Heather StykaInterview
Singer-songwriter
Adapted from Heather Styka's interview on Uses This, published 29 May 2018. 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
Well, it all starts with a song on my 00-18 Martin guitar.
I also have an Epiphone Casino Coupe that I use with a Fender Blues Junior amp when I'm rocking out.
And a 1980-something Omnichord that I break out on rare occasions.
to heat up water](https://www.instagram.com/p/kKq3WDiyWQ "Heather's Instagram photo of her car kettle.")) and an Aeropress, to make perfect coffee wherever I am.
I use an iPhone SE, mostly because I've got little hands, and I'm not a huge fan of latest trend of big screen phones.
I also use a 13" MacBook Pro from 2012, for all the administrative stuff and occasional recording.
I still think of it as my "new laptop." I've got a Blue Snowball that's handy for capturing song ideas if I want the recording to be slightly more hi-fi than a phone recording.
My 2016 album, The Bittersweet Tapes, was recorded on a 4-track cassette recorder, Tascam Portastudio, that my dad bought me from a thrift store when I was a teenager.
Productivity
Notes
It helps me keep track of all my ideas, and I use it in tandem with the Notes app to keep track of lyric ideas.
Storage
I'm also a fan of Dropbox --- I'm in a weekly songwriting group where we upload a song a week to a shared Dropbox, which helps keep us creative and community-oriented no matter where we are all touring.
Other
I use RapidWeaver for my web design, which makes everything so easy for anyone with rudimentary coding experience.