cruisinon2

This is just my two cents, and perhaps I'm a bit cynical...but I don't care what they told him, or if they provided a written attestation, complete with the official wax seal of the High Exalted Mystic Cyclops of Wireless Repair...No business on earth is gonna pay somebody to sit in a chair and noodle for 12 hours to see how long it takes a battery to die. Say that out loud and try not to laugh, lol... I'm having trouble typing through the tears...obviously there's no way to confirm or deny it, but if there were I'd be comfortable betting every cent I have that it did not happen, lol.

I'm not saying you don't have a legitimate gripe... but you know as well as I do that posting about it in here isn't gonna rattle anybody's cage, because they're never gonna see it. Open a new ticket every day until somebody responds to you... eventually that will get noticed, and sooner or later you'll get a response, if for no other reason than wanting to get rid of you. Squeaky wheel gets the grease...

I've seen countless things complained about around here over the years... Why didn't the update have this?!?!?!?! Why didn't it they fix that?!?!?!?! How come nobody at Line 6 cares about my personal wish list?!?!?!?! But I honestly never thought I'd see the day when whining about the updates' numerical designations would become a thing... who cares if they call the next one the "Fred" update? With such "critical" things rattling around in your head, how do you find time to play? ;)

Any volunteers to create a demo of crackling, dusty vinyl? ;)

Agreed. Even if there is, I'm not sure I'd pull the trigger again unless there's really a quantum leap with the tech.

1) Ideascale is where feature requests need to go...it'll never get seen in here. 2) Don't hold your breath... it's a decade- old product line that hasn't seen an update in years. Development clearly ceased some time ago...

Here's the Variax bottom line everybody... you either get a good one that's relatively problem free (aside from inherent modeling limitations that they all share), or you get a "clang-er". And like it or not, part of it is user-dependent... tone, technique, etc etc. They're simply not for everybody. If we're all super lucky, future iterations/algorithms might solve some of these problems... till then, as impressive as they are, there are issues that will make them largely unusable for certain players. 10+ years in, that much is obvious. Is what it is...

The odds are basically zero that any patch created by somebody else will just happen to have the same output level as a factory preset, or ones you've dialed in yourself. Hell, you could build two patches of your own, one right after the other, tweaking until they're both "just right", and it's a virtual certainty that one will be louder than the other when you're done...

This has been talked and experimented to death for the last decade. Having followed these conversations for some time, here are the "Cliff Notes" (now I'm showing my age, lol): 1) Some guitars do it and some don't... don't ask me why. Either nobody knows, or those who do ain't talkin'. 2)What you play and how you play it often factor heavily in whether or not you'll notice a problem, and to what degree. 3) For those instruments that do have symptoms, there's little to nothing that can been done about it. You will find lots of homespun "cures" posted, alleging that it has solved or at least mitigated the problem, but none have proven to be universally effective. 4) 99.97% of the time, high gain tones make it worse... and since you bought the shred-mobile version, I'm guessing this will give you extra grief. 5) You can't EQ it away... at least not entirely, without compromising your overall sound to some extent. You might get a slight improvement with a really narrow Q at the right frequency, but it won't be a cure-all, particularly if the symptoms are as noticable as you've described. and most importantly... 6) If a universal fix were possible, we'd have had it years ago... even Line 6 gave up on it at some point, publicly announcing on this forum that they would not be devoting any more resources to the issue. If you're noticing it with the slightest touch of a pick, then the odds of seeing any substantial improvement aren't terribly good. Send it back before you get stuck with it... unless of course you're in love with the mag pickups and how she plays. I have the 69, and despite the modeling's shortcomings, I quite like the neck single coil, and the bridge humbucker is more than adequate for most crunch duties.

Yeah... this has nothing to do with Helix, or impedance settings. He's already ruled it out with another instrument that is working properly. If there's absolutely no discernable difference switching between pickups, then there ain't no switching happening, lol

Well that rules out the Helix as the cause then...the selector switch on that guitar is not functioning properly. It ain't switching anything...

Whether you accept it or not, the simple fact is that there's nothing to "fix". It's quieter than other patches because it is fundamentally different...there is no amp model boosting the output. So if you want this patch to have the same output as the others you'll have to boost it somewhere, whether you want to or not. Different blocks do varous things to the signal along the way. The inevitable result is a bunch of patches that are not balanced by default... it's unavoidable. That's why the ability to boost (or cut) at the output block (or just about anywhere else along the way, for that matter) exists in the first place. There's nothing "wrong"with the patch... it's just different from the others, and is behaving accordingly. It's the exact same problem that you'd have when creating patches using two very different amp models... some are just inherently louder than others, even if you set the "channel volume" parameters to the same value. The solution? Use the output block to level everything out.... that's not "papering over the cracks".... it's using a tool to accomplish a task precisely as it was meant to. Likewise, there's nothing to avoid in the future, because you've made no "mistakes", and the device is not malfunctioning. Practically every block gives you the ability to boost or cut the output level... so boost it wherever it makes you happy if you really don't want to touch the output block. But in the end, if you want a usable patch, you don't have much choice.

Best topic-drift thread ever! lmao..

Finding retailers with Variax stock on hand is frequently an issue... these are niche products that don't exactly fly of the shelves (the Shuriken even more so than the rest of the lineup) so most places aren't ordering large numbers of them at a time. And the only thing harder than finding a place that has one in stock, is getting anything that even remotely resembles an accurate ETA for the next batch (or the next one, as the case may be). So if you really have your heart set on getting one, you might want to consider taking what's available, or looking to the used market... otherwise you might be in for an extended wait.

Curiously, it has the same lack of compatibility as the inquiry showing up in a "why does my Helix sound like $hit?" thread...;)

If your buddy had already registered it previously, then he has to un-register it first, or you'll never be able to do it. However, I'm not sure what that has to do with Customtone anyway...afaik, you only have to be logged into the site to download stuff. Don't know why it would care one way or the other if the unit itself is registered or not.

This... I don't care how many speakers there are, or how they're wired... if they're all in one box, there's nothing "stereo" about it. It's like taking two monitors and placing them side by side touching each other... no physical separation of L and R channels = no stereo spread.

Well you're not gonna get any stereo separation playing through only one of anything... Keep the monitors.

What's going on at the tuning pegs has nothing to do with piezo function. They either work, or they don't. A slightly loose connection from the saddle to the main board will produce that symptom, as will an intermittent ground connection, which is maintained by a solid connection between the height adjustment screws and the bridge plate itself. Any dust or crud under there can interrupt that connection, and cause the output to cut out... it's not a great design but it is what it is. If just putting a new string on solved the issue, it's very likely that in the process of manipulating the saddle was enough to re-establish the ground connection... whichever it was, the number of wraps around the tuning pegs is merely coincidental. No idea what a "grub scree" is, but this is exactly what I described above. Setting the action too low will also break your ground connection if the height adjustment screws are no longer touching the bridge plate. The only "best practice" is a proper setup. It's still a guitar...bridge saddles appropriately adjusted, dust and grime underneath removed so there are no grounding issues, and all the piezo leads tightly seated in the main board.

I want L6 branded boxer shorts, a churro, and a chance to use the executive crapper at the mother ship in Calabasas.

Can you bring me a tuna sandwich and a bag of chips?...No? You can't? Why not? Ideascale. Ideascale. Ideascale. Ideascale... read that again. If you pay close attention, you'll see a pattern emerging. This is a user forum... we don't work for Line 6. Nobody reading your multiple redundant posts can grant your wishes, no matter how many times you toss them out into the ether. Continuing down this road will get you nothing but well deserved sarcasm. Now go get me my sandwich...

Just wear big fluffy slippers... problem solved. ;)

Two things: 1) Asking in here is useless... feature requests have to go in Ideascale if you want anybody "official" to see it. 2) What exactly are you asking for? It's not terribly clear...

You'll never get a real answer, but if I were a betting man I'd say it's because the current Variax offerings are more than a decade old, and those kits were originally released to power guitars that are even older than that... nothing lasts forever. It also depends on where you're getting your information... if some retail drone told you it's discontinued, it's probably because that's what his inventory control program spat out... but that may or may not have anything to do with reality... it might very well still exist and be available elsewhere. You can't take anything some music store counter jockey tells you as Gospel. Most of them have permanent Neutral Zones around their heads...I once had one tell me (complete with obnoxious smirk and eye-roll) that the item I was inquiring about "didn't exist". Meanwhile it was in a display case not 6 feet away... but I digress. Nope... it's the battery, or a VDI connection to a device specifically designed to power a Variax.

Start here and watch a few of his Helix- specific tutorials: If you're new to modeling, you've got your work cut out for you... they're not "plug and play" devices. The learning curve tends to be steep, as they require a different approach than simply plugging into your favorite amp with the tone controls at "noon". While there are no "rules" per se, or universal formulas for success, remember the following two things: 1) It's not a guitar amp, and it'll never behave like one no matter what you do. 2) Unless you stop thinking like a guitar player, you're finished before you start. You're creating recorded guitar tones, not live "amp in the room" tones... you have to think like a recording engineer. Mic choice/ placement and EQ are the two biggest pieces of the puzzle. And when I say EQ, I'm not talking about the amp model's bass, mids, and treble controls...I mean the specific targeting of certain frequencies/ frequency ranges, that will allow you to really sculpt your sound. It's a process, and his videos are excellent... he's very good at explaining why he does certain things, as opposed to just saying "set 'Parameter X' at 7". You'll eventually figure it out, but there's no one magic bullet.