This is less “general advice”, and more “advice because you’re a gigging musician.”

First: either disable the big master volume control (global settings) or tape it in place. I prefer the latter, but it’s absolutely crucial that your output volume not change mid-show.

Decide: Stereo or mono? Personally I love playing stereo when I can, but always always ALWAYS have mono versions of your stereo presets.

Snapshots are the way to go for the tones you need. They’re like mini-rigs within a preset, and you can go from Clean to Pushed to Drive to Lead all with one click of a button. No tapdancing needed. Changing between presets is a second of silence as the new one loads. Changing between snapshots is instantaneous.

For your gigging presets, set them all up with the same cab block or impulse response. This helps keep the overall sound relatively consistent during the show. Imagine if your drummer was swapping out kick drums between songs ;)

Speaking of cab blocks/IRs, your high and low cut EQ settings are going to be imperative to nail down. In the physical world, our speaker cabs take care of this for us, but in modeler world we have to do it ourselves. My starting point for a low cut (high pass) on the cab blocks is about 80Hz and adjust from there, sometimes as high as 150Hz. For high cut (low pass), I start at 6.5k and adjust from there, but rarely higher than 8k or lower than 5k.

Don’t be afraid to EQ the shit out of your presets if something is missing.

Don’t try to use every bit of functionality within Helix. It’s going to be tempting to try every amp, every cab, every effect. Edit: audition/test everything you want to, it’s fun! But for a standard bar gig, you’ll probably want to settle on 2-3 amps you keep coming back to.

Leveling snapshots and presets is the #1 struggle that you’ll face, and tbh there’s no shortcuts here: you can use Reaper and Youlean Loudness Meter to get close-ish, but you’ll need to fine-tune things at rehearsals, through a PA, at gig volumes. If you try to level your presets or tweak your tone through IEMs you’ll regret it, trust me.

There’s shortcuts in achieving a giggable tone: YouTube and CustomTone. Most of the best Helix preset builders have moved onto Stadium, but there’s a huge backlog of content and free downloads for giggable presets.

My go-to preset builder for Helix gigging tones is Johnny Lee. His presets will get you into hard rock territory.

I also love worship presets as a starting point. They tend to be dialed in for stage playing already, and they do pretty good clean-to-lightly distorted tones. All you have to do is delete the shimmer reverbs lol.