Nathan Cross

A body IR and a few EQ cuts fix different halves of the piezo problem. Here is what each one can and cannot do, the exact frequencies to cut, and when spending an IR block is worth it.

Build the Holy Forever (Chris Tomlin) electric tone on the Helix — a bright AC30 chime, a 625 ms dotted-eighth delay at 72 BPM, and a four-snapshot worship layout that keeps the anthem moving.

One Helix preset, four snapshots — Clean, Pad, Drive, and Lead — mapped to the moments of a worship set, with block states, settings, and the wiring order that makes the changes seamless.

Build the Goodness of God (Bethel) electric tone on the Helix — a Greenback-voiced AC30, a dark dotted-eighth delay, a big shimmer-plate wash, and a verse-to-bridge snapshot layout.

A directional mic's most useful feature on a loud stage isn't where it hears — it's where it doesn't. Here's the null angle for each polar pattern and how to point it at the source you most need gone.

Build the Phil Wickham anthem-worship guitar sound on the Helix — bright clean chime, a cutting anthem lead, and dotted-eighth delays with controlled reverb, with exact blocks and snapshots.

Build Lincoln Brewster's bright, mid-forward Strat-into-Plexi worship lead tone on the Helix — exact amp model, EQ shape, drive stack, and snapshot layout for cutting rock-worship leads.

Build Nigel Hendroff's Hillsong worship guitar tone on the Helix — the Vox AC15/AC30 chime, always-on preamp boost, dotted-eighth delay, and huge ambient reverb, with exact block names and snapshots.

Build the Elevation Worship guitar sound on the Helix — layered Vox tones, the chorus shimmer behind 'Praise', dotted-eighth delays, and ambient reverb, with exact blocks and snapshots.

Build the Bethel Music ambient, pad-forward worship guitar tone on the Helix — a clean AC30 base, octave-up shimmer, stacked delays, and huge swell reverb, with exact blocks and snapshots.

No keys player this Sunday? Here's how to hold a chord and play over the top of it on guitar — freeze pedals, the looper-as-pad trick, and infinite reverb — so the bed under the band never disappears.

Shimmer reverb stacks an octave into a long reverb tail. Here's how to set the pitch, decay, and mix so it sits under the song like a pad instead of swallowing the chord.

A ducking reverb pulls its tail down while you play and lets it bloom in the gaps. Here's what threshold, depth, and release do — and how to set it on a modeler.

Sync reverb predelay to the song's tempo and the reverb breathes with the groove instead of smearing it. The BPM math, a starting chart, and how to set decay so the tail clears.

How to send one guitar to a stage amp, the front-of-house DI, and a tuner at once without level loss or ground-loop hum — the buffered-splitter topology and where to lift the ground.

An active buffered splitter with a ground lift clears most stage hum. Here is when only a transformer breaks the loop — and what the phase switch is actually for.

Conditioners solve AC-line problems. Isolated supplies solve pedal-power problems. They do not overlap. When you need both, when you need one, and the $400 mistake most touring rigs make.

Most acoustic-into-FOH problems are an impedance mismatch, not a bad pickup. We compare four DI boxes that actually love a passive piezo and explain why one spec matters more than the rest.

When the BigSky is too big for the board, the Slö and the BlueSky are the two reverbs worship guitarists reach for. Here's how to choose between them.

Four passive transformer DIs at four price points. We measured the noise floor, the frequency response, and what each one actually does for a guitar rig on stage and in the studio.

Balanced power solves the noise problem standard conditioners can't touch. Here is what it actually does, when a touring guitar rig needs it, and how the Furman and Equi=Tech compare on the floor.

Three power-conditioning products at three price tiers, and which one actually solves stage hum. The honest cost-benefit on isolation transformers, protection-only conditioners, and the $100 Hum X.

Your rig sounds clean at home but hums on stage. The cause is almost always a ground loop between the amp and the venue, not a pedal failure. Here is how to diagnose it safely.

Most pedalboard power supply problems aren't a power problem. They're an isolation problem, a current problem, or a daisy chain problem. Here is how to diagnose what's actually causing the hum or the dropout, and what to do before spending $300 on a bigger supply.

Running a tube amp silently into your interface requires a reactive load, a speaker simulation, and a specific signal flow. Here is the exact setup, from the amp's speaker output to a recorded track in your DAW, with the settings that make it sound like the amp is actually in the room.

A resistive attenuator reduces your amp's output. A reactive load box simulates a speaker. They're not the same thing, and which one you need depends on how much you're reducing and what you're doing with the signal afterward. Here's the decision framework.

Most guitarists use a volume pedal as a swell tool or an emergency kill switch. Running it always-on at partial position (with deliberate movement across a service or set) is the more useful technique, and it requires a different setup to work properly.

The reverb you set in your bedroom doesn't behave the same way in a reflective church sanctuary. Here's how to calibrate your reverb settings for the room you're actually playing in.

The Cut knob is the AC30's most misunderstood control. It's not a tone knob. It works backwards from every other amp you've used. Here's what it actually does and how to set it.

The formula for syncing delay to tempo is simple. The reference table below covers every BPM from 60 to 180 with values for quarter note, dotted eighth, and eighth note delays.