smrybacki

Oh man, since you are the only person I know of who has an American AND Korean made JTV -- would you by any chance care to compare and contrast these guitars? Are the switches a lot better on the American made one? For example in my case, the Korean made JTV59 toggle switch feels so cheap, I swear one day it'll come off in my fingers. And the tone knob actually just falls off from time to time. I would seriously be interested in your take on these two classes of Variax guitars and I'd bet others would be too.

They might be robots lol...

That was also the case with me. In fact, I'd say the dual channel aspect and it's implications are the cause of a lot of people's perceived problems really.

For $4k, I'd be getting an American Made PRS Custom 24 (in Jade!) every day of the week before I'd get an American made JTV -- and twice on Sunday.

Easy alternate tuning switching is the #1 reason I even got this guitar, truth be told, with the rest of the modeling aspect a distant second. So many great songs I love are so much easier to play in the tunings they were designed in! Getting comfortable using Drop D, Double Drop D, Open D, G & A (for slide!) and DAGAD tunings really breathed new life into my playing! I really like "The Rain Song" by Led Zeppelin and you can't really play that song without it being DGCGCD which I think is GSus4 or some such. Being able to program that into one of the tuning slots was huge for me. That would be the biggest thing I'd miss if the digital part of my JTV craps out.

Mine was a bit of a disappointment when I first got it from a fit/finish standpoint. The low E & A strings buzzed like crazy when I hit it hard which even after some work on my part, they still do but not as bad. After checking it, I actually found that fret number 11 was high and needed to be buffed down. Probably still does, but I went easy at first. Generally, I don't play my guitars hard though so it isn't a huge issue. The other thing is that the bridge humbucker will not always come on when selected by the 3-way switch when using a 1/4 inch cable and no modeling turned on. I can flip the switch back and forth once or twice and then it will spring to life though. As I don't gig with this guitar, it isn't a problem per say, but having to do that say mid-song would suck on stage. I probably should have returned it to Sweetwater, but I maintain my own guitars and have a strong electronics background as well (I even repair my own tube amps, for example) so I thought I could hanlde it if it really went south and I'd get to buy new tools at StewMac in the bargain. But really, this guitar feels very nice as Les Paul style guitars go and LPs are not my favorite feel -- that honor goes to the venerable Stratocaster. This guitar is really different than my Strats and Teles in a lot of ways, so I try not to let that bias interfere with my judgement of it. I have .010-.046 strings on my JTV whereas I have .009-.042s on all my single coil guitars for example. Obviously the scale length is different as well and as I have very large hands, the shorter LP fretboard feels a little cramped by comparison. But overall, for a guitar that was made on the cheap in Korea - the JTV is a great value with the modeling and a fair value without it, no doubt.

I am talking about fit, finish, playing feel and of course the actual analog pickups and tone using them. If the modeling on your JTV blew apart tomorrow, would you still use your guitar, or is it useless to you with the built-in models? For me, I would still get use out of it as my JTV59 is my ONLY humbucking equipped guitar and thoughI am a single coil guy, there are times when only a humbucker will cut it like for example playing harder rock.

Maybe this aspect is more important than anything else. Since I don't gig now, I don't have to haul my analog gear to gigs regularly nor do I have to get the sound with it right once there, hence I am 100% happy with it. If I were gigging with it, convenience would play a big part I am sure and so the lighter, more versatile digital alternatives would be more attractive -- especially in a cover band where you need a lot of different sounds But this last part (cover bands) is interesting to me As a young lad when the drinking age was still 18, I went to a LOT of bar band gigs long before anything digital. All of the cover bands back then used a few basic pedals and (usually) a single amp and guitar to do cover band work and we still had fun listening to them. And in my own case, I could still have fun playing OPM (other people's music) as I do now too with the same setup really. Then too, back then at least in my world (upstate New York) there was rock and roll, country and radio silence to choose from genre-wise lol...

Absolutely no disrespect intended my friend. Just playing Devil's advocate I guess. I am an analogue man in a digital world as it turns out even as I work in the digital realm. It's a great subject for spirited debate which is repeated daily around the blogosphere....

It's funny you mention your L2T being down...the fact that my 16 month old JTV59 has issues like the analog pickups cutting out or just not working at times, the knobs falling off and the low E and A strings being buzzy and out of whack (should have returned the thing to Sweetwater dang it) kept me from getting any more Line 6 hardware because I was worried over quality. In fact, I have considered just selling off the JTV59 and POD HD500 plus two PE60 power Engines and puting it down to experience as most of my time in the studio is spent within the computer anyway. Truthfully I get a lot more mileage out of my POD Farm with all the model packs I got for it than my HD500 these days. I can use that either stand alone to jam and practice while on the TrueFire site, or I can use the amp models in Propellerheads Reason and I can use ALL of those models in Cakewalk's SONAR as VSTs which for the $300 I laid out for it makes it a sweet deal IMHO.

It's all good man. People are gonna use what they like in the end. Digital will supplant analog one day because people like me will eventually not be around anymore to support the analog gear. Younger folks coming up today are just fine with digital because they don't know what things used to be like. I feel very lucky really to be able to see both sides of the divide so clearly and have been able to live it. The day someone models and markets something like a POD 1.0 will be a serious watershed moment. The really GREAT thing about right now is that we can all choose to have analog, digital or as in my case both.

Dude, I still have my original vinyls lol...I don't have to lament anything. But I know what sounds good to me, and so I am willing to be "cute" because it's worked for me since the 1960s.

So sayeth you good sir. I guess it comes back to what you value more; convenience or sound quality. I choose sound quality personally, all things being equal otherwise. But yeah, I use digital sources in my car for convenience and variety's sake.

My counter question to the OP and DI's later suppositions is why would you want that to happen? I LOVE my analog gear which is basically Fender guitars, amps and quality analog pedals. I love how it all sounds together. I love how it feels when I hit it, either hard or soft. I love it's elegant simplicity. I love that it was born and grew in the same era as I was. I love that all my musical "heros" used the same gear I am using, albeit some of it I own is reissued. I love the way it lives and breathes and communicates when I play through it all. FInally, I love that every single modeling device I have ever seen to a unit trys (and fails) to replicate what I already own which is a testament to it's ultimate long term value and sheer staying power. So will digital modeling ever replace analog gear? Probably because the world demands less and less quality every single day as evidenced by the crap we (re)buy day in and day out with shelf lives measured in months (or even weeks) before it is obsoleted. The proponents of digital modeling will keep trying, and it IS getting better and better, of course. But to those of you who say (rightly so) that all recorded music is digital these days, I ask you: Is that REALLY a good thing? If could you ever buy a new vinyl record from say the 1970s (say Boston's debut album) and could play it on a MacIntosh tube component stereo setup with quartz locked turntable and a Shure V-15 diamond needle -- you would throw your crappy little MP3 player so far, so fast your head would spin. Don't get me wrong. I actually like digital modelers, but not because they sounds better - because it is a way to experiment with other sound combinations to see if I should get the analog amp or effect the modeler is trying to mimic. I have fun with my POD and JTV59, no doubt. But when I want THAT sound, feel and experience I head straight for my analog rig and smile.

Sometimes I think it's too bad we can tell the difference. it's a blessing and a curse.

Yep...that'd be great...wonder if these new HD Model packs *might* just fly inside POD farm? Prolly not...

I have been a user of the POD series since the XT line dropped, and I even got the model packs for my red bean. I used my PODXT mostly for the Guitarport service and I learned quite a few songs using it. But alas, that service withered and died on the vine. Line 6 did the fair thing and comped me the POD Farm 2.5 standard as compensation which didn't mean much to me at the time, but hey it was free so thanks guys. Then, along came the HD500 and I bit on that as well and sold off my PODXT , but I kept the model packs because I found out they worked in the POD Farm and as well in Propellerheads Reason which was kinda cool and besides, I'd paid for them already. The only ones that I didn't have were the so called "Power Pacl" and the "Bass Pack". In any event, I spent most of the next year trying to make the PODHD500 and my pair of Tech21 Power Engines work for me somehow, usually with dissappointing results. So last night I pulled up the POD Farm stand alone (finally) and started to play with it and I was therefore playing through my recording setup monitors which are a pair of KRK Rokit 5s and things sounded fairly amazing suddenly. The blanket was removed, and the differences that I barely noticed in the HD Models became really apparent with the (so-called) lesser XT models. So I sprang for the Power Pack figuring I get 30 days to really wring this whole thing out, but I have to say that as a recording (with VSTs) and self-contained practice facility -- POD Farm may well be all I needed to begin with. So, am I out here alone thinking the XT models are actually better than the HD models? Or is it just my Power Engines that need replaced with a true FRFR system for my HD500? Thoughts?

Cool guys, thanks for the responses.

This. Especially if you are not in the US, then likely customs inspectors had their way with this guitar. Being in the military, I have had plenty of things "appropriated" from me by customs inspectors, notably the Turkish. I once opened my $900 Yamaha stereo receiver box to find a chunk of concrete holding it down -- my receiver was long gone. I feel for your situation, but being childinsh in a support forum will not help you either.

What're you using? I personally have a pair of Tech21 Power Engine 60s that I have an "OK" relationship with but I wonder at times what others are using and their paths to their own Holy Grail...

Dang, those are some tasty demos Stu. Great playing and tones are spot on, at least the ones I have heard so far. Thanks man!

Found this...it helped: http://line6.com/pod-vs-firehawk/

A simplified POD HD? A super POD x3? Both? Neither?

I understand what you're saying regarding "default great tone", and I agree to a large extent. I think the (ongoing) legacy of the Stratocaster is secured despite your snub lol. Interestingly, my first choice of electrics when I was starting out was a Rickenbacker 360 and I got one, but it turns out I cannot play it for doodly squat because of the width of the fretboard being narrower. This led me to the Stratocaster and the rest is history (for me).

I have gone to basically the same place for timeless, exceptional electric guitar tone for many years, and it is the standard by which I judge all others: Fender MIA Stratocaster/Telecaster -> A Few High Quality TBP Pedals -> Fender Tube Amps. That said, the POD HD500 and JTV59 combination I own has good points of it's own, namely convenience in spades with things like instant (and saved) alternate tunings and effects configurations. Digital sound is what it is and if they ever nailed it, there would be no more model packs or new takes on it. Leo Fender nailed quality electric guitar tone way back in the 1950's as far as I am concerned, and everybody else has been scrambling to catch up ever since. Lol...that would actually be an excellent product tagline, I would think.