Variax
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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, such as the Telecaster, Stratocaster, Les Paul, and 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.
[edit] Variax Electric Guitars
| Variax | |
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| Manufacturer | Line 6 |
| Period | appr. 2003 — Present |
| Construction | |
| Body type | Soild |
| Neck joint | Bolt-on neck |
| Woods | |
| Body | Agathis |
| Neck | Maple |
| Fretboard | Rosewood |
| Hardware | |
| Bridge | Fixed (300, 500), Tremolo (600, 700) |
| Pickup(s) | Saddle-mounted piezo |
| Colors available | |
| {{{colors}}} | |
There are 4 models of solid body Variaxes, the 300, 500, 600 and 700 (each more expensive and of higher quality that the previous). Some of the models come with a vibrato bridge, others do not.
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 modelling 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. The standard tuning of a guitar (from lowest to highest) is E A D G B E. but often guitarists will alter this tuning.
For instance, a popular tuning with slide players is D G D G B D, which makes it so that strumming the guitar "open" (not pressing any strings to a fret) produces a Gmaj chord. This makes it so that with a slide lying across all the strings a chord is produced anywhere on the neck.
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.
