If you're looking to divebomb and squeal like Steve Vai or Joe Satriani, but your vintage guitar doesn't have a vibrato system, you could avoid losing chunks of tonewood by installing a top mount system like the FRX from Floyd Rose. But switching from hardtail to whammy will still involve slamming your axe on the maintenance table for a while. Fomofx says that its Virtual Jeff can be installed in just 30 seconds on just about any guitar, and easily removed when not needed.
The Virtual Jeff is not a mechanical vibrato system, but an electronic one. Players use it like a traditional whammy bar, but digital pitch control is used to massage the output for pitch-perfect, error-free shimmers, dips, dives and squeals. It can be retrofitted to almost any guitar, including acoustics and basses. "As long as it has a pickup (or any kind of analog signal output), you're in business," say its creators.
Details on what makes the Virtual Jeff tick are a bit thin on the ground, but it looks like the main block is cabled to a box of digital trickery that takes the signals from pickups on a host guitar, combines them with data from the whammy bar, runs everything through a digital processor and then outputs the digitally whammified sound – all in real time.
As it's a digital system, it doesn't alter string tension, boasts precision return-to-center that won't change over the lifetime of the device and offers true bypass. Eight pitch presets are available, ranging from one semitone to two octaves down and one semitone and one octave up, and the player can switch modes using a footswitch to emulate traditional mechanical systems like the Bigsby or Floyd Rose. Players could even have several instruments "Jeff-ready" for quick swap-outs from one to another.
Pricing and availability will be announced at NAMM later this month. In the meantime, you can see it in action in the video below.
Source: Fomofx