My Fender Stratocaster

Okay, so it’s been a long while since I had an entry, and this time we’ll actually step away from technical matters to a different passion of mine — guitars. I’ve owned several, but the subject of today’s talk is my beloved Fender.

I bought this thing in 2007, after deciding that I really wanted to get back into playing guitar. I got it brand new from Guitar Center online; it’s a Fender Standard Stratocaster, which is a Mexican made model. This particular one is a “Fender Special Run”, FSR for short. It had the HSS pickup layout with hot pickups, a turned aluminum pickguard (that pattern is etched), black painted headstock, and a single piece maple neck + fretboard. In short, it started out in life as a rather unique guitar to begin with.

As with most of my things, I couldn’t bear to leave it stock for very long. The electronics are completely redone, and it has new GraphTech String Saver saddles instead of the original junk that Fender provides. It has strap locks as well — they’re the ever-popular Dunlops. It’s due for a new tremolo unit and nut, maybe even tuners. That stuff will have to wait until I have money again though. In the meantime, let’s look at what’s under the hood…

I went through a lot of possibilities for the pickups, but finally settled on BG Pups. They are handwound, and the guy who makes them is active on the Harmony Central forums, and he’s always eager to make adjustments to the pickups to suit each individual. Not only are the prices good, but he actually gives forum members a discount. So I talked to him and settled on a pair of hot wound Vintage 60 pickups, without the stagger, for my neck and middle pickups. For the bridge, we picked a Hellabucker. All of the pickups are AlNiCo 5, and both coils of the humbucker are magnets. I was actually trying to emulate the sound of the stock neck pickup that Fender had, but without the suck. These did a beautiful job of that. The bridge was basically meant to be as hellishly aggressive as possible without sacrificing tone; that, too, is handled amazingly well. Listen to the clips on the site if you’re not convinced.

The electrical setup is a bit more complex as well. I chose to use 250K tone pots and a 500K volume pot. That gives me a rather bright sound with everything turned up, and a LOT of range to back things off. (The volume pot is dramatically different between even 10 and 8.) I also wired the bottom tone control to the bridge instead of the middle pickup. The volume pot is a push pull that engages a coil split in the Hellabucker. The Hellabucker’s been wound so that each individual coil is about as strong as a Vintage 60; I get a pretty good Stratocaster sound out of it, though not quite the same of course. It’s a little beefy, thanks to the setup of the Hellabucker, and that suits me just fine.

I absolutely love the sounds this thing gives me, and it’s also got an amazing ability to produce a good fascimile of almost any sound. (Except it doesn’t do a great job of pretending to have a neck humbucker, sadly.) The unconventional electronics setup is a big part of that; I’ve deliberately dialed in a ton of treble, and I use the tone knobs and my amp to keep that in check. Still, it’s not a mellow guitar by any stretch. And that’s how I like my guitars, to be honest.

Quick Update

So I’m heading home for the weekend, and I’ve exhausted my queue of posts for the moment. I’ll be bringing you guys the next part of the SlimDX Architecture series some time next week, and we’ll see where things go from there. I’m also going to evaluate whether or not to do an interim SlimDX release for July; I’ve just gotten word that the SDK is not going to be released for some time.

This Blog Supports OpenID

I just want to remind everyone that WordPress and therefore this blog allow OpenID logins. That means if you have a Google account, Yahoo account, or AIM/AOL account, you can leave a comment without having to sign up for anything.

Seriously, I could use a few comments over here.

I am now a DirectX MVP!

I’ve just been awarded XNA/DirectX MVP status by Microsoft! I’m still poking around the new sites I’ve been given access to, but there’s a lot of cool stuff here, courtesy of Microsoft. They’re giving me MSDN and TechNet subscriptions, for example, which I’m thrilled about. I’m also eager to finally have access to the private MVP newsgroup, since it’s not uncommon that I have questions related to SlimDX development that really need an answer from the DirectX team itself.

In short, this is pretty awesome.

Michael Jackson

There’s not really much to be said beyond what’s said, but at some level the man was already dead to me. It’s clear from the early 90s or so that he was very far gone, which is very sad. At least it seems like most people remember him as the King of Pop, and not the wide array of messes that came after his late eighties heyday.

Hooray for Gluttony

I was going to write up a little thing about some of the goals I have for the upcoming November release of SlimDX, but then I remembered I’m going out to dinner with my girlfriend tonight. Strictly speaking it’s been ten months since our first date, but it was around mid October that I first started getting to know her. More to the point, I picked up some Restaurant.com gift certificates super cheap ($25 certificates for $2 each), which she doesn’t know about yet. Basically we’re going to the local Indian place and eating all super nice like. These certificates have a $35 minimum and it’s your typical $12 entree type restaurant, so drinks and dessert are a definite yes.

And she just called me. I’m out.

Promit’s Tips for Life (random selection part 1)

I truly regret watching this video.

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• #5: If someone is looking at you funny, consider the possibility that they may suffer from chronic creepiness, rather than intending actual funny looks.
• #23: Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid bringing lions, tigers, or bears to the mall, even if they’re just babies. Oh my.
• #49: Getting up close to someone’s face and singing Nine Inch Nails lyrics is not a good way to make friends.
• #70: Yes, you can still rock out like it’s 1998, even if it was ten years ago. Intergalactic planetary, planetary intergalactic…
• #91: Don’t bother trying to come up with the stupidest comment ever made to someone on the internet. You’re way out of your league.

Tina Fey Is Incredible

In this clip, Tina Fey does Palin in SNL’s parody of the vice presidential debate. It’s amazing.

I was going to write a post and then I didn’t

So have this instead.

Candidates As Trains

Welcome to Ventspace

I’ve played with blogging multiple times before. My original blog was Element 61, which gained some decent traffic thanks to dissecting some of the Quake 3 codebase that had recently been released. I got bored of it fairly quickly, though, after failing to write a coherent discussion of my terrain engine. More recently I maintained GameDev.Net Journal, which I got access to after being granted moderator privileges. I made a number of posts there, almost entirely technical. I lost steam on that several months ago. And so now I’m here, on attempt three, with Ventspace.

Why?

A couple reasons. There are any number of idiots out there who can code, and well. For me, that’s not enough. It’s inadequate to just code. One of the key aspects of being a software developer is being able to communicate effectively. And in an increasingly electronic world, writing is key to communication. So first and foremost, I’m writing here because that’s the only way I can improve as a writer. Then there’s the idea that I have something to share with other developers, and that other developers can gain insight into their own work by reading what I have to say. It’s why I read The Old New Thing and Coding Horror. (Although Atwood’s been slacking ever since the Stack Overflow project started.) Last, there’s the simple fact that people seem to enjoy my writing. People seem to like my weekly entries for The Daily GameDev.Net, and my regular forum posting as well. Unfortunately that forum posting has (somewhat necessarily, due to being a moderator now) lost its edge, and I’m thinking I’ll use this blog to get that feel back.

But why here?

Why not my journal, or my older Blogspot site? For one thing, I have technical objections against both those blogs, and it looks like WordPress is a far more promising alternative. GameDev’s real advantage is that my direct, best audience is right there and able to comment easily, but it is lacking in features. (Plus, I don’t like the URL format it uses.) Blogspot’s integration with Google is handy, but other than that I’m just more impressed by what I see with WordPress. The main reason, though, is that I’ve decided to try and draw a line in the sand. I think I read this most recently on Coding Horror, but it’s advice that you will get from practically any experienced writer/blogger — the only way to successfully run a blog is to post regularly, and often. That’s the way you get the rhythm of writing down, become more efficient at writing, and frankly it’s the only way to build an audience. Unfortunately, I’m terrible with schedules. Truly terrible. It’s a miracle I paid my rent today. So I’m not committing to specific update days. However, I’ve decided that I will, as much as possible, put three new entries a week into Ventspace, starting now.

Quality probably won’t be consistent, and I guarantee you I can’t sustain a rate of three insightful, technical posts a week. Some of them are going to be stupid. I might recycle a few from the older blogs. That’s fine though; that’s how a blog works. Sometimes there I will post a magnificent essay on SlimDX’s development process, and sometimes I will post funny pictures. But one way or another, I will keep new content flowing, and hopefully people will read it. Ventspace IS a technical blog by a professional programmer, but I think a more interesting mix can’t hurt. And to start off that more interesting mix, allow me to reintroduce myself.

I’m Promit Roy. I live in Baltimore, and work for Day 1 Studios as a Core Technology Engineer. My focus has historically been in games, and to a lesser extent tools and other client applications. Right now I am mainly in charge of build system development/maintenance (a role I share with my immediate boss) and tools development. I’m kind of a “whatever needs to get done” infrastructure Engineer at Day 1. This is my blog, Ventspace, and it has no affiliation with Day 1 and does not represent their views. My interests in software development are not terribly specific, but I like mid to low level architecture stuff, and I hate the web. But I’m pragmatic, and the web seems rather more important these days, so I’m planning to learn that too. I also love cars and talking about cars. I’m writing because unlike most of the software developers out there, I’m actually good at it and I’m not going to let that ability rot.

Welcome to Ventspace.