Kim BoekbinderInterview
Artist, musician (The Impossible Girl)
Adapted from Kim Boekbinder's interview on Uses This, published 30 October 2014. 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 play an Epiphone Alleykat guitar which is a great guitar, semi-hollow body, narrow neck, well balanced, amazing tone, a dream to play, and it's sexy as hell.
For years I've been using the Digitech Genesis3 amp modeler which has been great, it's got huge range and, though digital, it's really good at modeling all kinds of analogue amps and pedal effects, from fuzz to wah to reverb/delay.
My main synthesizer is a microKorg XL, a great analogue starter synth for someone like me who travels a lot and can't be lugging around an 800 pound instrument everywhere I go.
I also use my iPad and a Line6 25-key MIDI keyboard for live shows when I'm traveling really light.
For drums I've got a Roland Octapad SPD-30.
I just got a VoiceLive 2 which is a live vocal processing unit with thousands of possible options.
For demo recording at home I use a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2.
I often record field samples as well and for that I use my iPhone or my ZOOM H1, tiny and powerful.
Communication
Skype for meetings and international calls and to stay in touch with my long-distance boyfriend/creative partner when he's antipodal.
Design
I have the Adobe CS5 creative suite - a gift - which I use nearly every day.
Photoshop for almost everything visual I do.
Media
For recording I often use Audacity, a free, open source, recording program which works great and is very simple.
I have Pro Tools, the industry standard, but it's hugely complex and a bit of overkill when all I want to do is play and record a song.
Sunrizer - $10 app that I use the most.
SoundPrism Pro - which does some neat sound things and extra neat MIDI control things that I never use but intrigue me.
Samplr - an interesting program for sound experimentation and sample bending.
Storage
Going through the list of software I use, it's long, but seems mostly standard and boring (Google Drive etc...) so I'm going to skip to the exciting stuff: iPad synth apps!
Other
My Mac is still running one of the big cats - the one before Lion.