Zed ShawInterview
Developer, writer and musician
Adapted from Zed Shaw's interview on Uses This, published 21 October 2011. 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've got a Carl Martin Quattro pedal, which is my primary effect chain.
That feeds into a Line 6 M5 for extra arbitrary effects.
Those then feed into a Boomerang III Looper which is the most awesome looper ever.
Finally, I have a Boss DR880 that feeds into a secondary channel in the signal chain so I can actually loop drum tracks in the looper and apply effects to them.
then goes into a Surprise Sound Labs Rock Block Tube Amp then to the H4N so I have this complete setup for crafting improvised full recording sessions with almost no friction on the process.
My favorite guitar is a G&L ASAT Classic S, but it has single coil pickups so it's hard to record with it.
I then have a G&L Comanche that has stainless steel frets as my main recording guitar.
I also have a Will Ray ASAT that is a ton of fun, with a sick B-bender.
Lastly, I recently built a custom Bass VI that is quickly becoming my favorite improvisation instrument.
It's got 3 Seymour Duncan Rails pickups that solves my noise issues but still sound great.
I then put in Torres Engineering Varitone with an extra push-pull blend knob wired to coil-tap switches and three independent on-off switches for each pickup.
Productivity
I use awesome for my window manager on Linux since it's mostly keyboard based.
I first used Sphinx but it was too hard to get good PDF typography out of and really only works if you document projects the way the Sphinx authors do.
Notes
Coding & Development
Media
For post-production though I use REAPER which is seriously the best $60 bucks I ever spent.
Other
For programming I use mostly vim with MacVim on the mac.