Sunday, January 13, 2008

My New Guitar - Variax 600

Variax is a line of modeling guitars marketed and developed by Line 6. It claims to be the first guitar able to emulate the tones of 25 other guitars, including notable models by Fender, Gibson, and many others. It also has a banjo and a sitar tone. The Variax originally came as an electric guitar, but they have since then introduced modeling acoustic guitars and modeling electric bass guitars.

There are 3 current models of solid body Variaxes, the 300, 600 and 700 (the 500 has been discontinued) - each more expensive and of higher quality that the previous. The 600 & 700 models come with a vibrato bridge, while the 300 comes with a string-through-body hard-tail..

The bridge of all Variax electrics has an individual piezo-electric pickup for each string. All 6 of these signals is then converted individually to digital in the guitar’s electronics. This allows for processing with resolution to the individual string.

This level of resolution allows two technologies that would otherwise be impossible: 1) the modeling within the instrument can emulate the behavior of instruments where the movement of one string affects other strings on the instrument, and 2) the guitar can be set to behave as if the individual strings were tuned differently than they actually are. This allows guitarists to switch between different tunings using a pedal or a switch on the guitar, without having to manually retune each string.

A Variax can be set so that one selection on the instrument produces a standard electric guitar with standard tuning, but a different setting produces a metal resophonic guitar in open tuning, all happening with the flick of a switch.

One very popular thing to do is to take the electronics and hardware of a Variax (all the solid body models have the same electronics) and retrofit them into a different instrument, sometimes to add the Variax technology to the existing instrument, other times to create a personalized, custom guitar with the technology of a Variax.

Line 6 has the same technology available in electric basses as well.