Buying an Electro Acoustic - Any recommendations?

[V]

Basically an electric guitar body with piezo pickups in the bridge, one for each string. The output from the strings is then run through some clever sound mangling electronics to make it sound like a Strat/Les Paul/Gibson 335/Tele/Banjo/Martin Dreadnought Acoustic etc...
You can also mess with the tuning on the fly, so a flick of a switch takes you from standard electric tuning to a drop D or an acoustic DADGAD setup.
You can store your own custom guitars in there too, with a completely different one under each position of the 5 way switch, so you could go from a Les Paul bridge to a Strat out of phase, to a Rickenbacker 12 string, to a banjo to a 335 Neck just by wiggling your pickup selector.
The thing that most appeals to me is that you can really get under the hood with the Workbench software and experiment with body types and pickups and see for example what a Hollowbody Gibson would sound like with a Strat neck pickup, a P90 and an Ibanez madmoshingmetal bridge. You can even affect the taper of the volume control and the resistance of the tone pots for each position.
Check out the Line6 links above if you want to see/hear more about it.



And check back here next week when it arrives and I discover after all that that it's an overhyped tinny piece of shit...

[Labian Quest]

The thing that interested me about the Variaxes was the fact that you're supposed to be able to program your own tunings into the software, though having owned a POD for about a year now, I wouldn't be expecting too much from Line 6's 'modelling' technology.

And check back here next week when it arrives and I discover after all that that it's an overhyped tinny piece of shit...

I don't know about tinny, but I think the triggering on the Variaxes is supposed to be good compared to previous gens of guitar synths, but it apparently doesn't always respond particularly well to things like palm muting, pinch harmonics etc.

[micanio]

I don't like the Variax at all. There's something about it that's a bit....soulless.
10/10 for the idea but I just find it fundamentally wrong. And all the ones I've played have been pretty awful. And they look terrible too.

[V]

Soul is soooo last century - the future of music is gadgets.

Here's a clip of a guy who's ripped the components out of his variax and stuffed them in his regular guitar - goes through a few of the default sounds (acoustics/tele/les paul/335) most aren't too bad, but the strat model is way off.

[abighat]

I bought a PodXT Live in January, and it's the nuts. The amp sims are incredible, the effects sound great and adjusting them is an intuitive process. I've had tons of pedals and amps over the years and this unit is a godsend. It's a neat and robust unit which has withstood several pints of booze being knocked over it. The vast majority of the presets are a bit mad and unusable, but it's pretty easy to find great sounds with a minimum of effort.

I use a Jap Tele '62 reissue and a Hotrod DeLuxe, and after the purist in me had got used to the idea, I'd sayit's the best set up I've ever had.