clay-man

Could it be, that it's some resonant hardware vibrating sympathetically with the strings that made the noise? I tried many things before with adjusting the saddle and piezo on my guitar, but nothing really works.

It won't damage the piezo assembly?

That's awesome of you, but it's still off the clock.

So there's been something I've been dealing with ever since I've had my guitar, and I've done work arounds, but I might as well ask it here to see if anyone can help. I cannot use the whammy bar and do bends without sacrificing tuning stability. It seems to mostly effect the B and G strings. If I tune the guitar in tune in conjunction with the whammy bar, it will go back in tune everytime I hit the whammy bar deeply. After that, if I do bends on the G and B, the strings will go flat in tuning. I end up not using the whammy that much and just tune by streching the G and B string until they don't go flat anymore, so that bends do not cause the guitar to go out of tune any further, but this causes me to not be able to use the whammy bar too much. The deeper I use the whammy bar, the more the strings get reset onto the saddles. When I do bends, I believe the strings get caught on the saddles instead of sliding back from being flat to being in tune. I've determined it's not getting stuck on the nut, because I've tried tests to see if applying any pressure near the nut causes tuning problems, but it does not. I've applied pressure on the strings near the saddle and it does cause it to go out of tune. Is there anything I can use to make the strings go back in tune? Obviously this is a problem because I can't put anything damaging on the piezos.

Funny enough, there's no way Line 6 would ever do a transplant for someone.

You will always have latency with pitch shifting. Like I said in another topic, pitch shifting needs a window of time to gather enough data to pitch shift correctly and give out a nice sound. Asking a pitch shifter to pitch shift in REAL real time is like asking your autocorrect to know the word you're trying to type by just typing 1 letter. It needs a few letters to correctly determine what to spit out at you. As for the Roland, I wonder if it will sound nicer with piezos. Who knows. Does the pitch shifting sound nice in comparison to the Variax? I've always argued that the Variax has nice sounding pitch shifting because it does some formant preserving on the tonality of the signal so it doesn't sound muffled and muddy when you downtune.

Well, what people want, is for the guitar to work like any other Variax that works 100% fine. No editing or work around, but just a flat normal variax. I'm not saying the idea is bad, because neutral does get rid of the E string problem significantly, but doing that might sacrifice nailing the sound the model is supposed to achieve, though, I think we can all agree that a plinky E string is not "achieving that sound" either.

The problem with that is that it's evasive to finding a true fix, just like people who suggest turning the tone knob down from 10 to 8. It's a better solution than the latter, but the body models help make the authenticity of each guitar model. I might try it with the strat and les paul setting, but who knows.

Well, if you're listening to the other strings than the string with the plink, I can totally agree. Like I said, the Variax uses piezos, which I think is a huge advantage in terms of having a better frequency range to sculpt into certain sounding guitars. It's all advantages and disadvantages pretty much.

I don't think the knob really needs heat to be lifted off. It's snug tight but when you use 2 spoons, one on each side, it slides off like butter. I said to avoid prying from only 1 side, because technically if you did that, it would be lifting one side and pushing the other side against the knob, creating a tilt which makes it even tighter, and forcing any more lift is basically forcing an object onto another which can damage the knob shaft or the knob itself.

Yeah, I'm honestly quiet disappointed. I know that it's a "business thing" to not focus on something that is deemed not a big problem, but to me, it is a big problem, because it completely breaks the purpose of a 1k piece of equipment, but that's not the problem. The problem is, unlike every single thing in the universe where you can send it in for repair, this has NO repair. That basically sounds like Line 6 saying "Yeah, no, lollipop you, you bought it, it's your problem even though we've caused the problem by selling a product with potential issues" and that is a huge insult to the buyer. It's like if I bought a car, and then a part was messed up, and there's no way to order that part anywhere, and the company says "yeah we're not going to get the part for you".

2 spoons works well too. Anything that can lever it off. Make sure not to lever 1 side off too hard before you match the other side. Trying to force it off from 1 side will just bend the knob or damage something, you have to pry it off evenly.

There's no way in hell that there's multiple ways to recreate the problem specifically unless the problem strictly applies to the signal being overloaded. Again, I've said, the sympathetic string plinking sound and the plinking sound on the E string are 2 separate problems, nonrelated. One is the power of your picking causing the strings behind the saddle and behind the nut to be jolted with enough energy to vibrate loud enough to make a ping noise. The whole reason it's a "ping" noise is because of how short the strings are will obviously cause a high note to resonate from the string sympathy. If you pluck those areas of the string, it'll make the EXACT same sound that the ping makes in your guitar. The problem most people talk about with the E string is a hardware issue that noone can find the solution for because no one has the resources to fix it theirselves. Only Line 6 can fix it, because only Line 6 have the ability to swap broken hardware without spending a pointless fortune on the guitar. This is why no one can find a fix by theirselves. I believe Line 6 is skimping hard on the solution, and that it's out there and not as arbitrary as we think. It's obviously related to the piezos and hardware that lead up to the DSP. Hell, maybe it's also the bridge, but other than that, I highly doubt it's anything else.

Then maybe it's time for us to move forward from Variax.

I highly doubt that. I got 2 units with the same problem back to back. I think it's probably bigger than people think, but it's just on different levels, and some people accept certain levels of it, and some don't. Like I said, I accepted mine, at least for a good while, but now, I swear it's gotten worse somehow, and it's starting to really bother me. I sent my guitar in for them to check on it, and they checked my new guitar, and sweetwater said to both "Oh we don't hear any problems". You have to realize some people might not run the guitar into certain amp settings that display the problem very well, or maybe they just think it's the settings being too bright, so they tweak it out.

Variax has piezo pickups, so it might be a contributing factor. Does it give any slap type sound at all or does it just seem weak compared to the magnetics?

Please don't do anything to your guitar that you might regret unless you absolutely know what you're doing. I don't understand how they could deny a setup. It's all the same hardware to setup as any other guitar. They should of setup the truss rod neck relief, action and intonation, and it would fix the buzz on your guitar. You don't need to unscrew crap and mess with the electronics to do this. Perhaps they're scared because it's a Variax, but come on, none of that is going to damage the electronics. Honestly, filing frets is probably more dangerous to the Variax than a basic setup, because metal debris could go into the electronics cavity, though it's highly unlikely. Again, don't do anything you're not sure of.

This really isn't good.

You realize fret buzz is a guitar setup problem right? Either your action needs to be set up or your neck relief is messed up. It could only reduce warble if sympathetic string noise is noisy to the point that it bleeds into the signal and confuses the pitch shifter. Again, if you have fret buzz, get your guitar set up. No evasive action is going to fix your fret buzz. You can't amputate someone's arm and wonder why the foot still has gangrene.

I agree, but then again, I swear to jumping jesus, the first guitar I got sounded perfect, but retardingly (I don't care if this isn't a real word) I sent it back because I thought a firmware bug was a hardware bug. Second guitar came and I was like "woah wait, why is the E string more jangly than the rest". I sent that one back as well. Then I got this one, which honestly, had the same problem and I kind of gave up when I shouldn't have. It sounds great sometimes, and then bad sometimes. I don't get what determines how bad it is. I mean, if I got an old E string, it dampens the jangliness a bit, but I swear, lately, it's been at it's worst. I don't get it.

it's velcro.

Have you posted a clip of your warble? Warble is just that, the pitch warbling back and forth like some strange vibrato sound instead of sounding out the correct note. It happens because some pitch shifters can't hear the signal correctly to interpret how to rebuild the signal to sound decent. I think there is a difference between warble and pitch shift artifacts though. Pitch shift artifacts basically means the pitch shifting is working correctly, but the unnatural tonalities of the pitch shifted signal vs the normal signal is what we call artifacts. Pitch shifting basically works in 2 ways: if you shift the pitch upwards, it's basically stretching the signal to play faster and then resetting the time point of the signal back every few milliseconds so that the signal is always in time. This is why some cheaper pitch shifters get a stuttering effect when you pitch up. Pitch shifting down does the opposite and stretches the signal's waveform out to lower the pitch, but resets the time forward every few milliseconds to keep the signal from falling behind, and in some cheap pitch shifters, this is what causes some points in the signal to sound like it was skipped if it was a short burst of sound. Now, some pitch shifters need to listen to the signal more than others depending on how it reconstructs the sound. Some actually require tracking because the function of pitch shifting is different from others. Variax uses tracking for it's pitch shifting. Luckily since it's 6 channels, 1 per string, it can listen to each string individually, but stuff like fret buzz, or cross talk can throw the pitch shifter off and make it spit out the wrong sound. THIS is warbling.

Absolutely different, and I've told you before, you don't have any real warble. You either have to get used to it, or send the guitar back and get something else. I've told you that all forms of pitch shifting are going to have some sort of artifacts within it.

If people honestly have been participating in resolving this problem (unless the whole story was made up, though I'm sure Line 6 don't want to present this problem to the general public because it would hurt the Variax's reputation), why not reverse engineer 1 guitar, see if they fix it by swapping some hardware, and then have others send in their guitar and do the same? I mean, if they don't have this much time on their hands, then they shouldn't be selling something that can be dysfunctional in the first place. We're not buying confetti poppers and guessing which will blow out confetti and which one will be a dud, these are 1k+ guitars each. Let's have a quality that reflects that please.

I think it would at least be worth a try to even do it in the first place. Let's be honest, there's different types of "weird sounds" that this guitar can make. Let's talk about them: 1) Plink noise, probably the biggest offender, a plinking noise when picking or palm muting the E string. This is the plink that is probably caused by some form of signal overload that causes the "piezo plink" crap to happen, something I honestly think they can reverse engineer to get rid of but no one is doing this. 2) The jangly E string. Probably closely related to the plink, but it gives this extremely overpowering jangly drone overtone when you hit the E string anywhere on the string. This could also be reverse engineered. This is the problem I have. 3) plinking noises on all strings because of sympathetic ringing on other places of the guitar where parts of the string hover that is behind the saddles, or behind the guitar nut. These are the ones you can absolutely fix by putting dampeners on the open parts of the strings on the saddles and nut. 1 & 2 are not related to 3, and the plink noise is caused by something else. There has to be some reason why that crap is happening. Swapping parts between a good and bad guitar isn't going to hurt the research on this problem one bit.