clay-man

Your passive aggressive comment is ridiculous and shows you have bad reading skills. Perhaps if your ability to actually read posts was as good as your skill to make unwarranted, blind criticism, you'd understand where I'm coming from. Let me break it down for you: I've had a Variax 600 for years now, and it had none of the problems I ran into, none that I've noticed. I wanted to upgrade. Your comment about poor quality control was pulled from a completely different topic, and had nothing to do with the ghost note problem. The ghost note problem is something Line 6 can't control, so I'm not going to hold that against them. Get it? It's called being fair. The problem with the plinky sound BS from oversensitive piezos, IS a quality control issue, and I have the right to complain about it. Like really, how hard is it to do a test run of the guitar to find out if one of the strings sounds off. Just a minute? Yeah. Just a minute. You know, picking all the strings and hearing a "DINGGG" or "CLANK" out of all the other strings going "BUMMMM". And how dare I ask Line 6 to have a little better quality control over the piezos they install into their guitars, right? The source of sound for the modeling that could potentially break the usefulness of the guitar? I mean what are we going to do, play every string except that one? That's totally what we paid for. I love the Variax, and now that I have a proper Variax, I'm happy with it. The ghost note problem is barely a thing. Maybe it can be controlled to some extent, but it's hardly anything you can do anything about, because it's your hand creating a bridge for the vibrations to bleed into the other piezo pickups. The plinking noise is an issue that can be resolved, and I'd like Line 6 to at least try, because many people run into this problem, and those people shouldn't have to say to theirselves "Should I send back this guitar or live with spending 1k for a lesser guitar?". That's not cool.

This has nothing to do with the magnetic blend. 2 of us already stated what is going on. You palm mute, your hand will form a bridge for the strings to bleed into the other piezos. You do a Drop D tuning, palm mute the A string, you'll hear a G note under the A note, because the A string vibrations is traveling from the A string, through your palm, and to the E string piezo, hence the sound bleed. The reason why I'm not holding this against Line 6 is because they can't do ANYTHING about this. It's a physical problem, a problem with using piezos. With things like mechanical noise bleeding through into the piezos, string sound bleeding into the other piezos isn't very surprising.

So, the HD engine completely made the 1.9 translations sound way off. I had to change the Jaguar from a Strat with Rick pickups to a Les Paul with Telecaster pickups, and the SG is just the 89 presets with the positions and electronics tweaked. The bridges sound really close. The necks are close but not as good as the bridge, feel free to edit to your liking. The SG sound is based off my SG clone. Jaguar is based off a friend who gave me dry recordings of his Jaguar. The audio tests start out with the real guitars, then the presets, and then a small crunch sample with the presets. Jaguar audio test: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21663288/Music/jaguartest.mp3 SG: audio test https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21663288/Music/sgtest.mp3 Download the presets here in a ZIP file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21663288/JTVSG%2BJaguar.zip

Really? Are you asking how to hack the POD to unlock the tones? Sounds like it.

No, because when you payed for the POD, you weren't saying, "Gee I'm gonna get this and they better give me new amps later!", you purchased it because you liked what it presented you in it's stock form. A price on these packs helps make Line 6 keep the POD having a purpose on their end. Now, maybe taking at least 10 dollars off the packs, then sure, but they need to make profit somehow.

Sorry, I mean that I'm not gonna update because the update sounds pointless and sketchy.

Not updating.

That is true, but would be nice to make the EQ work be done through the POD. I don't get why it needs extra DSP though. It's processing 2 stereo signals if the USB DOESN'T use the EQ. Also, can't you just adjust the dryness through the control panel?

Yes. Use SPDIF if you're going to route POD to an interface. Using analog is a waste and causes additional noise and sound degradation, as well a waste of inputs. I use SPDIF from my POD to my Fast Track Pro and it sounds great. Turns it from a 2 input to a 4 input device.

I imagine the intended use was to cut through via live mix. Well, still. What if some of use are using USB live? These are things you guys need to consider. Besides, what's the harm? You can turn it off. I like to use a DAW to jam live, believe it or not. Luckily, I've been using spdif over USB lately.

using 2 channels with the post looper will cut the volume in half, sadly. It's very very annoying, and I wish we could move the looper at the end of the paths instead of the end of the mixer. Makes using a guitar and mic impossible.

True. That's why I got rubber strap locks because it requires no mods. I find it strange that a ghraphtech piezo was bad. Graphtech is usually the better company than LR baggs and are supposed to be designed to prevent the piezo quack crap from happening.

Is it a new guitar?

Yeah. It's really angering how their piezos are so inconsistent. I'm seriously thinking about complaining directly to them about this.

I would but I'm still working on it. It's just loosely based on old presets I had in the old Variax. The SG didn't even sound right because they got rid of the Les Paul jr body, so I had to redo it, and it's just the 89 settings with the pickups backed towards the bridge a bit. I still need to adjust the Jaguar settings. It sounds ok but I never did an A/B test to make sure it was accurate again.

That's bitdepth, not samplerate.

Why isn't there a SM57 straight + angled fredman option in the mics? Seriously. One of the biggest sounds ever.

EQ is a huge post-amp tone shaper that can help a tone cut through better as well as dial out fizz and other things. Why NOT? It's a necessity when you want to finalize the tone.

When trying to replicate a tone, the best thing to do is record a dry signal of the guitar you want. Play all the strings, chords, leads. After you do that, run Variax dry as well and mess around in workbench. Swap bodies and pickups, whichever sounds the closest, then move the pickups around. Adjust pot resistance values if you need to fine shape it more. It's how I got a tone based on my SG, and a tone based on a Jaguar.

Hm. Sometimes stuff just gets weird, but I would think the Variax wouldn't be brickable unless you did something really bad to the hardware needed to communicate with the computer properly. To be safe, I don't mess with writing firmware onto the Guitar unless it's an update. I suggest you do the same.

There's a button you can press on the battery compartment case right by the LEDs. Have you always been doing this before you updated? You want a fully charged battery when updating.

Very useful for knowing what I'll be getting.

Yup, consider it sleep mode, not off mode. Only use it if you're putting your guitar down for a few minutes. I believe the reason it doesn't shut off completely is to detect when you roll it back up.

It's either an oversensitive piezo causing the lovely plink garbage we all know and love, or it's yes, the trem stablizer resonating when you play the D string.

I never saw them say they'd work perfectly, however I do agree that paying 1k for something that has a bit of an error rate is a bit ridiculous. I do think Line 6 needs to up their quality control, especially on a product like these guitars. The thing is that I don't think the piezo crosstalk would really qualify for a concern. As I said, it is what it is, because of physics, and it's not something you could even take out 100% if it there was some variable to controlling crosstalk. It was just something I thought was a huge issue because I never had a setting on my 600 where I'd notice it much until now.