Piers CawleyInterview
Carer, singer, photographer, streamer
Adapted from Piers Cawley's interview on Uses This, published 6 July 2024. 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
Its clean HDMI feed is split via a passive HDMI splitter with one side going to the first input of my ATEM Mini Pro ISO video switcher and the other going to the cheapest USB capture card I could find in 2019.
Fill is a Pixapro Glowpad 450D set to warm light on a Manfrotto Magic Arm clamped to the pole of my monitor stand.
The iPad sits on a Reloop Stand Hub, a combination tablet stand and powered USB hub that's about the best thing I added to my rig last year.
Wireless In Ear Monitor System
As well as the ATEM, Mac, Raspberry Pi and AUDIO4c there's a 60W DC power supply feeding a big old splitter cable to power a couple of USB hubs, an Ethernet hub, the ATEM and a Gear4Music Wireless IEM Transmitter.
There's also an OWC Thunderbolt 4 hub because the only thing wrong with the M1 Mac Mini from my point of view is that it doesn't have nearly enough ports.
I've also got one of their tiny Atreus boards that would be absolutely perfect as a road keyboard, if only it could do Bluetooth.
The prime position there is held by an Ebony 45S - a beautiful large format camera that I love dearly and have taken some cracking photos with, but that was over ten years ago.
There's also chemistry and gear for making palladium contact prints from the negatives that's not even in solution yet, and an ArtixScan 1800 for scanning the negatives that's been in its box since we moved to this house 15 years ago.
And a Stearman Press SP-445 daylight film processing system and chemistry that's never been used.
An Olight Perun Mini flashlight: Purchased because it was so cute, but oh boy is ever useful!
There's a Pilot Custom 823 with an FA Nib that lives in the breast pocket of my jacket which gives me a small amount of joy every time I have the excuse to use it, and a Traveller's Notebook style passport sized notebook holder holding a couple of notebooks with Tomoe River paper that I got from Jetpens.com.
Communication
If I have a Zoom guest, their audio (and the Zoom window they appear in) are routed out to HDMI2.
Notes
Coding & Development
I do all my writing and occasional coding in Emacs.
Media
If one of their PCs running Ableton or something went down, the techs could switch over to the backup PC without changing anything else, so the A4c has two USB-C connections which provide access to the full capabilities of the interface to both devices that connect to it.
My looper is Loopy Pro running on an M1 iPad Pro and I love it.
I started doing this with Logic Pro on the Mac, but Loopy Pro makes things much easier, especially when I'm singing songs with more complicated structures than just a chorus - shanties often have a call and response structure as well as a chorus, for instance.
Over on the Mac, I host guests in a Zoom session (I don't like Zoom - it's annoyingly fiddly to set up for good sound and the company's pronouncements don't fill me with joy - but it tends to be software that people already have, so I use it) and route the sound hither and yon with Rogue Amoeba's Loopback.
I'm told that there's nothing Loopback can't do that can't also be done with BlackHole, which is free and open source, but I'd already bought Loopback when I found out about BlackHole and Loopback's UI is much nicer than Blackhole's, so I stick with it.