POD XT & Variax - Anyone tried them ??

[Savo]

Hey guys

This is my first post here i think. I read the forum quite a bit at work though. Just havent posted before

Anyway, i have an ENGL Blackmore, DSL 100, a Gibson Les Paul, and Edwards Les Paul and a Schecter C-1

I just recently moved into a new house and cant play the amps anymore at home. I leave them in another house and jam there.

I was thinking of maybe selling the DSL and getting a PODxt live for headphone jamming and recording in my new house (can you also play a cd through it and jam along to the cd ??) Maybe then later on get a pair of monitors and jam through them.

I dont want to have to have to lug the 3 guitars back and forth between my house and where my amps are 2-3 times a week so i was thinking of getting the variax with it. I really only want it for the alternate tunings. It would be cool to be able to go from E standard to Drop C on the one guitar with just the flick of a switch and not have to have 3 guitars lying around.

I heard the variax sound weird for muting and heavier stuff and i have heard conflicting reports about how it handles alternate tunings where you might drop the E string as low as C

Has anyone here used a variax with the XT Live or with out it, and if so, how did you find it ?

Also can you run a cd through the XT Live and jam along with it through heaphones ?

Thanks

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

I tried a variaxe (not for recording) in a store once back when they just were becoming popluar. I didn't like how they played but I was impressed with the fact that it modeled so many guitars. I never tried to drop the tuning though so no answer for you there.

And I don't have any clue about it going through a line 6 podxt. Although I am sure it wouldn't be bad.

 

[006]

A while back when the 700 first came out I did a session and the band's guitarist had one. He brought a couple of install CDs and his XT Live. We put the WorkBench software on the PC (we already had the Edit program for XT patches) and we loaded up some of the patches he made at home. After some tweaking we, as in my boss and I, got really interested in this thing.

We ended up giving them some free hours in exchange for letting us borrow his Variax for a day or two. They agreed and we really had some fun with that thing. Now...to be completely honest, it can't do metal if it meant saving your life. However, if you play rock, jazz, blues, blues-rock, punk, fusion, and even nu-metal it's a fabulous peice of equipment. Sounds great. Really convincing.

What we noticed is that the Variax with it's modeled guitars sounded better using Line6's models on the XTL than they did with our own guitars (EC-1000, PRS Custom22, Gibson Les Paul Custom). We spent nearly 14 hours straight just fucking with all of the settings. It seriously kept us interested that long. We then wanted to see how well the switching was using the knob on the guitar itself. So once you save your settings (just like patches for the XTL) to a preset "slot" on the knob, you can then just flip the knob to whatever axe you want basically.

If you are interested in this you should check out the videos on the Line6 site, they really do show the features off and you can hear it in action. One of the coolest things I think that we got it to do was to go from a Les Paul style electric sound to a nice fat acoustic guitar sound with the flick of the knob. And again, for everything but metal stuff, it sounded damn convincing.

Also, the way it works with the patches and the XTL, you connect your Variax to the XTL with the ethernet cable. You can still use your regular patches, but when you flip the switch on the Variax to change models, you are basically plugging in a different guitar. So say you have a certain patch for rock stuff, you try POS1 on the knob and it's a Les Paul, sounds good...then POS2 is more like a PRS type sound...it may sound better, bla bla...whatever. It's really neat and being into less heavy music for my personal band it's something I've been looking at more and more lately.

Hope I helped.

~e.a

 

[Savo]

^ Thanks. That was a great help. I watched the videos on the Line 6 web site and saw a few on youtube aswell but kinda had the same feeling as what you said.

It seems excellent for rock, blues, acoustic etc.. but not so good for heavier music (which i'd be playing 90% of the time )

Some of the blues tones etc.. i heard in clips were outstanding though. The feature of being able to have lots of different tunings loaded onto one guitar would be a God-send too so i was hoping someone here could confirm that it could do heavier music. I'd probably really only use the Les Paul and Acoustic models and then lots of different tunings. Im sure i'd mess around with the other models too.

I'd still be tempted to try it, but im not sure how bad it actually sounds and i cant try it out unfortunatley. I wouldnt be playing Death Metal stuff. Just up to Metallica and a bit more modern. I hear it cant do palm mutes very well though because it has no pick-ups. This could be a big problem