Over the last couple months I’ve become more interested in working on my guitar stuff. For the last 10 years or so I’ve been playing through the exact same stuff: an american standard strat, or a washburn electric (KC-40) straight into a multi-effects unit, a Boss GT-6 and direct into the PA. Very little mess, no fuss. And it was pretty good. That’s the problem. As I’ve come to realize recently, (slowly, actually, over the course of the last 6 months or so: “great is the enemy of good”). And so I decided that I didn’t want to have good tone anymore. I wanted *GREAT* tone. So I set out on my quest. I started using my tube amp again (Fender HotRod) - great clean tone. Great reverb. Horrible crunch. I looked at two people who had tone I liked. Dave Matsumura and a friend of mine, Steve garber. I talked to them about what they used. Dave pointed me to Fulltone pedals, and they were great. Steve talked to me about delays. I went to guitar showcase and tried different stuff. I read forums about what people liked. Then I tried stuff. And more stuff. Aaron loaned me some pedals. Andy Loaned me a crybaby. Try this. Try that. This guitar. That guitar. The fulltone stuff blew me away. The Crybaby wah didn’t. Andy says “Try a VOX.” Someone points me to H20 pedals. I got a bonus this fall and bought the ones I really liked. Then asked for one at christmas. Swapped some tubes on my Hot Rod to get more power tube saturation. Finally I’m getting to where I like my tone. I’m not satisfied yet, since I want to shape the sound a little more. Anyways, here’s where I ended up:

Pedal Board

I’ll use these to show you what is what(B = Bottom, T = Top, number = from left, so T1 = top left, B5=Bottom right (Vox Wah).

• T1: Canuck Custom A/B Box (Green)
• T2: Boss DD-3 Digital Delay (white)
• T3: Ibanez SoundTank Chorus (black)
• T4: DOD/Digitech Stereo Flanger (GFX75) (green)
• T5: DOD Compressor/Sustainer (FX80-B) (orange)
• B1: Fender Amp Footswitch (Channel, Drive/More Drive)
• B2: Fulltone Fulldrive-2 (blue)
• B3: Fulltone OCD (white)
• B4: Passive Volume Pedal (black)
• B5: Vox 847 Wah (black/silver)

My signal flow goes as follows: Guitar->B5->B4->T5->B3->B2->T4->T3->T2->T1->Amp

Very strange dreams last night. I was at a fairgrounds somewhere (might have been San Jose), and there was this massive convention of conventions… there were dozens, or hundreds of huge buildings (like the size of a convention hall) and in each one was a different type of convention. Also, in one of the buildings they were holding the NFL draft. Some of my family was there - my sister had a table at the ‘Crafts’ convention and was selling some kind of tchotchkes. I was there as the interim general manager for the New York Jets, and spent some time with Brett Favre, talking about whether he would come back. He told me “I’m willing, but my legs don’t have what they used to.” I agreed, but told him that his arm was the important thing, and I’d go get the best defensive line and wide receiver to play with him. Later in the dream, I was wandering around, but someone sidetracked me and made me a better offer: to become the GM and Coach of Tampa Bay Bucs. “Of Course!” I thought, then started to make plans on how I could get Favre over there. Bear in mind that I’m not really a huge football fan, although I love listening to John Madden on the radio in the morning.

Found this in my codebase today. It might have even been me who wrote it:

boolean delorted = kid.delete();//a nod to Coach-Z

Last night I built an A/B box for my guitar setup (to switch between two signal paths, usually effects->Amp A/Amp B or Guitar -> Signal Path/Tuner. It was a first little foray to see if I could do something like this. It worked out pretty well - I got a diagram from www.fulltone.com and pretty much copied it - I got most of the parts from pedalparts - although with the exception of the 3pdt switch you could get them all at frys for about $15. if it’s not plugged in to power, the LED’s don’t work, but for some reason, the power seems to add a tiny bit of noise. I’m not sure why yet.

First things first:
Hi. How have you been? Ok, Honestly, I don’t care.

Moving on.

I just got some new tech books: Programming Erlang (semi-work related), Programming Pearls (2nd edition) and Beautiful Code.

I started working on Programming Erlang but stopped a few chapters into it. For someone that has thought exclusively in OO for the last 10 years or so, trying to remember that = is a pattern matching operator is f’d up.

Anyways, a couple weeks ago I started to do Project Euler to learn a bit of python, and plowed my way through a bunch of the first problems (20-30) - they were mostly easy, even though my math stops at grade 12 - a few I ran into constraints issues where I actually had to think my way through the problem, or, even more rarely, find a mathematical explanation of the problem in order to write an algorithm. (the two triangle problems caused this. )

Python is a pretty cool language, very easy to learn.

Anyways, I had originally started this post with the desire to write a list of books I can’t do without, but I kinda got sidetracked. By Work.