Variax 600 first impressions

The UPS driver came yesterday and dropped off a Line 6 Variax 600. I got the sonic blue one. As in TARHEEL blue and as opposed to baby blue which may seem the same to you put it's clearly much different. I plugged it into my THD Univalve into a Boogie Thiele ported 1x12 with Vintage 30's and fed it through a Rocktron Chameleon for a little while too.

I've owned 3 other Variaxes (2 500's and one 700 with trem) so I pretty much knew what to expect. The 600 has the 300 electronics revision. The 600 has the same headstock and body style as the 300. The differences between the 600 and the 300 is the 600 has a whidlee bar and the neck is much better. That's not to say the neck on the 600 is great, more that the neck on the 300 is total shite.

I ran through the various guitar models and it sounded as good and bad as the ones I had before. The Strat, Tele, Les Paul, Firebird, Gretsch, 6-string Rick, Sitar, jazz box, semi-holow, and 6-string acoustics all sounded pretty darn good. The 12-strings suck still. They are really bad. I tried dialing in compression and chorus and delay and reverb to bury them and somehow the suck kept ringing through - impressive. This is a sign of the larger problem with the Variax. More on that in a minute.

I had a lot of fun with this. It really is quite convincing. A Tele really sounds like a Tele. The quack sounds on a Strat sound right. The Rick's jangle. The Les Paul neck pickup gets all fat and warm like you expect. The hollow body models inspire you to play all three "jazz" chords you know :) The semi-hollows emit kick ass blues tones. The Gretsch handled Stray Cat Strut no problem. The acoustics were sort of mediocre running through my guitar amp but I know from past experience that running them through a rig more suited to an acoustic guitar that they sound like pretty good piezo equipped guitars - the Variax comes with a footswitch just for this purpose.

Is the Variax as good as your best Strat, Les Paul, whatever? Nah. But it's very good. It really is.

Then it was time to fire up the Variax Workbench. This is a piece of software that allows you to reconfigure the guitar to your heart's content. You connect the Variax to a PC via either the Workbench USB box, a PODxt Live, or a Vetta with a VDI board. You can reprogram any "patch" on the Variax to be anything you want it to be.

You can create all sorts of monstrosities with the Workbench or you can just tweak existing guitar models for subtle changes.

For instance, the first thing I created was a flametop Les Paul with two Tele bridge pickups wired in series side by side.

You pick a body - Les Paul, Strat, Tele, etc.

You pick pickups - Les Paul PAF, Danelectro lipstick, Firebird mini-hum, etc.

You tweak the controls - you pick the pot values - 500k, 250k, etc. and the capacitor values .47pf, etc.

Note that the options are limited for acoustic based models.

And you can tweak the tuning. This is where the Variax could shine but ends up disappointing.

Remember my Les Tele monster that I created? I made it a baritone - I dropped the tuning down to B. It sounded pretty weak IMO. There was all sorts of what I call "little digital mystery sounds" happening. It's hard to describe but it's not a good thing. I did find that with some Chameleon mixed in things got better - a little chorus, distortion, reverb, and/or delay definitely masks the annoyances here.

Want open E tuning? Want drop D? No problem.

You could do the 12-string thing only with limited body types - so I couldn't turn my Les Tele into a 12-string monstrosity. But I could make a Rick Tele 12-string. There really was no salvaging the 12-string tones. Maybe with time and tweaking. I also know they are working on an update so hopefully the tuning stuff will improve.