The screen is important because it determines the size of your visual workspace. Is portability important? Are your productions going to be fairly simple or complex? Is your laptop going to be used in a music live performance? Screen Size So the first step should be deciding what your work requires. The folk singer/songwriter who wants to carry a laptop with her on the subway to record gigs in Brooklyn has different needs than the producer who wants to put together hip-hop beats in his home studio in Atlanta. Some DAWs are targeted more at recording, others more at generating music in the laptop itself. DJs typically do all of the above and also use the laptop as a performance device, often triggering everything with a controller that has touchpads and a couple of turntable-style discs for scratching.Īll of these applications use software packages called digital audio workstations, or DAWs. But they still record vocals and some other sounds using microphones, and mix those with computer-generated audio and often with snippets of other artists’ recordings. Hip-hop, pop, and EDM musicians typically use the laptop itself to produce most of the actual sounds-programming the sounds into a sequencer or playing them on a MIDI keyboard or touchpads connected to the laptop. Many employ a traditional approach, recording tracks from microphones and instruments, then mixing them to create the final product. Recording, Producing/Composing, or Performing? But while any laptop can be used to produce music on some level, the more serious your ambitions, the more selective you need to be when choosing a laptop for music production.įirst, let’s figure out what you’re going to do with music on this laptop, then we’ll run down the basic options and identify the most important software and peripherals. Whether you’re recording bass guitar or hip-hop or a classical quartet, you can now produce practically any kind of music on a laptop computer.

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