I have one machine for music production and two machines I use for everything else, particularly programming. Most of the stuff in my setup has been bought a long time ago when I built my gaming setup (with a friend).

A photo of my setup. It's a bit messy, but it works for me.
My setup. The laptop in front is not connected to the screen by the way, the desktop on the far right is.

If anything is missing, or if you just have question, feel free to send a message to stan@hoenson.net

Table of contents

Music production

I'm currently doing this on a desktop I built with a friend in . It's got an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X, a GTX 1060, 16 GB of DDR3 memory, 256 GB of SSD storage and 1 TB of HDD storage.

Operating system

I think Windows is usable, but I don't like the company behind it. Also, my machine doesn't support Windows 11.

DAW

I use Live for creating music. And I use REAPER for mastering. I have tried using REAPER for creation as well, but for now I can't be as creative in it as with Live.

Plugins

There is no need to buy many plugins, this is just what I use and have found valuable for my workflow.

Synths

Serum has been my most used synth throughout the years, but somewhat recently I've started enjoying the more analog inspired synths.

A custom GUI made for u-he Diva.
This is the MONA skin for u-he Diva. It has made the synth even more enjoyable for me.

EQ

I most often use Tone Control for the general shaping of a sound. Only when I need more surgical control I use Pro-Q 3. If I'd had to pick only one, it would have to be Pro-Q 3 for it's workflow and versatility.

Compressors

I actually mostly use the Live stock commpressors, but I've gotten great results with Vulf Compressor on the drum bus. I believe I've used this on every single song on Modernity EP.

Limiters

Pro-L 2 for transparant limiting, Faraday Limiter for colorful limiting.

Delays

Valhalla Delay is my bread-and-butter delay. It sounds great and it's extremely versatile. The others are mostly used for more experimental sound design.

Reverbs

Valhalla is just great, what can I say. I sometimes use Endless Smile as a rising effect to create tension.

Saturation / distortion

I often use Goodhertz Tupe in my mastering chain. It can give a really nice chunky feeling to a song. Rift is my most used distortion for sound design. It's really fun to go through all the presets and find what sounds cool.

Filters

This is one of my absolute favorites, very important for my sound.

Utilities

ShaperBox 3 is my go-to plugin for sidechaining, though I've been experimenting with some different methods as well. Midside and Panpot are great for manipulating the stereo field. Loudness is my favorite metering tool, and Good Dither is the best dithering in the industry (so they say).

Miscellaneous

I use SketchCassette II and Wow Control for vibrato or chorus effects. PhaseMistress is my favorite phaser. Lossy is just cool, either on the master bus, or to create very watery ambience. And I often use Addictive Drums 2 for realistic sounding cymbals and percussion.

This concludes the plugin section. Once again, this is just what I use, and I've been collecting these for over 10 years now. There is no need to buy this many plugins, and I would also encourage you to experiment yourself to find the tools you like.

Programming

I have gone through the Luke Smith pipeline and became a bit of a FOSS enthusiast for a while. Ideologically speaking it's a decent movement, but pragmatically speaking it's not there yet. Most people want their software to just work, and I can't blame them. However, I prefer using these highly configured machines over macOS or Windows.

A screenshot of my Artix Linux desktop. It has a gray monochrome theme and it shows an open text editor.
This is my Artix Linux + suckless "rice". As you might have noticed, I themed this website with the same colorscheme (both the light and dark mode).

So, for programming (and most daily computing) I use the ThinkPad X220 (released in ). It has great hardware support, the keyboard is near perfect, it's durable, it looks cool, it's easily repairable and upgradable, and so on. It doesn't have great specs, but I have upgraded it to 16 GB memory and swapped the HDD for an SSD. This makes it usable for most normal computing tasks and programming, especially if you're using minimal software.

I might at some point buy a MacBook Pro to have "best of both worlds". On that machine I could still comfortably use nearly all of my preferred CLI's (since macOS is UNIX-based) and do music production and graphic work. And the performance boost will be incredible.

And surprise, I have two of these.

Operating system

Both are great. Artix Linux has just a bit more programs available for it. But OpenBSD is even simpler and very secure. Alpine Linux is also a great option.

The poster for the OpenBSD 7.6 release.
The poster for the OpenBSD 7.6 release. They get one made for every release.

Desktop environment

I'm calling this my desktop environment, the suckless desktop environment. Most people would choose GNOME or Xfce, but I like it minimal.

I think an i3-based setup with either Alacritty or the new Ghostty terminal emulator and Rofi is also a great setup, which even requires a bit less configuration. I have used this in the past.

Shell

I usually use the shell the operating system comes with, but I've also been trying out fish and elvish. I think elvish is very promising, but fish is a lot more mature and has recently gotten a full Rust rewrite.

The history search in both fish and elvish could replace my usage of atuin, since I don't use the sync feature anyway. And the file manager in elvish could even replace lf for me, we'll see.

Text editor

Once you start using vim-like editors, you can't go back. It's not even (only) about any "productivity gains", it's just more fun and expressive. You can keep these very minimal, or you can shape them into a custom IDE.

Web browser

None of these are even close to being perfect. Firefox acts like they're all about privacy, but then they use Google as the default search engine and have many privacy features disabled by default. The same can be said about Brave Browser, albeit to a slightly lower extent.

But there is hope! Ladybird is building a new browser from scratch, including their own rendering engine.

Browser extensions

uMatrix is the best content blocker, easy to use, yet still deep control. uBlock Origin is the best ad blocker. Tridactyl is the best Vim interface for Firefox. And I still don't care about cookies, and neither should you.

Mail client

I've yet to find a mail client that's truly intuitive to me. The CLI mail client aerc comes closer than any GUI I've tried, but Betterbird is decent. Betterbird is a fork of Mozilla Thunderbird. The default macOS mail client is also fine.

Search engine

All of these serve very different purposes. Marginalia and Wiby I mostly use to find niche blogposts, written on actual personal websites. Really fun for exploration. SearXNG is a metasearch engine, so you get results from many different search engines for your query. DuckDuckGo gets used when I need to find a product or service in my area, or when I'm trying to fix a bug.

A screenshot of Wiby search engine.
A screenshot of Wiby search engine.

Password manager

A local first password manager. It works well, I manually sync it, I don't use it with browser extensions, and I follow this strategy.

Miscellaneous

I do use all of these tools, but some of them are mostly listed here as a shout-out. You can ignore most of these if you're not a UNIX nerd.

I use Miniflux as my RSS feed reader. This is how I stay up to date with websites, music and YouTube videos. It has been a great experience to control the content that comes into my world. I've previously used newsboat and newsraft, which are CLI's, but for some reason neither stuck.