Hi guys,

First I'd like to point out that the korean made JTV-89 I bought 10 days ago suffered very poor (if any) quality control:

• the neck is a bit rough near the headstock, it's not as "polished" there as it is on the remaining of the neck
• most screws on the humbucker rings were lose
• worse, the volume and tone pots were lose too, I had to remove the knobs to tighten the pots' nut
• there is some buzzing at about the 3rd fret on the high E string, I had to raise the bridge a bit, but doing so, I also needed to check the intonation,
  and this is where the real problems start !
• The tiny screws (~ 4 mm long) that allow the bridge to be moved away from the neck didn't help, because they were much too short !
  I had to replace them with longer screws, otherwise intonation wouldn't have been possible on the lower strings...
  I will have to confirm this intonation problem when changing strings though...
• But the worst concerns the alternate tunings:
  the "retuned" strings produce awful metallic/flanged sounding notes, with weird overtones, even on single strings and a clean amplification !
  The standard tuned strings are still sounding OK, but alternate tunings remain completely unusable !!
  There is clearly something wrong with the pitch processing !

How can this alternate tuning problem be fixed ?

I really need help, guys !

What should I do ??

Regards from Belgium,

Dede

PS:

I upgraded the flash memory on the Variax, it didn't cure the problem...

WinXP SP2

POD X3 Live

Workbench 1.72.0

Latest drivers

Variax USB Firmware 1.03

Variax Flash Memory 1.71