [that] if I’m going to use effects, they’re the effects that are actually inside of the [Line 6] Helix, because it’s already there. And I’m just going to use them as they were built from the factory. Should that device fail me anywhere, at minimum, I can go grab a new one from somewhere, turn it on, and the sounds are just right there.”
Carpenter also touches on the Axe-Fx, saying he’s got full faith in their engineers to come up with some great preset tones as well.
“I actually have an Axe-Fx in my rig, right, but I’m married to it because I used it on the Koi [No Yokan, Deftones’ seventh studio album] record – I use four or five different factory presets on songs. There’s no way I’m gonna achieve those effects with anything else.
“They are what they are. They came out of that machine, designed by those designers. I have to use that piece of equipment to accomplish what I used it for, and with this [upcoming] record, I haven’t used a lot of effects at all this time around.”
