Tips: Guitar rig

Guitar Hero, not Guitar Queero

It's 2010 and I got myself a couple of new guitars. One acoustic Yamaha and one electric guitar. Both used. Also, there's a few new tabs! So here's the list of my guitar rig:

Ltd. ESP F202

This Korea-model F-202 has EMG-HZ mics,24 jumbo frets and a Floyd Rose licenced bridge. Sounds great, feels heavy and good but cost me around 600 bucks (4500 NOK)! I can't belive instruments are so expensive. Even the crappiest ones are expensive!

Effect gear, picks & stuff

I've got an original Hendrix CryBaby, an Ibanez Distortion box and a Flanger box hooked up too. For picks I prefer the green Dunlop .85mm ones. They give a good combo of bounce and bend on the strings. Here's my pick collection, wich is nothing special. I'm using .85mm green Dunlops at the moment. I started out on the red .5mm ones, then advanced to orange, then yellow and now green! The blue one is just too thick. You can also see my capo, the slide and Floyd Rose tuner wrench on top of the green picks. Oh yeah, and a chromatic tuner.

Yamaha

A lovely sounding guitar, got it for a discount because it had to be glued.

Morgan

My previous, and 3rd electric guitar, a Morgan 'Legend' series that cost me about $250 new. My first guitar was in the same price class, namely an Aria Pro. Belive me when I say that your next cheap guitar should be a Morgan. It's got the same quality as a $500+ guitar. It's body is made of nice and heavy woodwork, with a layer of dark-colored wood for fretboard. Don't know the tree type. It has good mics, keeps the tone and tuning and doesn't break after falling over a few times ! The other two sounds like pieces of plastic. (Which they are too I think)

Squire

I guess it's an OK guitar, I just couldn't get to know it.

And here's my wife's Fender bass:

I used to use Blue Steel .10 strings for a long time, they are really solid. Seems they don't sell them anymore around here, so now I use D'Adario. They used to break all the time when I had them before I discovered Blue Steel. Seems they fixed their quality now! They both sound OK, though. I had a cheap 40W Peavey amp that had really good sound, but it broke after I puked in it one very drunk night. Got a Vajia Music GF-30 now as an emergency amp, wich doesn't quite sound right in the low spectrum.

Announce: Typos

Under Construction! I am trying to bloggerize many older posts from my old website (eivind256.statghost.com). There might be some broken links. Please report and comment!

Coding: Graftal snowtree

Recursive deterministic graftal algorithm

This nice algorithm that I found in Computer Graphics: Principles & Practice inspired me to implement it. I it will generate a set of data that you can parse to construct a tree-like graphics structure. This algorithm is bases on a alphabet of 6 symbols:

The algorithm shall use those 6 symbols to mutate a starting-axiom into a full tree. These are the two simple rules of this sorta game-of-life:

To initialize the algorithm, you must choose a starting axiom. Following the rules indicates that 'A' is not a good choice, since that will only produce new 'A's. (A->AA). Therefore we choose 'B' wich will tranform into A(B)AA[B] and produce a standard pattern to generate the tree off. This is the produce string after just ONE recursion.

This is the string buffer after two runs. When implementing this algorithm, it is recommended to have overflow-safe stacks and buffers!. Now it is up to you to parse the tree and make the drawing happen. When parsing the tree after generating it, the 6 symbols have the current meaning: A and B(nodes) = continue to draw in current direction; [ and ) means rotate left; ] and ( means rotate right.

Basically you want two char[] buffers so as to render from buffer 1 to buffer 2 and from 2 to 1 in the next iteration. Remember that the buffer is filled up at a exponential rate. (In this picture, snowfall was also simulated). This code of mine implements it. (Never ask me about that code)