ledocs

I bought a new Variax JTV-69 from Sweetwater in 2022, during the pandemic, and had it sent to France. I wanted to cut down or eliminate retuning guitars on stage, and I wanted to reduce the number of guitars required for a gig. I have some original tunes that I play in Drop D or other tunes that I play in open G, especially slide arrangements, and I am working with a singer whose range would dictate going too high on the fretboard with a capo, so my arrangements don't sound very good. So my solution has been to tune up a whole step. For most songs, I'm playing a PRS tuned up a whole step instead of being in standard concert. Then, I use the Variax for slide guitar or for a few songs in standard concert, and for those I use the magnetic pickups. I've decided that this use is acceptable for playing local gigs, but I would not do this for recording, I would instead switch to other guitars and retune them. Basically, the modeling just doesn't sound as good as a normal guitar retuned -- ever. It does sound better at higher volumes, as early adaptors warned users. I would also prefer a thinner profile neck than the standard one, but for the moment I don't want to invest in a new neck for the Variax, I'd rather just buy a PRS Silver Sky or something similar. Another thing is, the Variax is hard to control with the onboard buttons, it's much better used in combination with the Helix, and that's how I play it now, through the Helix, which also eliminates the battery problem, which itself is a big problem. The battery thing is ridiculous. It lasts 6-8 hours, or one day, if you're playing a lot. So, I'm not a big fan of the Variax, I've put a lot of time into it, and it has one possible use, a use that most players would not have. Another reason I bought the Variax was for the whammy bar. The question remains, would it be worth installing a new neck in order to get something more like a standard Strat with the magnetic pickups? I have not ruled this possibility out, and if anyone here can give me guidance on that specific question, I'd be interested. Honestly, the whole guitar modeling thing was a failure, IMO. It would always be better to switch to another guitar pretuned to an alternate tuning, but I suppose that should have been obvious to me from the beginning. And this is what any professional playing for more than 100 people would probably do. But not everyone who is on the road could afford to do this, it's not practical. My question is, can I get close to a PRS Silver Sky or Fender Custom Strat by putting a slimmer neck on my JTV-69? I don't play rock, I'm never going to play rock, I'm 74 years old, I play mainly original songs that are jazz-inflected blues, or jazz-inflected folk, or jazz. If I could get a much better guitar to play in standard concert out of this Variax by investing up to 500 euros in it, it's probably worth it to me, especially if I ever get into using the whammy bar. But I also have a G&L ASAT Tele that I payed $350 for, used from a store, and it's fine, I bought it to use as a travel guitar, and it plays and sounds better than the Variax right now, but I'm not really a Fender single-coil sound kind of guy, I prefer humbuckers. I could also have a trem bar system installed on that guitar, although the one I was interested in became unavailable in France during the pandemic.