In an effort to avoid cliché garbage about the past or the coming year, I shall do my best to keep this post as down to Earth as possible.
I finally got my new guitar, an FGN NCST 10m 2TS, which is a Fujigen strat copy with an alder body, maple fretboard and 2 tone sunburst, almost exactly like the first 54 Fender strats (they sported ash bodies). Beautiful, looks to be very well made. Really thick satin finished neck in contrast with the really slim (almost record breaking) wizard neck on my Ibanez RG. I looked really hard for the body block crease, but I couldn't make it out. The guitar sounded nice acoustically, and since I only have a Zoom 2.1u, I don't dare say too much about the pickups. According to an obscure German review somewhere, the pickups sound somewhere between Fender vintage and Texas. I know nothing about Fender guitars, but I have a feeling that assessment is kinda correct, the FGN can provide nice cleans and more output for some proper metal! With a Zoom.
I have done a lot of research about developing Outburst recently. Most importantly, I started playing around with Visual C++ to make sure my source code plays nicely with that IDE. I had to move around and rename files quite a bit, but but it's all sorted out and still just as easy to build in Linux or with MinGW. Or right, MSBuild is a joke, imho. I probably haven't seen the real strengths behind the terrifying piles of XML files, but a simple makefile is a lot more flexible and easier to write. A 30 liner for GNU Make could do more complicated file location stuff for a small project than the full MSBuild arsenal.
Time for the last meal of the year that my parents have made and apparently I am not allowed to keep writing this entry, so Happy New Year peepul!
EDIT: I had to cut my post short on New Year's Eve, so here's a small addendum to flesh things out a bit. Back in the land of nonchalance, I gave my guitar a good bashing right after having abused my brother's Fender for a few weeks. One thing for sure, I always have, do and always will hate D'Addario strings, they're like railway tracks. Good thing is they came for free on the guitar, bad thing is I would have preferred something else. Don't much like the 008 Malmsteen set by Dean Markley either to be honest, they feel like stretched out mosquitos. The saddle makes a popping sound when I do bends, even for whole note bends (with D'Addario strings, 1.5 bends are like successfully blowing the whistle on evil mega conglomerates, otherwise awarded for their brilliant and consistent improvement of environmental impact by their processing and manufacturing branches and providing for a better world for everybody, even young children and infants in poor third world countries, to live in), so I will get a TUSQ or similar eventually. I have also been eyeing the GOTOH 510TS-SF1 tremolo to fix the wobbly whammy bar (the Fender tremolo bar spring is supposedly bad for the threads), but these require new large holes for the posts so I'm gonna wait. The neck is peculiar. Perfectly fine, but it feels like a sort of light weight modern plastic wood compared to the heavier wood on my brother's Fender. Feels very airy and almost blown up due to it being pretty thick but still very light. Not sure if it's good or bad, just a neutral observation. I think I prefer it to the heavy Fender neck. The springs pick up on a tone just under C# on the 6th fret on the G string (and the same not on other strings). Pretty powerful feedback, so it seems there is a lot of transfer from the strings which is a good thing. Dunno if it's a good thing that the springs pick it up though. Did the Verheyen B string vibration transfer trick and the guitar body is well "alive".
I played around a lot with the Zoom this weekend and boy are the pikcups fun. Clean, plopping and chiming chords or really heavy, chunky riffing both work very nicely on the Zoom. Of course it doesn't have the "meat" of a tube amp, but for a hobbyist like me, it's more than good enough. And I really like the super fast patch switching in the Zoom, the fastest in the business when the unit came out apparently. Instaswitch.
Eudaimonia Overture, amazing to play, I recommend practising it. There is hardly a single dull piece of guitaring in there. Just a few sections that I need to work out still.
I have become rather accustomed to TDD and class invariances by now and I am almost starting to cheat a little. Sometimes I write the class declaration before the tests, but never the implementation. Porting the GUI widgets currently, I have the old size distribution calculations for the grid widget done, doing the button currently. Decided that pixel perfect rendering in OpenGL is a hopeless project and will go for Duplo style graphics (big fat rectangles for a bumbling artist).
