Christopher LearyInterview
Musician (Ochre)
Adapted from Christopher Leary's interview on Uses This, published 2 June 2010. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
Away from the synths and rack gear, I record vocals and sounds/samples with an Audio Technica AT4040 microphone plugged straight into the Audiofire's preamps.
I've also got a Yamaha Pacifica 312 electric guitar, for testing chord progressions and lead lines, and for general playing around.
On the monitoring side of my setup, I take a digital stereo output from my Audiofire and monitor through a Mytek Stereo96 DAC.
The Mytek then feeds a pair of Klein & Hummel O300 monitor loudspeakers, set atop some large and very heavy K&M stands.
My back has been thanking me since I bought a Herman Miller Mirra chair, which not only looks cool but is the comfiest chair I've sat in.
Coding & Development
Media
There are some software workhorses I rely on for synth and sample duties, such as Cakewalk's Zeta, which is an all-round great-sounding synth.
Waldorf Attack, while ancient by software standards, still gets a lot of use for making glitchy synth drum sounds and general audible weirdness.
For sample editing and mastering I use Steinberg's excellent Wavelab, with processing handled by Sonnox, PSP and UA.
Other
It's an Intel Q9550 quad-core custom PC (running Windows 7 64 OS) with 4 gigs of RAM, within which my sprawling half a terabyte of samples can stretch their legs.