No Warranty Expressed Or Implied

I admit I have been littering the house with musical instruments, and this is pretty much my desired result:

Not bad for 20 months old!

I'm really enjoying having the piano there, and my own keyboard skills are slowly improving. But it looks like I'll have to work on my self-accompaniment if I'm going to keep up...

Today I had a chance to just plug my Strat in to my amp and wail away, and it sounded bloody good. Even with the old strings and stock switching and pickups and all that, once I turned the amp up a bit the tone was highly satisfactory. The middle/bridge switch position isn't so good with the little humbucker in there; I might try the original bridge pickup again once I've fiddled with the wiring.

The point is, I don't actually need to spend a lot of money on the guitar; just cleaning it up and getting it properly adjusted should be fine. Although the Hot Plate would be very handy. And new pickups are always nice...

My Stratocaster is a 1987 '57 re-issue, a bit dinged about, with a few modifications. It's the first decent guitar I bought for myself (the first guitars I played were also decent, but belonged to my Dad). I paid about USD500 or so for it in 1988, IIRC. I bought the guitar (and a Carvin 100W solid-state combo amp, that I also still have) from a guitar shop in Los Angeles while we were stopping over on the family trip to the UK.

Anyway, I'm thinking about tweaking it a bit more, so I've collected a few links here.

Copper shielding tape from RS Components, with which to line the pickup cavity.

Some hot-rodding ideas from Per Bothner

some general Strat care tips

The Seymour Duncan JB Jr. pickup I currently have in the bridge position.
Some O.C. Duff pickups (as recommended by Darren Inwood) would be nice.
Steve Cobham has a nice guitar setup tutorial.
I'd also like to get a THD Hot Plate for my amp (a MESA/Boogie DC-3), which is a bit loud otherwise.
Information on vintage Fender guitars (including serial numbers) that is quite interesting.
This guitar is very much like mine.
The Fret Not site has plenty of good general advice on guitar maintenance.
John Pollock has some good information about MIDI guitars.

In November last year, I attended a seminar organised by MIDI.org.nz (not a great choice of name, IMHO) as part of Wellington Music Week. The topic was music recording and production, and on the panel were Liz Barry, Gillian Craig, Mike Gibson and Lee Prebble. Suffice to say, it was great. Thanks to the MIDI guys for organising it, and to the panel for being so cool and helpful.

There's a truckload of world-class music coming out of Wellington at the moment, and I find it very inspiring. Not that my music would be world-class even if I were producing any at the moment, but I'm working on it. Hopefully over the next few years, I'll be able to compose and record some stuff of my own. In the meantime, there's a lot of preperatory work to be done (and other things taking priority, but that's OK).

Other clever music-type bods I've come across 'round town recently include Darren Inwood a.k.a. Lucidtone Electronics, who'll build you a custom tube amp or weird effects pedal, and Simcha Delft (whose website tubesandfrets.com isn't up yet), designer of the Moonlight Amp, a popular small tube amplifier (see also here and here). Simcha also makes hand-wound output transformers and is a first-class luthier. Darren works at the Guitar Gallery in Newtown, while Simcha lives up the coast in Otaki.

Other NZ guitar resources include Joh Lang's guitars and pickups and the NZGuitar.com forums.

Although I've been very busy with work, I have been thinking about the home studio I plan to put together next year (while trying to resist buying more old synths off TradeMe). It occurred to me that, as a guitar player with minimal keyboard chops, I should controlling my (six voice) synthesiser with one of my guitars, not trying to learn to play keyboards particularly. So I've collected a few links while reading about the current state of guitar-to-MIDI technology. On the way, I've met a few interesting people around Wellington, which has been nice; I'll say more about them in a later post.

RMC piezo pickups — these look like the ones to get. Available for Strat and Les Paul bridges. As used by Robert Godin, Ulrich Teuffel and others. I think a Pow'r Bridge 'G' (USD250) for my Les Paul would be the go, coupled with the Poly-Drive II module (USD350).
The VG-8 Wiki has a list of alternative hexaphonic pickups.
I came across Thomas Perry because he has Godin LGX-SA in his extensive collection, and one of the guys at the Wellington Rock Shop is trying to sell one; this is what got me started on the whole MIDI guitar thing. I met Thomas for lunch, and he's a thoroughly nice guy; he even offered to lend me his AXON AX-100 if I needed a guitar-to-MIDI converter to test!
The AX-100 looks like a good unit. Certainly if it's fast enough for John McLaughlin, that's good enough for me. It turns out that AXON have been bought by TerraTec, and the AX-100 mk II is on the way (and should cost about EUR499). When it arrives, it should show up here; currently the AX-100 (which you can't buy) is listed separately from the MkII upgrade (EUR149).
Apparently there's a video of the AX-100 from Musikmesse '05, but I haven't managed to view it yet.
While Googling for RMC pickups, I came across the website of Ulrich Teuffel; his birdfish guitar, pictured on the right, is (was) available with a MIDI option that used the RMC pickup and electronics. Googling him further, I found that he appears in volume one of the Gourmet Guitars 'The Best Luthiers' series. This DVD is available from Technical Video Rental; I've persuaded them to rent the DVD to me here in New Zealand, so I'll see what it's like. A trailer for the DVD is available.

Curve, one of my favourite bands (currently disbanded) have a page on their website that offers the chance to remix the original tracks from the song Unreadable Communication. You can then send in your mix on a CD, and they'll list it on the site. Very cool.

Further to the D-110 post below, I checked the schematic and the path of the MIDI input signal is very short, so hopefully if I take it apart and trace the track from the socket through the optocoupler (a Toshiba TLP552, apparently equivalent to an NEC PS9601) and into the CPU, I might be able to debug the problem. Or not. Who knows.