I would bet specifically there will be new custom guitar model packs and artist signature tones that will only be available to JTV and Vax II or later owners

Nope - I don't really seeing this as a feature like the offer on some Spider model amps.

I shouldn't have used the word "signature" here, I was thinking of something more like the factory tones in the Vetta II, the tones named "Back in black", "You Really Got Me" the Pink Floyd, Stevie Ray, Carlos Santana etc. tones that are base on the artist's sound but not actually artist created and endorsed as I think the Spider tones are.

For example, a Basswood Strat body model (at least this is what I recall to be correct, correct me if it is wrong) with custom pickup #1984 (a new Vax model based on Seymour EVH), bridge model based on original Floyd Rose (anyone who has ever swapped a Floyd into a strat is probably familiar with the tonal difference), pickup wired direct to volume and no tone control/capacitor = $25,000 Fender "Frankie" patch. Or, Korina Ibanez Explorer with a big chunk of wood cut out of the butt = Women and Children First "Shark" guitar. And the list goes on... by just including a bunch of custom pickup models in an SG body model we get Angus/Iommi ets "signature" models without actually needing the artist's permission, just name the model after one of the artist's songs like on the Vetta.

Maybe you are right and this will never happen, I don't have much riding on it but seems like a cool idea regardless.

 

I would bet your warranty will be a year and you will still not be able to get replacements parts and will have to leave your guitar at the service center for months if anything goes wrong.

I would bet in 10 years there will be no more electronic replacement boards etc. available from Line6 or anyone for JTV. I base this on the knowledge that 8 years after it's introduction there are no electronic replacement parts available for Vax 500 (okay, you can still get the 1/4" jack and the 5 way switch, but no motherboards, ribbon cables etc are left anywhere in the world according to the very cool and helpful person I talked to at Line6 customer service a few weeks ago.

Does anyone actually read what I write?  Sorry bro, but I did cover this in my reply to the original posting.

I did read what you wrote, anything I am writing here that you wrote already means we are in agreement and anything that disagrees with you means we have differing opinions/experiences/information. Your question is vague so I am not sure but I think you mean "buy extra guitars to use as spare parts" was covered and as ridiculous and wasteful as this seems to me I have to say I agree with you on this and am backing you up 100% .

On the other hand if you mean you covered this by saying you have not had any problems I would say a second thing to consider is many other people have had problems getting Variaxes repaired.

The service center where I live is located in a music store and they will not work on your Variax unless 1. you bought it in THAT store and 2. it is still under warranty.

I recently called the next nearest service center to ask about a repair and they told me they would call me back. That was 4 weeks ago, and I am still waiting for their call.

Now, if you are saying you can do the repairs yourself should the need arise I am impressed... how do you know which part is bad when your Variax dies? Sure, step one is try reflashing, but what do you do when reflashing multiple times fails to fix the problem? Just start pulling out parts and replacing them with bits from your good donor guitar until the thing starts working again? You said you didn't have the skills to perform a transplant, but if you can take the guts out of a Variax and put them int a different Variax you are in essence doing a transplant, albeit a Variax to Variax transplant... and if you have to buy a complete Variax for the internals to repair your old Variax, why wouldn't you just scrap or sell the old broken Variax and play the one that was working perfectly instead? If both of your 700s die are you really going to buy 2 new 700s, pull the guts out, and put the parts into your old guitars? Seems like a bunch of unnecessary work when you could just play the new guitars instead...

I dearly wish everyone would just stop talking about transplants of Vaxtronics into whatever other guitars.  The majority of the world guitar playing population - including myself do not swap guitar parts around except for tuners, straplocks of some kind, pick-ups an perhaps different brand or color hardware on the outside of the guitar.

So you "only" swap out all the parts except for the wood? 

Okay, you keep the nut original... and the frets... and I guess the pots and switches? Wait, do you switch the nut to an Earvana?

Okay, seriously though, it is kind of pointless to compare the swapping Variax parts to swapping parts on a traditional guitar... not many other guitars have motherboards and ribbon cables, or 6 pickups, or 25 distinctly different core tones. Transplants have made sense to me up to this point because so far no other guitar can do the things a Variax can do techwise, and so far no Variax can do the things my other guitars can do (feel awesome and inviting in my hands, practically play itself, be attractive to my eye, look cool onstage, and... palm muting just kidding, I don't care about metal style palm muting, any lighter palm muting I need I can pull off on my Variaxes to decent effect.

I understand you don't like hearing about transplants and you originally wrote you think it is "disrespectful" to discuss them in this Line6 forum, I kind of see your point and might be inclined to partially agree with you on this... but I am not a moderator here, if Line6 decides they don't want any discussion of transplants they can easily use the search function, find every incidence of the term, and delete every post or thread where transplants are discussed. Until that day I say let free speech reign and thank Line6 for the opportunity they give us to speak our minds on their site.

I do think it is best to ignore transplant threads like this if you are opposed to them even being discussed, this thread was clearly labeled as a question about JTV versus transplanting a Vax 600 into another guitar and you DID choose to  read the thread so... enter at your own risk...? Best to not look at things that upset you, mama always used to say... my reply here was just me expressing my opinions as to which would be the wiser choice in the long run, I had more to write last night but my girlfriend came in to tell me it was time for bed so I cut it short... after thinking about it more today I  have decided a JTV would be the wiser choice in the long run and here are my reasons:

1. Better/newer tech with probability of longer lasting supply of replacement parts and probability of new future model upgrade features for the JTV as I mentioned

2. a 1 year warranty on a new JTV, no warranty if you butcher even a brand new Vax 600

3. free Workbench with JTV

4. the cost of a 600 Vax donor ($600) , a Vax routed and finished body ($300), and a nice neck ($300) alone will be around what a new JTV will cost. Add some conductive paint, shielding tape, and mag pickups and you have already well exceeded the cost of a new JTV. This assumes you reused the tuners from the Vax 600 for your transplant.

You could do the cheaper Vax 300 transplant and spend around what the cheapest JTV will cost...

Funny thing about these transplant guys/gals.  The majority NEVER seem to have owned or even tried the model 700.  Yes the 300, 600, and yes IMHO the 500 are HORRIBLE guitars to hold, and try to play.  It was BECAUSE of the original look of the 500 I DID NOT buy a Vaxwhen it first came out.  ONLY after seeing the 700's did I WANT to even give this amazing tech.modeling guitar a try and simply fell in love with everything about it except the tuners which I changed to Planet Waves Auto-Trim locking tuners and the tremolo which I've locked down...
 

Whatever I might have just written about MY specific experiences and feeling towards the VariaxElectric Model 700 are exactly that MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCES.  However, I believe there is much merit to many of the things Johnnyayy wrote...

 

Well, I have owned a 700. I bought it used (ebay) for $975 a few years back with the sole intention of doing a transplant. After I opened it up and looked inside it looked to be way more complicated than I thought it would be so I changed my mind (this was years before I had seen all the Midirose and Jeff Miller transplant sites that make it look sooooo easy), decided to use the guitar in stock form for recording... didn't use it much, an acoustic part here, a banjo part there, mostly it sat in the corner and collected dust... I originally chose the 700 over the less expensive 500 because of the tremolo - when the cheaper trem equipped 600 was introduced I decided I would sell the 700 and pick up a used 600 for a future transplant, sold the 700 for $900 (ebay), not a badd loss, then got busy with other things and kind of forgot about Variax til i stumbled upon the Midirose/Miller sites, did some research and found out how to use a Vax 300 and convert a regular Fender style trem CHEAP and got all excited about a potential transplant again, bought a 300 to transplant, found a 500 cheap and bought it too... now I have one transplant and one regular Vax.

I always thought looks-wise the 700... had a great personality actually 25 great personalities, I know you like the way the 700 looks but you are a member of a very small minority there, my friend. To my eye the 700 looks "okay"... yes, less bad than the 500, but still kind of mousey/frumpy/nerdy/square... actually, visually it seems to have no personality whatsoever, and I think this was the intent - I would bet the body was designed by morphing pics of the bodies a a Strat, a Les Paul, and a PRS in Photoshop or somesuch digital photo manipultaion program, like, "Oops, don't want it to look too "rock", and not too "country", not too anything..."  and in the end it came out looking like "nothing", no point of view, like a blank canvas.

If a Vax 700 were a woman it would look like Peppermint Patty... or Velma from Scooby Doo... or Pat from "It's Pat!" on Saturday Night Live.

Actually maybe the 500 would be those women and the 700 would be them with lipstick, contacts, and maybe a boob job...

I always thought the 700 was just a 500 with no pickguard, didn't realize the 500 was also missing the carved top till I bought one recently. Feel/playability-wise I don't really notice much difference between my 700 and my 500. Neither of them are terrible, neither great, both just "okay" - functional, workman quality, definitely not crappy but nothing to write home about and not in the same leaugue as my other guitars. And who would expect it to be at that price? At $1400, minus the $500 value of the electroncs, the Vax 700 is a $900 guitar and it is probably only fair to compare its feel and playability to other guitars in that price range - when I do that the 700 holds up fine and I would say is probably in the middle of all guitars in that price range quality-wise...

I think Midirose hit the nail on the head when he wrote something to the effect of "The Variax 700 is a $1400 guitar that feels like a $600 guitar"

I know you have said maybe you got the only two Vax 700s that were any good, and MAYBE Midirose and I got the only two Vax 700s that weren't all that great, but I would bet the reality is more likely that Midirose and I had Variaxes Vari () similar to yours and maybe you just have a different standard of how a "nice" guitar should feel and play than we do...I know how it is when you "fall in love" with a guitar, it becomes difficult to see its shortcomings... I had a bolt on neck sunburst Korean Les Paul copy in high school that I thought was the greatest axe ever made, because it was SO COOL and it was all mine and I ROCKED!!! Erm, eventually I learned more and was able to see that guitar for what it was, no more no less...

 

I just feel that so much talk about gutting brand new guitars that nearly NO ONE has even laid a finger on is kinda ridiculous.  How about trying the guitar out first BEFORE planning to gut a brand new guitar just for the Vaxtronics.  I just think transplanting discussions on a Line 6 forum of any kind is frankly very disrespectful to the product and the Line 6 company.

Ooooops, there's the "disrespectful" line... not sure disrespectful is exactly the right word, but I think I get what you are driving at...

Just remember, for every transplant done Line6 has sold one guitar... maybe that is why they don't ban discussion of the practice here...

I think the talk of gutting out JTVs for transplants was in some of the other threads, I thought the poster of this thread was talking about gutting a Vax 600 INSTEAD of just buying and using a JTV in stock form, weighing the pros and cons of each, albeit in a very snide manner... just skimmed the original post here again and I don't hink anyone is talking about a JTV transplant in this thread... do YOU actually read what others write? J/K

 

I have a much simpler way of dealing with guitar buying in general...If I like a guitar AS IS (not counting any basic set up and intonation procedures I usually need to do to fit my playing style), then I buy it if it's in my price range.

Well, that works for you and that is great... but some of us have different needs. If you want to wait around until someone comes up with a guitar that is exactly what you want and need or at least can convince you that it is what you want and need that's cool and that's the way most people probably approach most things in life, but some of us want guitars (or cars or motorcycles or etc. etc.) that are customized reflections of who we see ourselves to be (or wannabe haha), or guitars that fit a certain particular need that is not addressed by any manufacturer, or that we find sexy or HOTTT or coooool, or just guitars with some kind of character/style/personality that is I believe INTENTIONALLY missing from Variax 1.0 (honestly I prefer playing weird guitars that give me a little fight to guitars that look feel and play just "okay", for they are lukewarm and I shall spew them from my, erm, guitar strap...) - these are the people who are prime candidates for Vax transplants.

The Vax 700 seems to make total sense visually in a cover band - it looks enough like whichever guitar it is supposed to be emulating at any time to be passable in most situations, country, rock, metal, funk, ska, techno, jazz, surf, ... hmmmmm I wouldn't use one in a rockabilly band... gotta wait for the Vax II hollowbody for that

I also sell Vax guitar patches I custom create to anyone who has a request for them.

So THAT'S why you didn't want to upload/share your patches with us here, and why you are pushing so hard on the Workbench thing you sly dog you... didn't realize you were making money on the deal... are you the guy selling patches on ebay? How about some details at least on what patches you have available, those ebay ads are REALLY not very descriptive...

Final thought on JTV for the night: Honestly I can't imagine finding a truly GREAT feeling/playing guitar (according to my high standards) for under $3000-4000 (yep, I am spoiled by having played too many REALLY nice guitars for too many years in the past), and the US made JTV's I would bet will be worth every penny of their asking price. I would also bet the Korean JTVs will be totally worth their substantially more modest prices, add in the value of the Vax electronics and they begin to look like a real bargain.

MerlinFL wrote:

I dearly wish everyone would just stop talking about transplants of Vaxtronics into whatever other guitars.  The majority of the world guitar playing population - including myself do not swap guitar parts around except for tuners, straplocks of some kind, pick-ups an perhaps different brand or color hardware on the outside of the guitar.

Oh. . .so you only would change tuners, straplocks, pickups and hardware? What exactly is left? The wood? I did the opposite and changed the "wood".

As much as you love your 700s NOBODY bought the 700s for the guitar. . .. they bought it for the guts. I bought 500s for the guts and put one in an xplant because I didn't love the look or feel of the 500s.Where is the problem?

BTW. . .just to tick you off more warmoth just shipped my variax strat shaped body with sunburst flame top that I am going to put lipstick tube pickups in and then put in my second vax 500 guts in it.