Yesterday I received my new guitar. Today I will send it back!

Note: What I am going to write here should not be considered a review. It is not since you need more time in order to write a review. These are just my practical observations on playing MY new Line 6 Variax 600 guitar. I don’t want to say that all Variax guitars behave the same, because frankly I don’t believe so. This is not a review of how it feels, I will not say here if the sound of Gibson models is close to the real Gibson model or anything like this, this is not the reason for this post. I started as a fan of Variax possibilities, I truly believe this is the way to go in the future and I do support this as much as possible. Read on…

Later edit: please read until the end because of a last moment phone call.

So, yesterday evening I have received my new guitar, a beautiful Variax 600, blue. I can tell you I have waited almost 3 weeks for this guitar to come here from UK so I didn’t have the chance to test it, I saw this particular guitar for the first time when I opened the box.

I opened it, took the guitar out, I am sorry I didn’t make a movie out of it, it should have been interesting, but I had no camera and no patience to wait anymore. The guitar is nice, I love the finish on the neck, natural wood color, I had no problems with the quality of details, playability, or general feeling of “cheap” as I have seen some people saying on the internet. Nothing in this direction, but hey, I get excited pretty fast and a new guitar can blind you in the first days from that point of view, right?

So, let’s test it to the rehearsal room!!

I plugged everything together, as you probably know if you are familiar with Variax guitars, you need 2 input lines in the PA, a guitar input, as usual, and a voice input, for the acoustic guitars. There is a foot switch that makes the…switch between the two lines. Done! Let’s see the baby in action!

First, a jazzbox model, because it was set there. I started to pick a few notes…surprise! I was picking a straight D major chord and the notes were…well, how to put it, not right! The notes on the G string sounded like having some kind of flanger or rotary effect, like in a wave, coming to me and then disappearing back! WTF?! I switched to an other model, then to an other one, then to an other one…

General result?

The Spank models, meaning the Stratocaster emulations, on all positions had big issues with G string from 2 points of view:

• volume: the volume of the G string was lower than the volume of the B and D strings. Picking the notes in a chord gave me the impression that one string was not present there. Playing the same pattern on the 3 strings gave me the impression that somebody was having fun with the volume knob while on G string.
• sensitivity: when picking B string or D string from as smooth as I could to hitting them hard, they sounded as they should, low in the first case and loud in the second case. Well, not the same situation with G string. When picking notes on G string easily, you can barely hear the notes, while when increasing the force applied on picking the same notes, the volume suddenly jumped, it was like having only 2 levels of volume on G string.

Gibson models gave me a beautiful sound for distortion, I was quite happy with how my guitar sounded on Gibson models through my BOSS processor…except at one moment when I had the sudden impression that I was tuned to some radio station, since my guitar suddenly started to make a hum-buzz-radio-like sound that scared me since the volume was high on the PA.

At one moment I had the surprise to see that a string just disappeared from the mix…it was not there anymore, WTF?!! As I have understood from somebody from the internet having similar problems, switch to an other guitar and then back to it. OK, I did and the string was there. That sounded too much like a reset on a computer. I know this guitar is a computer but come on…

On a 12 string guitar, the low G note on low E string was way too powerful, IMO, produced a strange resonance. Now, I can not be sure if this was real or just an impression caused by the particular room conditions, because the 12 string is produced by kind of an octaver or something. Now, this low G note may have been resonating with somebody else in the room, like the speaker or drums, or who knows, I can not tell for sure but the impression was that playing a F, G, A sequence, the G was louder and that was not good.

I had the impression of a strange behind-the-note effect in some cases, again on G string mostly, like picking the G string, hearing the clean G note and then behind it a long distorted but very low volume tail, like a low volume distortion. Strange. I can not tell you on what guitar because I have stopped looking at the models and focused more on how the particular notes sounded. Like I have never done with any other guitar, I have started to take every single fret and play it in order to see if sounds strange on some notes…

I also experience a strange noise on an acoustic model that was set on custom bank, so I just switched to custom bank and started to hear a noise like when the cable is broken and you move it around to have the two pieces in contact.

At that moment I was already mad with the fact that the guitar was not what I expected but what happened after this really put an end to it: I tried to save a model on the cutom bank following their procedure described in the book and that was the end of it, after this I wasn’t able to start the guitar anymore, nothing made any noise anymore, the guitar was dead!

I unplugged everything and called the guys at the company that sold me the guitar decided to ask my money back since I needed a reliable guitar, not a toy, but there was nobody there at that moment.

I called Silviu, my friend who owns one and told him about my experience with it and he somehow convinced me to give it another chance and have it fixed or replaced by the company instead of asking the money back. Also, I experienced a loud noise when pressing the foot switch and I was also mad at it because it can not be used on stage like this, imagine hearing a shot amplified as loud as possible every time you switch your guitar from acoustic to electric. He explained me, however, that this is normal and not a bug, you just need to turn of Phantom power on your mic line. Well, good to know…

I am going to call again the guys from the company to see how I can fix this and keep you posted.I expect a good feedback from the guys who sold me the guitar, I hope for the best and I hope to end up with a good, reliable guitar that can be played on stage.

By the way, I have also attached a few pictures with the guitar and yours truly!

Later edit: I have managed to get the guys on the phone and they told me to cool down cause there is no problem, the guitar is actually a computer (of course) and needs a bit of “tuning” using their Workbench software so I should get back to them with the guitar, they will connect it to their computer and “re-tune” it, kind of how they do it with your car computer, when something goes wrong. Strange, very strange, but efficient, if it works. So, I am happy with this solution and probably tomorrow I will take a day off to go to Bucharest to tune my guitar. Damn!

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