Emma WinstonInterview
PhD student, musician, botmaker
Adapted from Emma Winston's interview on Uses This, published 21 June 2016. 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
I work mostly on an 11" MacBook Air and I love it to death.
Except when it's too big, and then I take an iPad Mini 2 out with me instead.
I write about 90% of my music on a Teenage Engineering OP-1, which is a kind of synthesiser/sampler/sequencer/miniature-four-track-workstation hybrid with its own teeny-tiny elf-sized speaker and a 16-hour battery life.
I recently got my hands on another Teenage Engineering synth, the Pocket Operator Arcade, which is a fantastic little chiptune machine which fits in the palm of your hand and that I got hold of for the grand total of £40 on eBay.
Live, I also use a Critter and Guitari Septavox, which is not quite so compact, but it's nicely self-contained (batteries!
Communication
Productivity
Coding & Development
I back up and version all my work to a private GitHub repository.
When I became a student again I applied for GitHub's Student Developer pack in order to get access to a free private repository (I know Bitbucket exists, but this way I can ignore the command line).
For botmaking and other miscellaneous coding I use Sublime Text 2, although I'm fairly sure I don't make the most of its capabilities at all.
Media
I keep an ongoing series of 'sound journals', sound art pieces which act as a kind of messed-up audio diary of places I go, on SoundCloud, which are produced simply by recording snippets of audio from around me and then manipulating them.
For music-making, the only software I use for playing live is Ableton Live, which I use to trigger backing tracks that I can adjust parameters of on the fly, then play hardware lead synths over the top.
If I'm working on more abstract field-recording-based stuff I will usually use Samplr for iOS - my aforementioned sound journals are composed and recorded completely in Samplr.