snhirsch

Yup. Thanks. I had seen that and didn't put two and two together and realize it was your post. The HD500 exhibits its native "icepick through the ears" overdrive in a vain attempt at emulating a Marshall Plexi. Even if it can be EQ'ed to sound more like the Helix it will likely do so only at one setting of the guitar volume knob. An HD500/500X has its place, but being a universal tool for classic rock / R&B players is not one of them.

Can I have a link to parts 1 and 2?

I agree on the high-E wrap angle. Ended up installing a string tree on mine to solve the problem.

I use my JTV-69 with a Fender Mustang III.v2 modeling amp. Why? Because my HD500 does not do a good job of emulating a tube amplifier in terms of how it reacts to the volume control and pick attack. There doesn't seem to be a good middle ground between glassy clean and highly overdriven. The HD500 is very much a "one trick pony". Any one patch can be dialed to provide crystally rhythm or crunchy edge-of-breakup chording or punch-between-the-eyes overdrive. What I have never been able to do is get a setting that lets me do all of those in a single patch by working off the volume control and my picking. The Fender, while not perfect by any means, is just more "organic" in the way it responds.

Interesting. Those are markedly different from the tuners on the Korean JTV-69 (Gotoh?). Low E and A are nowhere near as tall and gradient from end to end is shallower.

You may want to contact that dealer and find out why you didn't receive the interface device with the guitar. All JTV Variax instruments ship with the adapter and a programming cable (Ethercon on one end and RJ45 on the other).

Not quite sure I follow the physics behind a change in tailpiece reducing fret buzz. Can you explain a bit about that?

I have a JTV69, but the guitar is not the issue. Regardless of the guitar, the HD500 just doesn't do a very good job of emulating a tube amplifier. Out of all the gear I have here, the Fender Mustang III.v2 provides far and away the most accurate modeling.

No, just one. The one that makes them a hefty profit.

Don't be tempted to pickup a battery that doesn't say "Line6" on it. The JTV Variaxes have a digital protection scheme that prevents the guitar from working with anything other than the rather costly ones they sell.

I keep trying to find the love for my HD500 (most recently over the weekend after buying the new model packs), but the amplifier modeling simply doesn't cut it for me. Even with careful use of the parametric EQ to notch out the truly obnoxious "fizz", it lacks any semblance of warmth. Every couple of months I go round-robin on the HD500, Roland GR-55 and Fender Mustang III. The Fender always wins in terms of realistic tube-amp modeling. I've heard other players get great sounds from the HD500/500X, but even starting with tweaked models from Glenn DeLaune, it doesn't seem to suit my playing style. Obviously YMMV.

At the DSP level, it's all just numbers. "Clipping" is numeric overflow (or perhaps underflow depending on the algorithm). I'm not familiar enough with the processor Line6 uses to know whether or not it issues a hardware-level exception on math errors, but either way it should be possible to spot when it occurs. I don't see any reason why they can't simply set a flag when the condition is encountered and wait for a convenient time to update the display. That action absolutely does not need to be real-time synchronous with the error. If it happened within 0.25 sec. of the event I think that would provide quite enough of a clue to the user. But, this is beating a dead horse. There's been no official response to the IdeaScale thread and I think it's a safe bet it won't be addressed.

There's been a thread on IdeaScale for at least two years on the subject. Line6 is not going to implement overload indicators - nor are they going to ditch the idiotic "%" scale on parameters dealing with audio frequency. It's possible they are out of DSP capacity or EEPROM space, but without an official response that's just speculation.

And the good news is that occasionally they actually have what you want in stock. I waited almost three weeks for a &)(^ JTV-69 transducer.

+10 on that. Dan Erlewine literally wrote the book on electric guitar setup.

You could easily buy a vintage guitar for what a MITS Altair would bring on eBay nowadays.

You obviously cannot directly access more than 64k of memory with a 16-bit address bus, but an "aux slot" memory expansion would let you bankswitch a window over a much larger span. I have a 3 MB Applied Engineering card in one of my beloved //e machines. Indeed, bankswitched memory was relatively common back in the heyday of S100 as well (as I sit here admiring my Northstar Horizon). Sorry to digress, but classic computer collecting is almost as much fun as vintage instruments - and generally a hell of a lot less expensive.

I've had similar sucess with jamming a small piece of foam rubber under the string just behind the bridge piece.

Which Variax model is being discussed here? A JTV-89?

Any non-residue electronic contact cleaner (no lubrication!) should do the trick. If your local Radio Shack hasn't bitten the dust, that's a good source in the US - albeit at usurious prices.

They certainly don't act at the analog input level and I'm not sure that anyone besides Line 6 knows where they lie in the virtual signal chain. Why a detail this fundamental is considered proprietary is beyond my understanding.

I have Mag-Loks on a couple of my guitars. Prevents unwanted "dive" of other strings on double-note bends and still allows upward bends. One of those "I wish I'd thought of that..." inventions.

Great voice, nice playin'.

If you search on this forum you should be able to find a posting from last year describing the issues encountered on a JTV-69 refit. The 69 bridge plate has pairs of milled slots to locate the height adjust screws. The GraphTech bridge pieces have either a different center-to-center spacing for these screws or the screws themselves are too large in diameter to seat properly in the slots (cannot recall the exact details at this point). If memory serves, there was also an issue with alignment of the intonation screws. The bridge pieces are longer than the originals and the holes need to be enlarged or redrilled to properly accomodate a steep angle. All this aside, GraphTech does not officially carry a set of pickups that are all offset to the left from the intonation screw. The original poster had to arrange a special order to get this arrangement.

I should add that the aftermarket Mighty-Mite neck I used did not require any work to align with the body. And even if it's off by a couple of 64-ths of an inch, you can probably compensate with the intonation screws.