Reverse engineering the Variax guitar

The Variax guitars are an "old" series of modelling guitars from Line6. The early models don't even feature any magnetic pickups since all the sound comes from piezo pickups in the bridge. The guitar actually has a piezo pickup for every string which gives it the ability to do good pitch-shifting and modelling. At least a lot better than the modellers I've used. I've known about these guitars since getting my first Line6 guitar effects unit that had a very interesting connection on the back. The effects unit I got was a Pod XT (somewhere in 2014) and on the back it had an ethernet jack marked "Variax". Rear of the Pod XT According to the manual this allowed connecting a Variax guitar and when using that the entire signal path from the guitar to the Pod was digital instead of using the ADC in the Pod after a long cable. I've always thought it would be a good idea to move the converters into the guitar since the pickups produce a pretty weak signal and converters are cheap now but…