clay-man

Uh excuse me but I ordered a JTV. Line 6 should give me another one for free! I deserve it.

I probably wont do any customization to my JTV until the warranty runs out, just to be on the safe side. I probably will do stuff to my guitar afterwards though. There's a small chance I might swap the neck out one day just to be a little better, but right now it's fine. Maybe when fretwear starts to become evident. If I installed new pickups, I'd probably want splitting single coil sized humbuckers or something, and I'd just put another switch in the pickguard or something.

Does turning down the volume really work with getting rid of "piezo overload"? I remember the global string volumes acting like a pre-amp for the piezos before the modeling stage, but is that still true with the HD Variax?

Yeah, my 69s' pickups are very noisy. Definitely not hum cancelling single coils. You have to use a noise gate. I still find natural noise on the models when using the modeling, but if you feed anything through high gain you're bound to bring up the noise floor a bit, so, noise gate is always a nice thing to have to get rid of that.

Last time I turned off the 12 string guitars like that it sounded a bit brighter than the other guitars, and maybe a bit of a hybrid between the new HD model acoustics and old piezo sounding acoustics, so yes, give it a try. I understand that the new acoustics can be muddy in a mix, but you can always work on it with EQ. You can get the HD models to stand out more with EQ, but you can't get the old piezo models to sound as realistic as the new models with EQ, something I've tried a lot but it never sounded as nice as micing up even my low end Rogue dreadnought. Just didn't sound as real.

The acoustics sound superb. They no longer sound like piezo electric acoustic guitars, and sound more like microphone recorded acoustics. I love it.

Still waiting on his rig setup. If you used a tube screamer anywhere on the POD, it helps to turn the treble on it down. It gives it that nice string attack but without making things overly honky or droney.

Changed from the D'dario set to Elixirs and it did not get worse for me. Still sounds the same. People say the spank model sounds too thin and ear piercing sometimes. I think it's best to just compensate with amp settings, like edstar said. I've been playing with my JTV more and more and I'm getting used to it more and more. Honestly, a lot of metal music has that honky low E string even though they use humbucking guitars, so in some way, it's natural, I just thought it was overpronounced a bit, to the point where it's hard to dial out, as it's not always a thing you hear out a typical Les Paul. I highly suggest you give us details about what settings you used for your tone.

I got my JTV 69 replacement in last week. The setup was awfully high for my taste so I knocked the action down a bit with the hex set they gave me and it feels a lot better now. There's slight fret buzz but nothing that hurts the tone or sustain of the guitar. Setting up the intonation was extremely annoying though. The 69 neck isn't that bad, it just could use more edge space on the E strings, but that's something I'll just have to adjust my playing to.

My new guitar seems to be slightly better with the crosstalk. Muting the E string helps kill crosstalk a little bit more.

Yes, the piezos can vary, and the point of global volume control is to tame this. USe this in workbench. If you can't fix the problem in workbench, then it's best to address this with Line 6 via support ticket, as you could have an very overly sensitive piezo, which can result in issues with the sound of that string with the piezo.

I think I'm a bit in denial, and honestly, it's still pretty there, so I did sent an email to sweetwater one more time. I feel bad though, because he did test it, but honestly it's hard to tell someone the problem of a guitar with a bunch of settings through emails. I told him to use Lester and that's probably the least affected model, though it can get really annoying still on higher gain. Does everyone have that sound on their E string to some extent or is it just me?

Yes. No avail. I removed the fretbuzz with the truss rod and it's still there to an extent. Fret buzz makes it more obvious, but there is still a weird overtone on the E string to some extent on like 90% of the models. The Chime models actually sound fine, but the rest have it.

Got my new replacement. Sounds kinda better. The strings are more consistent. I've realized the softer you play, the less the stange clanky overtones show up. Any of you tried throwing a default screamer in pod in front of an amp, then using spank 1? The E string sounds the worst on that, but it is a single coil guitar, but even the magnetics sound better. I guess I have to play a bit softer then.

I just got my 3rd Variax replacement today, and it's a bit better but the clanky sound is still there. It shows up the worst with spank, as the person said. It sounds awful on some high gain settings. The person at Sweetwater tested it and said it sounded fine, but It still seems like it kind of has a problem. It might be the HD firmware as well making the problem more pronounced. I guess I'm going to settle with the guitar I have though. If it honestly becomes a big problem, I'll see if the problem goes away with 1.9.

Hello, can you tell me what you were using in the signal chain? I have this problem when I use spank 1 with a tubescreamer on default settings thrown in front of, say, the treadplate amp.

No awkward sounds with the modeling? You should check, I believe, custom 2 bank with the magnetics. The high gain models on the 89 are literally modeled after the pickups on the guitar, so referencing between that and the magnetics would be good.

The plink issue goes down as strings dies. Does a new set of regular strings still sound less plinky than the Elixirs? I've always noticed the plinking of the E string on the Lester model of my 600 ever since I've got it, and didn't think too much of it until recent years.

I'm sure the alt tuning is just a pitch shifter. You can't really model different tunings, but you can use techniques to make pitch shifting sound more realistic. Frankly, the downtuning on the Variax is incredible, but the uptuning could use a bit of work. The downtuning doesn't muddy the highs like most pitch shifters do, but the uptuning still does that alvin & the chipmunk squeaking effect to some degree on the guitar. The best thing to do is to make timbre preserving routines and algorithms, and I do think the Variax has that to some degree, but not to the extent of say, using DAW plugins like PitchWheel by quikquak or ReaPitch in Reaper. As for Workbench, that would be amazing, but obviously Line 6 would need to sell the technology to make our own guitar models. The thing with the Kemper is that it's so direct, that you just need to plug in your guitar, then plug in a few other cables, and that's it. The Variax probably has way more equipment involved and a lot more work for the person. Emulators have to be pretty much accurate to a T or else a routine ran in the code would cause the game to crash. The thing people have to know to make emulators is how the processor works and what language it uses. A lot of reverse engineering. I go on a forums where people make homebrew NES games and it baffles me how they reverse engineer NES assembly code and learned it. I can do programming, but assembly is way too complicated for me to comprehend.

Agreed, though I think in a sense, mdmayfield might be correct on what modeling and profiling really means, that profiling is more open for the user to make the amp tone, as opposed to the company "profiling" it at their R&D place and then it being closed for us to use. I was more thinking about the technique as opposed to what the people are allowed to do. In old modeling, there was less and less convolution based analysis and compilation, and more A/Bing, and tweaking sound functions to get it to sound close. There's no question that modern modeling uses a lot of more direct and accurate data analysis, and one thing that modeling does have against profiling is that profiling can't emulate an EQ section or the change of the gain dail of the amp it's emulating, especially if the thing it's trying to emulate is something that might have drastic changes when you turn those knobs on your amp other than just "turning up or down the gain". Also, about the emulation analogy, emulating video games is using the exact ROM of those video games, but running it through something that isn't native hardware, but uses programming to simulate everything that the original hardware does so the game can actually run. Opposed to simulating, which is rewriting everything form scratch and just tweaking it to act like a certain game does. In a way, the Kemper is more akin to emulation, and modelers more to simulation, but again, that doesn't mean that modeling can't rely on techniques the Kemper uses, it just doesn't SOLELY rely on it. In a way, I find it hard to believe that you could gather all the information of a guitar via just using sensors, for the Variax, but the sensors will cover a lot of ground in the first place. I just doubt it's what they used for stuff like the guitar electronics emulation, probably more or less of studying and knowing how those voltages do much of what it does. The pickups and body responses probably used most of the sensor technology, but I wonder how they mashed it all together, especially the part where you can slide pickups to different positions in workbench. So maybe the Variax isn't a profiler, but it comes pretty close.

The original modeling had routines to emulate the noise of a bigsby on the gretch models, the strat model had emulation of the springs (Incredibly horrible thing to emulate since most people would silence their trem springs in the first place). There might be more I'm missing. What do you guys think about this? Part of me likes how the original modeling went so far to try to emulate these goofy nuances to really get you into feeling like it's the actual guitar you're modeling, but again, I think the Strat trem springs ringing was a bad idea. It would be nice if there was an option to turn it on and off in workbench, but I did notice that activating alternate tunings in old workbench would stop any emulated ringing, probably to free up space for the DSP to do pitch shifting routines.

Totally forgot, Lace Sensor pickups for that Smashing Pumpkins sound.

In that sense. you're right mdmayfield. I'm sure modeling uses some audio analysis and capturing techniques, but with something like a Kemper, the Kemper does all the work and less guessing and more straight forward actually getting the sound. I think if modeling was more about the company doing that on their own instead of letting the users do it, and if the company used the same techniques as the kemper does in it's routines, we wouldn't be bickering too much about modelers sounding more accurate than other modelers. My view is more or less this: Imagine someone making a cabinet simulator. modeling seems more like if someone used a frequency analyzer and then dialed in the EQ to simulate the cabinet profiling is more of a somebody programming a computer to do a bunch of audio sweeps to gather the information itself and compile it into an impulse response. The processor does the work to compile something to recreate the sound, instead of a programmer. The programmer more or less just makes those routines and technology to use it in that way. With the Variax, if they used sensors to make up impulse responses then it seems like it would be more akin to profiling. It would explain why it sounds so accurate.

1.9 is old workbench. 2.0 and above is HD workbench. OP: Give 1.7 a try and see if you like the acoustics more. If you don't but you like the electrics more, switch to 1.9. Old firmware will sound different, and some prefer it, but a lot of the presence/high end will be missing that the HD firmware has. Some think the Strat is too nasally, part of me agrees, but part of me also says it sounds damn close when comparing it to the magnetics on my 69s. The Les Paul and 335 models sound less muddy on the HD imo. The only thing I kind of have a problem with the HD is that the attack kind of has this subtle volume drop right after you pick. It might be to try to make the Variax more dynamic, but I think it makes the Variax sound a bit less authentic, but it's barely noticeable when you run it through amps.

Strange, it might be an oversensitive piezo again, maybe related to the E plinking thing. I have it on my E string which is why I'm sending my 69s back for another. I tried other strings and it's still there though, not just the Elixirs. It's not as bad as your guys', but it makes the Humbucker models make the E string sound like a crappy singlecoil (doesn't mix well when you're riffing between the E and A string, or just need a smooth sounding E in the first place), and it sounds ear piercing on the single coil models.