I only brought my JTV 69 with me.We use cookies and similar tools that are necessary to enable you to make purchases, to enhance your shopping experiences and to provide our services, as detailed in our Cookie Notice. I would take pix for you but I am in Arizona and my 500 is in Colorado at the moment. I am a soldering expert - build my own amps and boards and I have the right tools. It would lose volume and get noisy every once in a while. I had grounding issues with the original piezos.
#ACOUSTIC PIEZO PICKUP INSTALL#
That being said my install worked fine first time and it's reliable. You also have to be careful not to have the wires get pinched when you reinstall the bridge. This is easy to do on a 500 because it's a hard tail. I removed the whole bridge / flex assembly to work on it. The difficulty is that the wires have to be very short so you need the right tools to split the wires and strip the insulation without breaking them. (I think it was the one with the blue tracer) I scraped away the insulation on the flex to make room to ground each of the second wires on each piezo. You have to make sure you ground the correct wire. The original piezo's only had one wire and no ground. I opted to do it at the flex rather than risk damaging the traces on the board.
You could try to find a flex circuit that matches that connector or you could very carefully solder the wires to the connector pins but that is not easy either because it is a surface mount connector. The later Variax models had a white connector with wires and that is much easier to modify. There are no wires on a 500 to splice into. The wires are long enough to run back to the board but the connector at the board on a 500 is a flex connector. It was not easy to do and if you do not have lots of soldering experience and the right tools I don't recommend it. I cut the cables and soldered them to the flex circuit at the bridge. I would still appreciate if someone did hard picking on a generation 1 Variax with a ghost system though. I assume that a ghost system would reduce the piezo quack unless I got a bad set or installed it wrong. I remember the LP model says it's emulating PAF pickups in the manual. On a frequency chart, it appears as a narrow peak around 1khz, typical of piezo transducers.Personally, I've solved it by stoping to use modeled sound with overdrive (I've mounted mag pickups in my Variax for that and I use the Variax models with clean tones only). That said, yes, the Variax quack exists and is not exactly the same than a "vintage PAF quack". I've tried many PAF replicas and only a few of them are able to reproduce this tonal feature, BTW. IME, "LP sound or other warm guitar models" DO quack: it's one of the prominent features of PAF pickups and one of the reasons why vintage Gibson are considered as unique sounding VS modern ones.
The Variax sounds a bit quacky when I play hard.Ī few answers from someone who owns a Variax 500 since 2003. Second guitar after the long pause is my SG. It fits the tele and strat sound, but definitely not the LP sound or other warm guitar models.įirst guitar is the Variax in LP bridge. I'm not sure if it's a quack, but it just starts to sound too bright when I play loud. Not too bad with distortion, but without sounds kinda weird. I'm a type of person who likes to play hard when the notes call for it, but I suppose I have to adjust when using a Variax. I don't have a LP, but I don't remember them doing that either. I know an SG is a bit different, but it's very similar.
I'm wondering if 1) The bright, snappy sound is a limitation from using piezos or 2) That's how a LP is supposed to sound and my SG is weird. I know what you're talking about, trust me, I've had that problem, and yes, backing off the string volume in workbench made it go away. I was wondering if that's also considered a quack, or if it's just when the piezo output is so loud that it makes a distorting weird sound. On the Variax, it gets snappy and almost sounds like a luke warm strat when I play hard. When I play hard on my SG, it has the same characteristics as not playing hard, but louder and compressed. That's what I've done, but I'm wondering if the LR baggs piezos are also attributing to the snappy strat-ish sound on the LP models. I am also going through Workbench HD and backing off on the string volume as some other posters have suggested. If I back off of the guitar it doesn't seem to be a problem. I have a feeling it may be related to fret buzz feeding into the piezo since I keep my action very low.
I have had problems with the acoustic models breaking up or sounding distorted and quacking on certain strings when I really dig into the guitar.
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