clay-man

After you fix your E string's piezo, and you like the guitar a lot, I highly suggest investing in a way to use workbench. It's absolutely fantastic if you want to use alt tunings or tweak your virtual guitar's specs. Really fun. Adds even more depth to an already amazing guitar. I know I couldn't get a 600 without the workbench interface, that's for sure. Either way, good luck on the repair. I believe Line 6 actually restocked their piezos after a long time of being out of stock, so it's really awesome to see that they are in fact still supporting semi-common hardware malfunctions of the old Variaxes. I really appreciate them doing that. You can also order an X insert from LR Baggs, which is what I did when everyone said Line 6 isn't restocking. It's basically the same exact piece, but maybe a little different internals, according to the guy i spoke to on the phone. (He says Line 6's piezos are produced by Line 6, and the X inserts by LR Baggs themselves)

I saw a video once about the Variax simulating the ringing of a bigsby on a Gretch. I notice that there's also a ring on the Strat, which i assume is trying to simulate the tremolo springs ringing. I noticed that if I switch on alt tuning in workbench on my Variax 600, the simulation of the ringing noises are gone. I assume this is to focus processing power on pitch shifting the strings, since the old Variax DPS isn't strong enough to process both at the same time. My question is that does using alt tuning also disable it on the JTV series variax guitars? I think it would be nice if there was an option to disable these options, like for anyone that likes to stuff their tremolo springs in their strat guitar, or something to the such.

So someone made a topic saying there's a glitch of the tone thinning out if you roll it above 8. It's very subtle, but it's there. I got sick of marking my knob with permanent marker, so I did a semi permanent solution. I basically took super glue, took off the tone knob carefully with the pry end of a hammer, and dabbed a few layers of it on the rim of the bottom of the tone knob. After I formed a lump on the tone knob, I cut out a thin piece of plastic to glue slightly to the pick guard, right under where I want the piece of plastic to obstruct the knob from going past 8. The plastic I used was a simple soda cap ring cut into a small rectangle. After that, I glued that to pick guard, and then turned the tone knob directly at 8. After that, I line up the knob for the bump of super glue to be right beside and behind the piece of plastic. Once I did that, I push it in far enough to float above the plastic piece but still have the glue lump to hit it when it goes to 8. It's really useful if you want to roll up back to full tone really fast without having to gauge it at 8, which is hard if you need to do it quick. The best part is that the process is easily reversible just by lifting up the tone know a little higher until it passes the plastic. If you don't want that, then you can carefully chip off the plastic and glue on your tone knob as long as you didn't use too much. I only suggest this to people who don't mind very slight alteration of their Variax. The solution isn't noticeable if you cut the plastic small enough to fit under the tone knob.

I really like my 600 a lot. I think the people who say the old Variaxes are ugly are FOS. They just don't like it because of the missing pickups. It's a reasonable complaint, but the whole point of the Variax is the modeling, so mag pickups honestly don't matter. I say, if you want mag pickups, use a mag pickup guitar. You can't model a mag pickup, it'll sound nothing like any other pickup or guitar other than itself. Either way, I think the 600 looks way nicer than the 69. I can't get over how ugly the headstock is on the 69, and something looks a bit smoother about the 600. The only complaint I have about the old Variax guitars is that they're all Strat bodied guitars, and have no big variation between eachother besides headstock and knob placement. Maybe the wood, but that's it. Oh also, I can't tell you how much I fell in love with the maple neck/fretboard. Feels and looks great.