clay-man

Yeah. I like that. How close does it sound to the actual pickups? That must be the closest comparison you can do with a model-to-real comparison. I'm glad they made it available for everyone though.

Would kill for non-PAF modern humbuckers, but maybe that's what the 89 pickups are.

You can't adjust "some models" on old Workbench. You only have a global string volume control. If you want to work with the volume on a model-to-model/patch-to-patch basis, you must use the pickup and overall volume level sliders on the editing window in Workbench.

This. The purpose of the Variax isn't to give you a tone you prefer out of that model, but a close replica of that model. You people think it sounds "thinner than before". Maybe that's how a real strat is supposed to sound? Maybe the 1.9 version wasn't as "thin" as a real strat should be?

Thanks for clarifying that. Then they need to fix workbench, I suppose.

I'm really serious though about the Strat. Not the complaint about that "Oh they don't sound as nice as 1.9", but if quack positions won't work because the firmware isn't turning on both pickups correctly, then they legit have a problem. That's not a complete strat without those positions. They need to fix that.

Put it into a device or software that can tell you when it's clipping. When it says you're clipping on any model when playing too hard (I suggest doing this on the LP setting, maybe try downtuning too) then you need to adjust all the string volume slides a few notches down until it stops clipping. If you DO want to clip your signal on purpose to simulate a high gain pickup, then just use the level sliders on the pickups on that model, don't clip it with the string volume. I suggest starting out your string volumes at 60% each, level them to sound equal volume to eachother, then lower them all if they still start clipping.

You should adjust your global string volume to be the loudest without clipping when you play the hardest. String Volume is basically the pre-amp volume of your Variax, before it gets processed through the pickups, body, and any other stuff. You don't want your string volume to be too low though, or else models like the Sitar won't drone well because it relies on volume attack detection, and if the volume is too low, it has nothing to work with properly.

the quack positions on the strat??? Aren't those broken? When are they ever going to fix that? You can't have a broken product and say "It's finished!!!"

That's pretty awful. Hopefully you get stuff sorted out. I imagine it was USP's fault. If someone broke that on purpose just to return it, they're pretty disgusting.

Is that within Workbench HD? I remember tried getting a banjo tuning in regular Workbench and couldn't because it only went up 1 octave.

It's incredibly hard to impossible to get a decent acoustic sound out of an electric magnetic pickup guitar imo. I've tried stuff like a BOSS AC-3 and even that sounded horrible, and it was specifically designed to make your electric sound like an acoustic. You can try if you want, but it won't sound anywhere near as good as a piezo setup imo. Too much of the highs and other tonal frequencies are lost in the sound of your magnetic pickups. You can't add back frequencies that are cut out completely, it's impossible. You can try EQ settings like people said, but it'll require a lot of tweaking to sound anything relative to an acoustic.

I think Amplitube's stuff sounds really nice, but I thought that Line6 might be ahead of the curve in the modeling industry, especially at that price range. Amplitube's Orange amps are really great. Even though I find Amplitube and Guitar Rig's stuff to be efficient in the amp modeling department though, I've been wanting to get in on the POD HD stuff. It really is an impressive jump up. I really couldn't say the same for the previous POD stuff. It was good for it's time, but it's obviously lacking these days. Also keep in mind that it's absolutely asinine to just rely on the forum base for suggestions. Do people really think that every single Line6 product user has an account on these forums and are actively posting? No. The fact is we're only a fraction of the people that use Line6 products, so to listen to their product user's suggestions, they have a special form for that. They can't spend all day looking at forums posts.

That's one of the reasons why I settled on getting a Variax 600 over a new Variax, because I knew if I waited, it would take forever. If I had enough money for a JTV, I'd have to be from some type of income, and if I had that I could still get a JTV even though I got my 600. The HD does make a nice difference between the JTVs and old Variaxes though. I also do find the alt tuning knob to be a big feature.

Hi. It seems there's string breakage mostly happening at the saddles. Anyone have any tips on lessening that? Can I sand the saddle area without breaking the piezos or is that out of the question?

Pitch shifting will never be spot on, especially something pitch shifted a whole octave up. They've got it pretty close imo. You might be asking the impossible. Perhaps they can fix the tonality as much as possible, but you're never going to get the exact representation of the lower gauge strings from a pitch shifter shifting heavy gauge strings to sound a higher pitch. I believe the Variax already has some timbre preserving going on in the pitch shifting stages, so there's not more they can do after that.

If you're talking about the output level set by a volume knob (if the POD has one of those), that doesn't matter. You have to make sure the output level isn't clipping in the digital stages. I'm pretty sure an output knob would just be controlling the level of the analog stage of the output. You have to adjust the output inside your chain and make sure it's not clipping there.

Digital clipping is what happens when the volume exceeds the maximum amplitude that a digital signal can have. The bit-depth of a digital signal is how many bits are used to tell where the sample's amplitude is. If the volume is larger than the bit depth, then you lose that data of amplitube and it just clips to the top or bottom of the maximum decibel level that bit depth can give you. Digital clipping is basically hard clipping distortion.

That's it. The HD500 is my goal then. I'm going to hit so many birds with one stone it's not even funny. New audio interface device, been looking for a MIDI footswitch with a MIDI expression pedal to control VSTs, and something nice to extend my Variax functionality with. I'm also getting some killer modeling stuff that I'd be happy to use.

That's something people need to understand. Hearing your guitar from a cab is totally different from hearing your guitar from a mic'd up cab or anything simulating that. A mic'd cab will only get certain frequencies of the cabinet, depending on position, and frequency response of the mic. That would be digital clipping if that was the case, and that means he needs to turn down the final output stage of his chain to not clip, and/or put a compressor/limiter on the end.

I understand what you mean, but either way, the latency wasn't too bad. I think the best setting was 6ms round trip. The new drivers for my Fast Track Pro reported down to 2.2ms, but the drivers were buggy and had a problem in Reaper where the buffer wouldn't always trigger correctly, and the output would be silent until I reset the buffer again. I'm not sure how accurate that representation is, but I could virtually not even hear a gap between panning the 0 latency dry signal feature on my FTP with the processed latency output left and right. With 6ms I could, but it's bearable on its own. I'm assuming a POD HD500 would allow less latency than that though, as my Fast Track Pro is actually poor in the latency department because it's a v1.1 USB bus, I guess to lower the cost of the device. I'd also like to have a lower noise floor, as I've noticed when I listened to a dry signal of my once working POD GX, the noise floor was a lot lower than my Fast Track Pro. The Fast Track Pro has nice features, but the quality is rather poor, and I should have done more research (which is what I'm doing with the 500 so I don't make the same mistake) Thanks for all the help.

Old POD series had a 5150 but obviously the quality of that and the quality of the amps on the HD are very different. I'd stick to getting a similar and better tone with the HD.

Please stop with the TV analogy. TVs last usually at least 10 years. TVs are a completely different product anyways. A company will release many many different TV models, but Line 6 only has a few Variax models that have interchangeable hardware. Guitars are expected to last for more than a few years, ok.

Oh I totally forgot to ask, can you use assigned midi footswitches and effects assigned footswitches at the same time? Example: 1 footswitch sends midi while another footswitch turns an HD500 amp's distortion on and off?

In Flames mostly uses a Peavey 5150, though I've seen them use Marshals before. The HD doesn't have a 5150 but there's stuff you can use that sounds very similar, like a Mesa Boogie I believe.