cruisinon2

What, no mesh water bottle pouch? Suppose Helix gets thirsty on our hike?

Lol...it's such a scam. When I was a kid I spent 2 summers saving up enough money to buy myself my first decent component stereo system. Dad and I got everything home and realized we hadn't bought any speaker cable. The old man, being an engineer, went to the basement and hacked the power cord off a sh*tty old lamp, cut it in half, stripped the ends and, POOF! Speaker wire...and it was a nice pair of BOSE bookshelf speakers, too. Sounded prefectly fine...used those same wires, with that same stereo well into my 30's.

The FX loop has it's own dB boost, so you should be able to place it anywhere in the chain and level things out without messing with the mixer...in fact, on a few patches where I want to keep the same tone for rhythm and lead, that's what I use it for. Just plug the send straight into the return with a 3" cable, and boost it by about 3-4 dB.

Cost is hard to say. I'm in suburban NY...air costs money here. It's really just a labor intensive job, materials are negligible. It will also vary considerably depending on who's doing the work. If they're good at what they do, they're gonna be more expensive. Don't look for bargains...I've seen fret jobs completely butchered by guys who had no idea what they were doing. The neck in question is a factor too...bound necks are more difficult to work with, and typically cost more to re-fret than un-bound ones. The stainless frets are also more work to level and crown. Expect to pay $250-$300 at least, I'd say. Now if you're looking to replace the neck on the JTV entirely, Warmoth offers the stainless frets as an option for only a $20 up-charge...don't know how they manage that, but that's how they do it. So you could conceivably get a whole new neck for what it would cost you to re-fret an existing one...life is weird. And no, I haven't done the JTV yet...it gets a lot of use these days, and I'm trying to have only one axe out of commission at a time. I've already had a G&P on the JTV once, after about 18 months of playing. Really just depends on how much you play, and if you really dig into the strings...it can vary a lot.

If it's a new guitar, it's a lemon. I'd send it back and get one that works. You've already re-flashed the firmware several times, and the LEDs are turning up funny colors. There's obviously more than one issue with the electronics. Doesn't sound like this is something you're gonna sort out on your own, unfortunately.

Yeah, don't forget to make some music periodically, ;). Over-tweaking will eventually make your tones worse. My yardstick is to play it against a backing track. If I'm trying to tone-match, play along with the original recording. If it's one of my own compositions, I play along with the drum, bass, and (sometimes) keyboard tracks,and judge that way. If you're only listening to the raw, unaccompanied guitar, you won't get an accurate idea of how it will sit in a mix with other instruments...plus a lot of that top-end fizz that sticks out like a turd in a punch bowl with just the solo guitar, simply disappears in the mix anyway, making all the extra EQing a waste of time.

Here's how I see it...with standard frets, wear is inevitable. Yes, it might take considerable time before complete re-fret is necessary, and you can usually grind and polish a couple of times before there's not enough meat left to re-crown them. But replacement cannot be avoided forever, and once I discovered just how resistant to wear the stainless frets are, the decision to re-fret all my guitars was a no-brainer. The money would eventually be spent anyway. My first set of stainless frets is about 2 years old now, on a guitar that sees daily use with heavy guage strings (.11-.50, in standard tuning)...and there's not a mark on them. The ease of bending has less to do with the composition of the strings themselves, than it does with how smooth a surface they're being dragged across...it's an enormous difference. Standard frets feel like sandpaper to me now. I never bothered to investigate it all these years because I had assumed that there couldn't be such a glaring difference, but I was VERY wrong, lol.

Yes, I meant stainless frets. One of the best moves I could have made. I've never used pure nickel strings, so I can't offer you any info there. But I do know that most strings out there are a steel core with nickel winding, and generally nickel plating on the plain strings, so I don't know if you're gonna notice any difference as far as corrosion is concerned. There are plain steel sets out there with no nickel anywhere...but unless that's what you've got, whatever your using likely has nickel on the outside already anyway.

Go stainless, and you'll never go back. I have only 2 guitars left to convert...they're practically indestructible, you'll wear out before they do. Bending strings is effortless. I should have done it years ago.

Assuming that the formula is still the same, yeah. That's Oct 2014...so that one has already been sitting in a warehouse for year.

Wouldn't surprise me a bit...we should all just get used to the idea of the JTVs going the way of the dodo. Nothing lasts forever...and tech-heavy products have a REALLY short half-life.

Hallelujah, a voice of reason. That has driven me nuts for years...I suppose Kevlar speaker cables would be nice, just in case your living room comes under fire in a drive-by...but the notion that they sound any better or worse, is comical.

Well who knows? Maybe I'm wrong. The evidence thus far is anecdotal, so we shall see. You say you haven't seen any newer than 2013 in a store...I'm still waiting for my first public Variax sighting...and I'm within 10 miles of a GC and 2 Sam Ash locations. There's never gonna be a huge market for these things. I just don't see enough of a demand to justify 4 different models, plus the absurdly priced US JTVs.

Someone had posted recently that he had one on order from a Labor Day sale...retailer canceled the order with the excuse that no more are coming from L6. So yes, it's hearsay...but it's also common sense. It is a VERY niche product. Most guitar players don't even know they exist. It's not cost effective for them to keep that many irons in the fire. They're already producing the Standard at a much lower MSRP, which means it's costing less to produce...so they can continue to supply the same tiny market share with a less costly item, tool the factory for one design instead of three, and call it a day. Money decides everything...if you want one, I'd grab it while you can. I suspect supplies will start drying up soon.

Lol... That aside, I will never part with my Fulltone Clyde Deluxe wah...I've yet to find a convincing wah in any multi-fx unit.

If the Carvin is DOA and not worth fixing, check out some of Rocktron's SS power amps. They have several single rack-space units with a lot of punch, and they weigh next to nothing. Had a couple of them at various times over the years...they're pretty bulletproof.

Just buy the guitar....nobody can tell you if you're going to prefer one model over another. If don't like it, you won't have any problem unloading it, and you probably won't take much of a loss. The JTVs are soon to be discontinued in favor of the new Variax Standard, if they haven't already....and Strat replacement necks won't fit the new ones. So if you want options, buy the JTV. $699 is a steal. Bought mine when they were still $1K+.

Bucking for a promotion to marketing? ;)

It's just like the Ark of the Covenant...a mere glimpse at sensitive info like optimal pickup height will melt your face. L6 may very well have saved your bacon....now off you go to an authorized service center! ;)

OK...now it makes sense.

Forgive the pun, but you're comparing apples and oranges. If L6 had Apple's reach and resources, we wouldn't be having this conversation. They're just a few iThings shy of planting a flag, annexing Cupertino, CA, and becoming their own country ;). They release new products on a fairly regular schedule to a customer base that numbers in the tens of millions worldwide. Legions of the tech-obsessed pitch tents outside their stores days ahead of time...foregoing bathing, sustenance, and indoor plumbing...to buy a friggin' phone. Boggles the mind, but I digress. By comparison, the average schmuck walking the street has never heard of L6 or Helix. So who's gonna warehouse more product ahead of time? Expecting the same kind of roll-out from a company the size of L6 will leave you chronically disappointed...its easier to find a pearl in a pig's ear.

Fair enough. Is the amp by itself bass-heavy? 2x12, 4x12? Just curious...

Then why go out of your way to hint at it? Even your rebuttal has built-in plausible deniability..."we aren't 'necessarily' that strict". This conveys no information, and allows for just about any interpretation under the sun. Leaving yourself wiggle room is great for you, but it doesn't help anybody else. All it does is leave people who are trying to solve a problem, with the nagging feeling that they shouldn't touch their own instrument, or make even the simplest of adjustments that every guitar on earth periodically needs. If Ford started telling their costumers to never check their oil or tire pressure for fear of voiding a warranty, they'd get laughed out of the industry, and/or sued into bankruptcy.

If it works and you're happy, great. The point was, running straight into the front of the amp always requires extra work and/or extra gear to get it to sound right. I would bet you wouldn't need the external EQ if you went into the FX return. But if you're happy, you're happy and all is right with the world...;)

POD patches don't care what kind of guitar you're plugging in, any patch will work with any guitar you feed it, assuming that you have the inputs set properly. So yes, any given patch will work just fine with multiple guitars. Will they sound identical with a JTV and your ESP? No, of course not. No two guitars sound exactly the same. If they did, we'd all just own one, and be done with it. So expect to do some fine tuning with any instrument you plug in...but that will be the case with our without the fancy JTV electronics. As for the neck, Warmoth Strat necks are a drop in replacement. Other Strat replacement necks will work too...Mighty Mite makes a much cheaper one if $ is an issue. A few guys on here have gone that route with no complaints, so you're not stuck with Warmoth, though imho they do make a much better product. Either way, you're not gonna be able to "live with it" if you hate it. You'll never get comfortable, you won't play well on it, and the guitar will eventually end up collecting dust. Whether or not you will find it difficult to replace it depends on how comfortable you are working on guitars. Yes the intonation will need adjusting...then again, your shiny new JTV is likely to need that right out of the box anyway, regardless of whatever promises you get from the salesman over at GigantoMusic. A new neck will need to have the nut slots properly cut as well. Even pre-cut nuts are slotted deliberately high and generally need to be lowered a bit. Tuners will also need to be installed...though you may be able to get Warmoth to do that for you if you buy the tuners from them also. Not sure about that... If you're not comfortable doing it yourself, take it to any decent luthier you trust, and everything should be just fine...the work has nothing to do with the electronics. Most stuff (excluding fretwork) I do myself, but I chickened out on installing the neck, as the holes we not pre-drilled due to the offset spacing on the JTV. So I had an excellent repair guy I know do it for me. He had never seen a JTV before, yet no harm done. Same guy just did a grind and polish on it a month ago. Again, issue-free. If however, something else craps out down the road and you do need a warranty repair, you may have issues if the work was done somewhere else. Some guys choose to wait till the warranty runs out, and then do it. Up to you...I lasted about a month with the stock neck before replacing it, warranty be damned...haven't had any problems. Ymmv.