Variax 600 questions...hope some experts are around

[Forrest]

Hey guys,

I have a line on a variax 600 for pretty cheap. I'm unfortunately short on time to do enough research before I go check it out and make a decision....trust me I'm googling my ass off right now, but if you know the answers to some of these, it'd really help me out.

1) I know this thing has a piezo pickup. I know there are midi guitars with piezo pickups. Is there a way to get midi output from the variax? Line 6 says "this is not a midi guitar"...I can't find any indication they made drivers/software to use it as one.

2) My ultimate goal was to do an electronics swap. Not so much a case of "I refuse to play this non-metal looking guitar" but honestly, the body style looks hideous to me. Is there any benefit of getting a 600 over a 300 in this case? It's been a while since I looked into this but I seem to remember getting the impression that the electronics were the same, just better workmanship on the guitar.

Thanks in advance, I'm going to do some more digging on the variax transplant boards and junk now.

-Forrest

[DonP]

There is a guy on this board named Brian in Dayton who I know was into Variaxs, but for the life of me I can't think of his handle.

We went to the grand opening of the Dayton GC together.

[BTB007]

Haha, what's up Don! Yep, that was me. Yep, almost positive you cannot do midi with a Variax. And, if you just want the guts, get the lower priced 300 instead. And, I would honestly recommend finding a 500 as they are actually pretty decent playing guitars. I have owned a 500 and 600, btw.

[Forrest]

I went ahead and got the 600. It plays really well actually. It was only 350$, I figure I could flip it any time on ebay and make that back, they're going for almost double that.

I did do some more reading...in order to get the MIDI thing working you have to get a little more hardware, from Graphtech. They sell the kit to get the signals from the Variax piezo bridge and send it to a guitar synth that will do the freq -> midi conversion. I have a Roland GR33, I just don't like the GK2 pickup. It's uncomfortable and when I start playing fast it starts cutting out.

The Rackvax guys are not accepting orders right now, and before they stopped, they weren't supporting the 600. So I don't know what I'll do about that. My ideal solution would be to take the Variax guts and put them in a Rackvax box, and get an entire Graphtech Floyd Rose w/ piezos and put it in a Jackson. If the cost goes over the price of a piezo equipped MIDI guitar that also has a regular magnetic pickup setup, say, something like Carvin sells, I'll just bail on this project.

Thanks for the help, though. I am impressed by the acoustic modeling. It doesn't replace an acoustic but for playing live songs that require both an electric and an acoustic, it's really convenient. I don't like bringing my expensive acoustics to gigs to use on half of one or two songs.

[DonP]

Haha, what's up Don! Yep, that was me. Yep, almost positive you cannot do midi with a Variax. And, if you just want the guts, get the lower priced 300 instead. And, I would honestly recommend finding a 500 as they are actually pretty decent playing guitars. I have owned a 500 and 600, btw.

Hey how's it going! Long time no see. I'm glad you found this thread - I knew you would know about Variax's.