Mike Outram

Here are some resources, tools, apps, gear, things I use that help me with making music, practising, running my websites, running an online business, writing, productivity, workflow, and so on. Maybe some of it will be of use to you.

**Disclaimer** Some of these links to the stuff I use are affiliate links. What does that mean? Well it means if you click the link and, for example, buy the ruler that I like and pay the £2, then I get 10p. And then I can buy some white mice or fizz bombs and live it up.

MUSIC RESOURCES

Guitars

• Gibson 335
• Fender USA Telecaster
• Larrivée Parlor O-01
• Heritage 575
• Burguet 3-M Classical Guitar
• Ovation 1624 Nylon Acoustic
• Fender Jazz Bass

Amps

• I use a Cornford Hurricane which I sometimes pair with a Polytone. Also use a DV Mark Little Jazz for small gigs when I’m on the tube.

Bits & Bobs

• Picks – Jim Dunlop ULTEX Jazz IIIs. Or Hawk Picks – I use their Tonebird 4 model which is a similar size to a Jazz iii XL. They’re great picks and they’re from Manchester which is my hometown :)
• Straps – I use Air Straps – fantastically well made, and some really gorgeous designs too. Made in my second hometown of Devon :)
• Strings – I use D’Addario 11-48 on the 335, 9-42 on my Tele, 13-56 Chromes on the Heritage, 12-53 on the acoustics. EJ45 Normal Tension on my Classical Guitar. LaBella flats on the bass.
• Leads – Planet Waves American Stage 10ft, and Evidence Audio SIS Monorail patch cables.
• Soft case – Mono M80 Vertigo – Perfect case, no problems, doesn’t wear out, loads of room for cables etc.

Writing Music

• Staedtler Mars Eraser – These are good rubbers. I got a pack of 20. I can rub things out like a champion.
• Pentel P209 series mechanical pencil, 0.9mm lead. These are orange and they are pencils. I imagine Q would use these. So I feel good about that.
• Pukka Pad A4 Jotta Squared Paper Notebook. I like this because it has little squares on and there’s loads of pages.
• Novello Manuscript Book 10 – It’s 100 pages of double sided A4 manuscript with 12 staves per page.
• Westcott 12″ Stainless Steel Ruler – It has a ‘Non Slip Cork Base’. So now you know.

Effects

• Archer Overdrive
• T-rex Replica Delay
• TC Electronic Polytune 2 mini & HOF mini Revrb Pedal
• Lehle Volume Pedal – good pedal, does a good job, might get the lighter/smaller version because it weighs a ton
• Strymon Timeline Delay
• Boss OC-2 (that broke, so I got the OC-4 which is uninspiring and nowhere near as good)
• UD Stomp – 8 separate delay pedals in one box. Allan Holdsworth had a lot of input into this and it’s fantastic. I just use it on a couple of gigs that I do.
• CE-3
• DD-3
• Z-Vex Box of Rock & Wooly Mammoth – Back when I bought those Z-vex pedals above, I bought 3 others that were stolen from me – £1000 worth of pedals! Here are the names and serial numbers of the stolen pedals. If you happen to come across these, I’d love to know how you came by them…Ooh Wah II – serial number: D 161, Johnny Octave – serial number: 036, RingTone – serial number: 129

Studio

• Apollo X4 – This is a great audio interface. And it has an X and a 4, so that’s quite important.
• Sennheiser HD 600 – Listening headphones. Great sound and super comfy.
• Soft Box Lights – I put these on when I’m filming, and sometimes when doing an online lesson. They make the entire world seem better.
• Samsung T7 Shield External Solid State Drive – credit card sized 4 TB storage drive. All good.
• Salt Lamp – Oh my word, what a lovely lamp.
• CalDigit TS3 Plus Dock – Dock to connect up all the stuff. It’s tiny and it works.

MAC RESOURCES

I spend a LOT of time at the machine, making music, writing, running the site, etc., etc. So I do my best to make it work as best as I can. Here’s some of the stuff that helps:

• Nice people – There are a ton of people (*cough* – MASSIVE nerds) who have done all the heavy lifting re productivity, effective workflows and so on, so I encourage you to check them all out.
• Merlin Mann
• Brett Terpstra
• David Sparks
• Leo Babauta
• Tim Ferriss

• Transcribe! – I’ve used this for forever. I use it every day. There are some more geeky features that enable you to drill down into figuring out EXACTLY what’s going on in a performance. Some people say it’s cheating using this stuff, but I say, like, whatever….

• Alfred – This is an absolute ‘must have’ on my machine. All it does is launch stuff from the keyboard. You click ‘command – space’ and that opens Alfred; from there you type what you want to open/do and it starts guessing what you want to do. It gets smarter too, so say I want to launch BusyCal, I click ‘command – space – B’ and it’ll first guess I want to open that because that’s what I’m usually looking for if I type ‘B’. So that means I can throw all apps in the app folder, nothing in the dock or desktop, couple of keystrokes and away you go! But the real power is in the workflows that you can create, eg., opening several webpages in one go, running search queries on specific sites like say I wanted to search the Andertons Guitar Shop website for a Ditto Looper – I type ‘command, space’, type ‘andertons’ [actually only needs ‘an’ because it guesses that you mean ‘andertons’, hit ‘enter’, then type ‘ditto’, hit ‘enter’, and that opens up the search – it takes 5 seconds. So, for any workflow I regularly do, I make a shortcut for. Another good one I use a ton is whatever transcription I’m working on I have a shortcut that opens the Sibelius file, plus the Mp3 pre-loaded in Transcribe! Takes literally 2 seconds to launch. That workflow is all about removing barriers to do the work. Anyway, Alfred – it’s super super super useful.

• TextExpander – Again, this is a total ‘must have’ for me. It enables me to create snippets of text. For example, I have one for my address where I type ‘;8’ and that expands into my address, with directions, a link to a map, where to park, etc. Massive time saver if you find yourself typing the same stuff again and again. I have hundreds of snippets. E.g, say I’m inputting gigs for my calendar and I’m playing somewhere with my band. I type ‘qmo’ and that expands to ‘Mike Outram |’ with the cursor ready to input details for the gig. Then I hit, say, ‘vpe’ and that expands to ‘Pizza Express, Dean St, London, Tel:…’ etc. I have auto spell corrects for commonly misspelt words, snippets that add accents, umlauts, etc., to foreign words. It’s a lovely thing. I’m on version 5, which is really old.

• BusyCal – Great calendar app. I do wish there were some way to bulk edit the calendar database, so if you know of any resource to do that then let me know.

• Dropbox – Everyone has this already, I guess. But if you don’t, it’s invaluable for sharing stuff like rehearsal charts, Mp3s, demos, etc.

• 1Password – Great password manager that I use to remember all the login deets for everything, and it creates and remembers 50-string random generated passwords.

• Sibelius – I’ve been using Sibelius since version 1. I use it to present most of the notation on this site, making transcriptions for teaching, my music, etc. It’s a completely pro level bit of software, so if you’re not using it all the time then you don’t really need it. Sometimes I prefer to write stuff out by hand, though, especially Lead Sheets. Sibelius isn’t that great at doing that. A great free alternative is MuseScore which has a cool feature where you can publish a bit of music and share it, plus it can play it back with some sounds too. Pretty nifty.

• Logic Pro – This is what I use to record music. Again, it’s a Pro piece of software, so unless you’re recording a lot you just don’t need it. There are plenty of cheaper versions of this kind of thing where you can get a great result. [Check out Reaper, for example] Also, bear in mind that you’ll NEED to be using it tons just to understand how to use it. There’s a LOT you can do with it.

• Sublime Text – I use this when I need to edit code because it has syntax highlighting (pretty colours) so reading the code/debugging is way easier. Plus if you let it know what type of file it’s looking at, e.g., php, css, html, etc, then it’ll help you out a bit. It’s also super useful for editing text too.

• Spotify – I use this to make playlists of music to check out. Check out my Charlie Parker Omnibook post for an example

• The Archive – for very simple documents I just store them as plaintext files in dropbox, and use The Archive to view them. I did like NValt, but can’t be bothered to use a viewer to render the files. The Archive just uses a little .json file to render the markup as you like. I got a bit hacked off with being unable to very quickly search google docs – actually it’s impossible. So plain text is great – super fast, searchable, offline, future-proof. Excellent.

Chrome Browser extensions 

uBlock Origin – Well that sounds fancy, doesn’t it? It’s an ad blocker, but I use it for a bunch of other stuff too. For example, one thing it can do is find <div> tags and block them, so on some sites I visit regularly where there’s a bunch of ‘upgrade now’ or just stuff I don’t want to see I’ll check to see if I can block it with this tool. So there’s a whole bunch of stuff I’ve removed from various websites. Useful if that kind of thing drives you mad.
MarkSnip – Web clipper that formats as Markdown
Full Page Screen Capture – does what it says.
Print Friendly – occasionally use this to save a webpage to PDF
Vimeo Record – Vimeo just brought this out which is really great for recording quick videos. So if someone asks in my website how to play a particular thing I can really easily make them a little video to show how to do it.

 WEBSITE RESOURCES

Here’s some of the stuff I run my websites with.

• WordPress – WordPress is one of the greatest things on the Internet. Currently, around 34% of ALL websites run on WordPress. It’s free and incredibly well supported. I use WordPress on all of my sites.

• Memberpress – This is the software that I use to make the membership side of ElectricCampfire.com

• Dreamhost – This was the hosting I started out on. Actually, it was the first hosting I tried that was great. Before that I started on AOL hosting, then Xcalibre, then GoDaddy, HeartInternet and then Dreamhost. Their hosting is nice and easy to use with 1-click WordPress installs & great customer support so I’d recommend it for basic hosting, and I still use it for several smaller sites I run (for the past 10 years) (and there’s a great link here where they give you $50 for getting some basic hosting). For this site, I’ve been trying out different hosting lately as the site needed way more resources. Tried WP Engine which was great although their caching doesn’t work with membership sites, but they’ve got a staging site feature which is awesome. Now I’m using a VPS with LiquidWeb which is brilliant, but costs a LOT. Are you really reading this?… Surely you should be practising ;)

• ActiveCampaign – This is what I use for my email list and newsletter. It’s a super powerful email service provider. If you just need to send the occasional kind of ‘here are my gigs/what’s going on’ type e-mails then I’d just use MailChimp which is free for the first 2000 subscribers. But if you need autoresponders with tagging, segmentation, plus neato integrations with tons of other software then check this out, it’s splendid.

• Thrive Themes – I use this suite of plugins for making landing pages, opt-ins to join my newsletter, etc. They come out with new stuff all the time so it’s great. Plus the guy that runs is it, Shane Melaugh, is a stellar chap.

• Bandcamp – This is a way to sell your music (here’s my store). Can’t say enough good things about this. It has a great player that you can embed anywhere, stats, you can bundle anything with the download. It’s a great way to sell/share your music.

• Filezilla – free FTP client. As they say, ‘The FileZilla Client not only supports FTP, but also FTP over TLS (FTPS) and SFTP’. Whoa! Let the party begin…

• Vimeo – I use Vimeo to host all the video on the membership side of the site (over 750 videos right now). It’s totally reliable and does everything I need. Really top notch service! (my link here gets you a 25% discount)

 iOS RESOURCES

• In the past couple of years I’ve definitely removed/hidden many of the tools I use from my phone. On my homescreen I just use really basic stuff – a Calendar, Safari, Gmail, Messages, Voice Memos. I have a bunch of other stuff but I hide most of it in folders so as not to get massively distracted. Here’s the other stuff I use:
• Cleartune Tuner – Chromatic tuner. Amazing all the things you can do on your phone now, isn’t it? A tuner, recorder, diary, metronome, etc.
• Time Guru Metronome – Great metronome app. Actually, the only thing I want in a metronome, apart from it keeping time, is that the click is woody, precise, and quite loud. I hate beeps. The best sound I’ve heard from an app is Justin Sandercoe’s app on android, but the iPhone version doesn’t use the same set of sounds, or it doesn’t have the same oomph as on the android. Anyhow, if you’re on Android, get that one! This one is pretty posh though – you can set it to different time signatures and have it drop out if you want, plus it’s made by Avi Bortnik who plays with John Scofield in that band that was good. And I like them.
• 1Password – iOS version of this splendid password manager.
• forScore – Fantastic app for scores on an iPad. You can scan in some music and then hyperlink things like codas etc, plus the backlight of the machine means you don’t need any other stage light to see the music. There’s also an iPhone version for those times when you’ve forgotten your music, but nobody ever does this…. er…
• The Times – Huzzah! I don’t read the news at all, but I just have this for the deadly killer sudoku and the crossword. Got to have something to do on the Tube.
• 1Writer – simple app which links to my plaintext folder in dropbox, super fast, markdown, looks good.
• Flags Quiz – Yes, come on now! It was lockdown, so I wanted to learn all the flags of the world. Which I did. And now you’re here, I might as well tell you that this is an awesome book about flags. And now that you’re thinking, ‘Matron, that’s cool!’ – let me tell you, pal, there’s not a day goes by when I don’t think to myself, ‘I Bloody Love Flags’. My favourite flag is Turkmenistan 🇹🇲

RANDOM

• Fujitsu ScanSnap iX500 – Until I got this I hadn’t thrown away ANYTHING ever. I had comics, school books, reams and reams of music for bands, reviews, cards, etc., etc – all the stuff that builds up over years. Stuff you keep for no good reason. Nostalgia, maybe. Anyhow, this is a document scanner that ate up all the paper in my life in a day, ultra fast, both sides in one go, 50 sheets in about a minute. And any text goes through this automagic thing called Optical Character Recognition, which means I can search for, say, how much my phone bill was in August 1997 :)
• Aeropress – I like coffee, and this is a nice way to do that. I’ve tried those pod machines but wasn’t really into it. This is a different vibe to a French Press. Cleaner. No crema. It’s a winner. Fueller of much practice!
• Exiftool – I wanted a way to sort all the photos/files/voicememos etc without relying on iCloud. I like how iCloud shows you your data, but I hate the lock-in, obfuscation of where the file is, waiting for files to download, having stuff in more than one place, and having to pay for another thing I don’t actually need/want. So, Exiftool is a command-line thing that shows you the meta data in any file, and you can pull the data to do stuff like batch-renaming files to the same file naming taxonomy. I use it and Hazel to rename all image files to “yyyy-MM-dd_hh-mm-ss + [something about the image]”. And that’s nice to arrange all photos in order. And you can do things like name all files like m4as, jpeg, mov, etc., and then run a smart search so you can see a whole bunch of stuff that you’ve used/made within a certain time period. Also Alfred can pull the GPS info using the exiftool so you can quickly see where an image was taken etc. Either way, I’ve found tons of old photos/vidoes which I can watch with my kids from when they were little. Aww.
• ffmpeg – Great command-line tool which I use for converting video. Ridiculously easy to use, eg: “ffmpeg -i input.mp4 output.avi”
• My 2nd favourite drink – probably a good thing that nobody seems to stock this. It’s everywhere in Italy though. Must be like a national drink.
• And I do enjoy a good book.
• White Board – This is right in front of me and I use it to track stuff or to nag me to do stuff. Once day we’ll have Minority Report, but until then…

HOBBIES

Always fun to have a bunch of hobbies. Most of mine are puzzles of some kind. Here are some I’m interested in at the moment.

• Typing – A couple of months ago I decided to learn how to type properly. I started with Keybr which was great for just learning to type without looking at the keys, and now I mostly use Typeracer and monkeytype. This has actually been a really beneficial thing to do in terms of using time more effectively. I’m practising about 15 minutes a day, and trying to improve to around 100 WPM. When I started with proper technique I was typing around 10-20 WPM; now I’m around 70 WMP with about 95% accuracy depending on which website I’m using (Typeracer is the most realistic so I average about 60 WPM there). There are different aspects to improve: speed, accuracy, look-ahead, optimisation, etc. Nerdy fun that’s not too dissimilar to practising the guitar!
• Cryptic Crosswords & Killer Sudoku – If you like solving cryptics I can definitely recommend you check out Simon Anthony and Mark Goodliffe’s YouTube channel: Cracking the Cryptic.
• Memory League – A great little website & community of folks interested in memorisation.
• Speedcubing – Feliks Zemdegs has a fantastic site where he shares ideas about solving the Rubik’s cube. My pb for the 3×3 is 29 seconds – ludicrously slow compared to the average speedsolver time of sub 10 seconds, and around 3 seconds for the world record. Kids, eh?
• Electronics Repair – This is going to take ages, but I have so much broken gear that’s just languishing forlornly in the cupboard that I figured I might as well learn how to fix stuff. Just don’t touch the capacitors. My favourite fixer inspiration is MenditMark

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Ok, those are some of the resources that I use. I use all this stuff a LOT. Hope you find something useful there that makes your life easier/more fun. If you want to ask me anything about anything from that lot, feel free.

PS: Like I said, some of these links are affiliate links which means that if you make a purchase then LOOK OUT – I’m booking my goddamn helicopter outta here – I’m gone. Bahamas bound, tequila life for me. Kids? Bills? You and your problems?… A distant memory, pal…

But really, thanks.

Mike