Picked up a Taylor Variax JTV-59 yesterday. My band play a few songs that require tuning down a 1/2 step, while others are in standard, so rather than jumping about changing guitars all the time I thought i'd give a variax a go.
So far so good, the actual guitar build is excellent, if a little heavy. The Neck is big and chunky similar to the Les Paul Custom which is great and the magnetic pickups sound good. The digital side of things is a lot better than I expected, switching over to the digital Lesser model sounds almost the same at the magnetic pickups but brings in all the tuning options as well which is perfect, plus I've set it up to have a strat neck pickup when the pickup switch is up which is ideal for some of our songs.
It also does a decent acoustic and 12 string sound, certainly would be fine for a pub gig, I need to investigate ways of splitting the signal so I can send the acoustic sounds to the PA rather than through my main amp.. Not sure if this is possible but hope so.
Any other Variax users on here?
Comments
soundcloud.com/thecolourbox-1
youtube.com/@TheColourboxMusic
If we bought guitars purely as functional items based on need rather than want I suspect a few more of us might already own one. I'll define need here as a guitar that covers a hell of a lot of standard sounds and tunings in a band situation.
If I was gigging I reckon I'd grab one. As it happens I don't 'need' one and 'want' a collection of the classic guitars.
I will be interested to hear how it works out for you. Do any well known players use one?
I have a JTV-69 and they're great guitars.
Re splitting the signal to take the acoustic sounds to a PA, I use a Mooer Micro ABY switch and that works fine. It definitely adds an extra dimension to the acoustic sounds if you play them through a full range speaker.
The ability to set up custom pickup combinations and tunings in the Workbench software and then save them in the custom presets in the guitar is also really useful.
http://uk.line6.com/jtv-59p/features