The modelling guitar, known most famously through its début in the form of Line 6's Variax model, is a revolutionary idea inspired guitarists since they first appeared on the scene.
The idea is that instead of, or sometimes in conjunction with, traditional magnetic pick-ups, your sound is sent to internal DSP housed within the guitar body which can then transform your tones into anything and everything – a Les Paul, a Strat, a Gretsch, even a banjo or a sitar. Based on perfectly sampled and emulated tones from the real things, they turn one guitar into an arsenal of the best instruments and tones available, or even ones that aren’t.
It allows for serious tonal variation over the course of a gig, and an effortless switching system means that one minute you're playing one guitar for the solo, and next you're playing another for the middle-8. They look and feel like the electric guitar you already know and love, too – all that magic is just under the hood.