INCOMING

 Okay, so I bought another instrument, but at least I made sure Anna knew about it first. What's the point of adulthood, if not to have fun where you can?

It's a weird sort of guitar I've had my eye on for a while, called a "modeling guitar" because it digitally models the sound of other instruments. Only one company, Line 6, makes such a thing, and they've been making emulators for decades. I already have a multi-effects unit of theirs, the M9, from when I bought an electric guitar, and realized I did not want to spend the time, money, or space on a billion different guitar pedals. People get very passionate about very specific guitar pedals or effects: to take one example from the list of effects in the M9, the Tape Echo effect is an echo based on the Maestro EP-3 Echoplex™, manufactured from 1970 to 1991. Do I care? Not really. I have only the vaguest of opinions about different kinds of distortion, and no opinions about quirkier stuff like phasers or reversers. I do know that my ambitions are simple and my space is limited.

I finally have the wheeled shelf I dreamed of, to get everything off the floor. The M9 is up top there. You can have 3 effects active at a time, with 6 different groupings available as "scenes," which I don't really use. For $150 (used) I get to experiment with dozens of effects, each of which individually would cost no less than $100. Behold, my complete lack of snobbery.

The M9 is not actually the height of Line 6's emulation skills. Now, the distinctive tones that have shaped every form of electrified music come from–not to put too fine a point on it–shitty hardware. Vacuum tubes and janky resistors and all kinds of elements that have nonlinear responses as they heat up or draw more current or whatever. In the higher-end Line 6 devices, they are emulating the old hardware at the circuit element level (emphasis mine):

HX Modeling accurately recreates the behavior of even the most idiosyncratic vintage effects by modeling their individual components. The Transtronic process emulates the behavior of virtually any germanium or silicon transistor diode, making it possible to authentically recreate fuzz, distortion, and other pedals once considered too persnickety to convincingly model. The Throbber is a "virtual lightbulb" that mimics the decidedly nonlinear behavior of the small incandescent bulb and four photocells inside the original 1960's Uni-Vibe pedals that are essential to their unique sound and vibe. And the Bucketier chip and Panda circuit are virtual recreations of the Bucket Brigade (BBD) chips and compander (compression/expansion) circuitry found in many old-school analog delay pedals. Accurately modeling the inherent quirkiness of vintage analog delay pedals at the component level endows HX analog delay effects with all of their lo-fi majesty.

They do it for amplifiers, too (a musician fetish I understand even less than with effects). It dawned on them some years ago that they could pull it off with a guitar: take a basic input from 6 individual strings, and output Eric Clapton's Fender Stratocaster, or B.B. King's custom Gibson ES-345, or Jimmy Page's  Gibson Les Paul.

(Trust me, those are all so radically different even I care about the distinction.)

For that matter, why not transform the signal into that of an acoustic guitar? A 12-string? A different tuning? (I mean, what you play on the strings won't be what comes out of the amp, but if it saves you from having a dozen differently-tuned guitars on-stage, that's okay.) Or a banjo, or a sitar.

Hence, the Variax, long described, quite accurately, as a $300 guitar with $600 worth of electronics on it. The previous ones were a little dodgy as guitars, but then Yamaha bought them, and put that $600 of electronics on a Yamaha electric guitar platform. This is not the world's best electric guitar; however, I already own a Yamaha so cheap they don't even sell it separately–you buy it combined with an amplifier, for like $150-200–and I quite like it.

You could accomplish something similar by using MIDI, which sends note data to a computer, which then plays those notes according to some synth it has handy, however:

• It ties you to a computer, where the Variax is all on-board the guitar.
• MIDI is a right royal pain in the ass, inviting an endless rabbit hole of buying packs of synthesized sounds.

MIDI is where I'll turn if I want to be able to play a guitar and have it sound like a piano. Not out of the question, but not yet.

The Variax should completely replace my current electric guitar, which I pulled down from the attic because it's a lot easier to record than my steel-string, as I'm trying to figure out how to make music by looping parts (more on that later, especially how many software UIs are replicating the controls of the aforementioned Echoplex™).

And some kid at a local school will get a pretty decent electric guitar for free.