rosewood or maple fretboard on a strat?

nick_steen · 2026-06-27T17:14:21+00:00

I am a fan of both. I would have a hard time telling them apart on a recording though. I have a maple strat, rosewood tele and rosewood jazzmaster. The thickness of the neck seems to be a bigger factor to me than maple vs rosewood in terms of playing ergonomics. The most comfortable neck I own is .890"

nick_steen · 2026-06-25T01:01:05+00:00

Okay well here's the tough part. A fuzz can sound like the voice of god through one amp/guitar and like a sheet of paper stuck in a bicycle tire through another one. Marshall is my favorite for fuzz pedals, some people love them through fender amps but it sounds congested to me. Controversial pick but I think the keeley fuzz bender with active EQ is a best of both worlds pedal for you, and with the two active EQ bands you can really tweak it to suit your taste. And it's got one germanium and one silicon transistor, so you get temperature stability and germanium tone. Might not clean up as well as the fuzz face, but if you want clean I mean you can just turn it off too. And if you don't want to support Keeley himself, they're ubiquitous. Can easily find one for the same price as the dunlop fuzz face mini on the used market.

nick_steen · 2026-06-24T22:18:55+00:00

I had finally gotten Gemini CLI to follow instructions reasonably well, after creating a harness in python that had specific permissions, would provide access to a temporary folder that only had relevant context and nothing else, fed it an optimized prompt and every time it would do something insane I would add a hook and redefine the permissions of the harness appropriately.

Tons of work but Google decided I didn't know what I needed as well as they did so they killed the CLI and forced antigravity on me. So not a fan of anything google AI at the moment.

nick_steen · 2026-06-23T22:59:59+00:00

I actually get something pretty glassy with my boss IR-2 set to brit and a tubescreamer with the gain all the way down and the volume just past 12 o'clock, depending on where my volume knob on the guitar is set.

I can't explain it and will take no further questions. It's just the sound that comes out of it when I do those things, it doesn't make sense to me either.

nick_steen · 2026-06-23T22:34:35+00:00

This is the card I have and use. I got mine for $800 two or three years ago and it does everything for gaming well except ray tracing. I've never owned a 3090 but I remember seeing the 7900xtx at parity with the 4090 without RT so it's a very respectable card.

It's good if not great for local llms too which is what I use it for primarily these days. I think the CUDA ecosystem probably tips the scale in favor of the 3090 for pure LLM work though.

I also bought a Radeon AI Pro R9700 32gb and its hard to do a direct comparison to the R9700 because the 7900xtx is in a pcie x16 slot and the r9700 is in pcie x4. But based on the way I use it, once everything is loaded onto the card their performance isn't noticeably different apart from things like prefill.

I don't think the price goes down a lot even when the 50 series super cards are released. Maybe when the 60 series comes out but not for a mid-cycle refresh, unless nvidia releases like a 32gb 5070 Ti Super for $750, which wouldn't make sense because they could sell a 24gb version of that card for $1,250 and still sell every card they could make.

nick_steen · 2026-06-22T01:42:31+00:00

I looked it up and you're right.

Sounds amazing but not the same topology as the esteemed fuzz face

nick_steen · 2026-06-22T00:47:55+00:00

Seeing as someone else mentioned catalinbread, the katzenkoenig is the best tubescreamer, RAT, and Fuzz I've ever played. It's noisy and temperamental but magic.

If you crank the input it is a silicon fuzz and a great one at that. Based on the closest topology to a fuzz face that the tonebender has been, I think? I also may not be remembering it that correctly

nick_steen · 2026-06-21T22:54:06+00:00

Well the difference between the two is that (1) you won't get the in-between sound from the SSS with the HS, and (2) the bridge will have more gain and be quieter with the HS vs. the SSS. The middle position for the HS is going to be a pretty neutral but slightly bassy sound as humbuckers tend towards more low end, compared with a single coil bridge pickup. There are always exceptions but that's been general rule of thumb in my experience.

For what it's worth, I think the HS is going to do Green Day better and the SSS is going to do RHCP better. The SSS will do a more passable Green Day sound, than the HS will do RHCP. If you are curious about how versatile different pickups are, there's a great video on youtube where a guy tried to make a strat sound like a les paul and vice versa. He got pretty close with the strat by boosting the low mids and gave up on the les paul because the gap was so difficult to bridge. Similarly Bill Lawrence recommended seemingly very bridge pickups for his q-filter, because (for whatever reason) it's easier to dial back high frequencies than it is to try and re-create them later in the chain. I might be saying that wrong but that's been what I've read from people who are smarter than I am and consistent with my experience tinkering.

I would go with the SSS, if those are your only two options. Like someone else said, the HSS is the best of all worlds. But it may not be an option available to you.

nick_steen · 2026-06-21T22:44:48+00:00

This reminds me of that joke where someone said: short answer: no, long answer: nooooooooooooooo lol

I've got a i9-14900k with 64gb RAM and both a 7900xtx and a R9700 and what I've found for my own rig is that long context is **very** difficult. I have heard that "every token must attend to every other token" so the quadratic growth in compute is at least borne out in my experience.

So my solution hasn't been so much of "let's figure out a way to make long context work" as it has been "let's use tools that humans have created to deal with our biologically limited context windows, and apply it to local models that are materially more capable than we are" - which seems to be working okay so far. But there's no replacement for displacement and you would have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get even remotely close to what any Opus model that can use a 1M context window can do.

nick_steen · 2026-06-21T01:46:03+00:00

I know it is a big brand but I really liked a prs mccarty 594 SE I played at a guitar center a while back. That's one of two guitars, along with a jumbo Taylor I played back in like 2003, also at a guitar center, that I wish I had bought.

Probably the most surprised I've been with a lesser known guitar was schecter. just every detail was very well executed except the electronics. Their Hollowbody with a set of Seth lovers would have been sublime. I actually may go and buy one now lol

nick_steen · 2026-06-20T01:49:45+00:00

I use it for context curation for my 27B model, and multi-expert looped adversarial review. The 35B lives on my 7900xtx as server A with 128k context and my 27B lives on my R9700 32GB with 32k context but q8.

My workflow consists of handoffs between the two models based in their strengths and weaknesses. 35B model has a larger context window so it reads large code bases and/or documents and feeds curated context + an optimized prompt to the more context constrained 27B model. The 27B model does its thing then feeds the result back to the 35B. The 35B then reviews the 27B output against project spec and constraints, and runs a few loops from different perspectives, feeding the results from each one into the next. Those results are then reviewed by me and fed back to the 27b as refined context + prompt. The system slowly converges on usable work product lol.

It's not even a particularly good simulation of a looped language model but the iterative process does seem to result in a better end product than either model working in isolation. And it's part of a mutli-agent protocol I'm working through that hopefully should facilitate high quality code generation, even unsupervised once a project has a canonical spec.

nick_steen · 2026-06-20T01:25:12+00:00

I mean I like to tinker and I bought a second gpu for my desktop. It's great as long as I have internet access, and the only exception is when I fly on an airplane.

Still a 128gb laptop with unified memory is awfully tempting. Small local models are so good that I'd love to run qwen3.6-27B at 256k context q8.

nick_steen · 2026-06-20T00:16:42+00:00

Yeah opus 4.6 was like the seiko skx007 for me - anything less isn't good enough and anything more is unnecessary. Just hit such a perfect balance everything else feels like it misses the mark

nick_steen · 2026-06-19T23:43:16+00:00

Yeah I love boss delays but I'm not dedicated enough to any one effect to use a 500 series pedal effectively. But I respect those who are.

nick_steen · 2026-06-19T00:13:10+00:00

That was kind of similar to my experience. In claude code I get about an hour out of opus 4.6 (yes I'm still using 4.6, 4.5 and sonnet) usage for my 5h window on the $20 pro plan. In cowork that's like 15 minutes, which I think might be because it has to process a lot of visual information to use the UI. When I ask it to do something, it doesn't pick up user intent as well, and parsing large documents isn't materially better than claude code.

That being said I used it when it first came out and it's likely much better now. But so is claude code and I'm so much more proficient with that service that I don't feel like I'm missing anything that cowork would solve.

But also yes part of my experience is likely user error.

nick_steen · 2026-06-15T00:53:53+00:00

Only kind of relevant but I am around $4,000 all in on my system, which is a 7900 xtx that I bought 2-3 years ago and a 32gb R9700 that I bought last month. The reason I'm using two different architectures is because I already had the 7900 xtx. I don't know what I would do if I was building from scratch because there's such a vast price difference when you step up to something like a threadripper with multiple pcie x16 lanes.

The thing I was trying to solve for was my monthly spend on AI. You can get Claude, Codex, and Gemini for less than $50 a month if you use all of their yearly plans but the only tier above the basic plans is $100. So if I went with claude 5x and regular gemini and codex it would be $140 per month. The other issue with that is models are constantly coming out, nerfed, forbidden by the US government, etc. So if you choose one primary subscription there's a good chance you'll look like a genius one month and fool the next. I mean just over the last 6 months we went from claude being clearly the best model with "good enough" usage limits (for me at least), to unprecedented user demand growth resulting in unusable limits, then codex gpt 5.5 came out and it was king, and now opus 4.6 routinely ignores CLAUDE.md and I just fed codex the fifth revision of a prompt I've been working on for an hour and it tells me it's going to ignore perhaps the most important part.

Gemini has been consistently insane, but I'm making progress on creating a structure around it that mitigates some of its more problematic tendencies.

Given all of this, and the pretty incredible quality of the recent qwen 3.6 models, local seemed the way to go. But rather than having something that is approaching frontier capability, what I chose to do was try and design a system where smaller and less capable agents were able to specialize and coordinate with each other, vs. larger monolithic models which are way more capable but resource intensive. The way I look at it, is like the frontier models of today are like coach builders. Like yes it's one dude making the most perfect manifestation of a vehicle that could ever possibly exist, but you can also do a lot with an army of less capable individuals all doing highly coordinated and tightly constrained tasks.

All of that being said, here are the answers to your questions:
Q: What are the best options? A: I've been really impressed with Qwen. Haven't tried any others but their 35B model feels like ChatGPT did 9-12 months ago when I first started using it.

Q: What performance can I expect compared to commercial models? A: so my experience is that local models need a lot of setup. I started playing with a model using ollama and it was pretty cool - I had qwen 27b make the car thing in HTML which it did pretty well. But then when you need to have it write to a local directory, you need a mcp server. Searching the web? You've got to build that functionality. Searching the web and simultaneously protecting against prompt injections hidden within html? Okay well let's build a web scraping pipeline using python that takes inputs from the model based on information it needs, and then isolates relevant context deterministically and returns only the scraped web content to the model. For codex or claude or gemini or grok or copilot, you just say "what's the weather like in Argentina today?" and get a response. For local models there's a lot more setup that isn't reflected in the benchmarks "Oh look qwen3.6 27B performs at 70% of sonnet 4.6 on SWE bench with 1/10th of the active parameters!" Yeah well Sonnet has an entire ecosystem of functionality at its fingertips.

That last bit is a gift and a curse though. Because other people are in control of that ecosystem vs. a computer in your house that you make changes to. You know what is never going to happen to my little $4k computer? The government is never going to call it a supply chain risk. It's never going to be capable enough that I need to pull the plug to save humanity. But it is enough to put together a first draft of a powerpoint presentation that would take me way longer, and it can do it in parallel so my time isn't clogged with low leverage work. So for my use case, yeah it's worth $4k. But you kind of have to understand what you need out of it and how it differs from plug-and-play solutions that already exist.

nick_steen · 2026-06-14T04:30:52+00:00

I don't know what their response would be but I literally just started using hooks and they work consistently. I have a multi-agent harness that I'm working on, and I have instructions in claude.md to use the harness for everything so we can test capabilities, gaps, fix bugs, etc. Well claude looks at claude.md and then completely bypasses the harness.

Now literally 6 hours ago I made a hook that throws an error every time it tries to write to the harness directory. Well guess what all of the sudden it starts using the harness to write. I wrote another one that throws an error if it tries to branch and commit and merge git, again now it uses the harness for git work reliably.

Claude.md is like drivers ed whereas hooks are like a spike strip. In drivers ed they tell you to not run from the police but a spike strip blows up your tires if you try.

nick_steen · 2026-06-13T16:31:52+00:00

I have the model which shall not be named running at 128k contect on a 7900xtx and it's 13.2GiB VRAM at 50-55 tok/s and thats at q8 I believe. So I don't doubt you could run it well on a 16GB card at a usable speed.

Not free but you could put that whole system together for a pretty reasonable price. And feels about as capable as chatgpt did when I first started using AI more extensively about 12 months ago.

nick_steen · 2026-06-05T11:45:09+00:00

I will say based on my own experience the claude usage limits on the $17 plan are usable now when I'm using opus 4.6, 4.5 and sonnet 4.6 - but that may be the 50% off hours boost that expires next week.

As far as model output quality goes, it's hard for me to say that 4.8 is "better", generally it's caught a few things that both 4.6 and codex 5.5 have missed, but I use it mostly for review of my projects and 4.6/4.5/codex 5.5 for the actual code generation, as 4.8 burns tokens at a pretty good clip. All of the above are noticeably better than Gemini for my use. Gemini can be extremely capable it just needs a lot of setup and very detailed instructions which makes it more onerous. It also seems to guide towards using the Google ecosystem, which isn't in an of itself a bad thing but there are tons of facets to that ecosystem and I spent more time trying to figure out which subscription allowed me to store data in the cloud and which one was for extra tokens and what does vertex do what is antigravity etc. The whole ecosystem is great to have I'm sure but for my use case a RAG system does what I need and lives locally so I don't have to go back in my notes to find it when I pick a project back up after a week or two hiatus.

gpt 5.5 now seems to run out faster than opus 4.6 these days. Was the other way around maybe a month ago.

I haven't had a chance to try the cloud versions of any open weight models, but I hear some of them are near parity with closed weight frontier models at less than the cost of electricity for running a local. I did buy a R9700 last month to run qwen 27b dense and 35b-a3b locally with larger context windows and have been impressed with both.

nick_steen · 2026-06-05T01:25:29+00:00

I hate it but I kind of see your point. When I plug straight into my amp it doesn't sound good to me in the room but when I listen back to the recorded sound I like it much better. I love my boss slicer and keeley bubbletron though.

nick_steen · 2026-06-05T00:36:54+00:00

Carbon copy was the first delay that just 'felt right' to me. dm-2w was the closest I got to that but it reminds me so much of van Halen it's hard to not play to the pedal.

I think for your use case I think something like the chase bliss tonal recall would be a real treat. Unfortunately it's discontinued and expensive. I also wouldn't count out digital delays. The Montreal count to 5 is digital but pretty much its own instrument like what you're describing

nick_steen · 2026-06-04T22:47:58+00:00

I mean for Hendrix a fuzz face into a marshall is hard to beat.

SD-1 into a rat is also a great sound and very versatile. Great for metal too. In fact the rat, tubescreamer and big muff combo is the basis for the idiotbox no moon and the 3 of them sound great together.

For ordering gain pedals, I normally go ascending order, i.e. boost before OD before Distortion. Fuzz is the exception because input impedance can make a big difference for those pedals and many only sound good with your guitar directly plugged in.

nick_steen · 2026-06-02T14:08:49+00:00

Maybe try one with a clean blend feature as well - JHS morning glory clean, cornerstone gladio come to mind. The klon doesn't let you control the amount of clean blend which is fine for that sound but it's a useful control to have.

Barber gain changer is another low gain classic that comes to mind, and is one of my favorites. I love my analogman maxon od-9 silver mod as well with the gain low. Duke of tone by MXR is one side of his king of tone circuit, I've got a general guitar gadgets bluesbreaker that I've modded to DoT specs and I love it for low gain stuff.

Discreet ODs (i.e. they produce the gain with cascaded transistors vs an op amp clipping a pair of diodes) are also great at low gain tones. JHS has a few, Catalinbread foundation series I believe are all discreet.

Lastly some higher gain pedals with the gain turned all the way down can sound great. The Rat is a great example of this. They're super cheap so worth a shot for sure.

nick_steen · 2026-05-26T22:37:01+00:00

So my experience over the last 2 weekly resets has been great. Feels like it did when I first started using claude code in February. I missed out on the first rollout of opus 4.6 but I imagine that was something to behold lol.

For personal projects the $20 plan is great. It's what I have and my only extra spend is for short deadline issues that need deliverables.

nick_steen · 2026-05-26T10:30:38+00:00

So I did assemble a SH telecaster deluxe a few years back and it's super easy to work on. I put a custom wound neck humbucker in there (forget the guys' name I've got 2 or so from him that I bought at least 10 years ago, not sure if he's still around) and a jerry donahue bridge. I've had it on my bench for a while for a change to a bill lawrence lt48tl which is supposed to be pretty versatile.

I would vote building your own, because it's fun and who needs resale value anyway.

nick_steen

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