Music Hardware

Music Hardware

Physical hardware for music production

 

The budding artist and song writing community is ever thankful for the epic leaps that have been made in the last two decades in electronic studio equipment.

There are some essentials that are required to populate your studio if you want to go about making tunes.

Microphones

Essential for recording vocals and acoustic instruments, mics perform according to their components and response attributes. Some microphones are better suited to vocals whilst others respond better to plucked instruments, bass, drums, brass and percussion

 

Amplifiers

For a studio you should seriously consider investing in a good quality amp that outputs a clean and flat signal. When you monitor a mix you want it to be as raw and uncoloured as possible, again this comes down to brand and the internal respective components.

 

Speakers

The sound you hear is generated by timphanic surfaces of the speaker moving in response to the signal coming from an amp. Monitor speakers should be positioned correctly, provide an accurate uncoloured sound and be matched closely in power to the amp that is driving them.

 

Mixers

The mixer of course is the hub point for all your devices. Signal to noise ratios should be low as this unit will feed the amp its signal to be pushed out as sound via the speakers. Cheap mixers may be quick and easy to handle, but they will often lack some of the most basic requirements to secure an accurate representational balance of the instruments being routed through them.

 

Sound Cards

Sound cards are an important feature of computer sequenced music. Good quality sound card either external or internal have in most cases replaced the need for expensive and cumbersome multi-track tape recorders. Whilst hard disk multi-track recorders are available, these too are being replaced in favour of more advanced sequencing packages that are able to control deep levelled dynamic characteristics of individual tracks. Sound cards of course need a computer to be fitted to or controlled by.

 

Synthesizers

If you want to make interesting and expressive music in the electronic genre, then synthesizers are going to be the mainstay of your studio. I recommend that everyone purchases at least one decent synth so that you can learn the nuances of electronic sound production and live recording techniques. 

Whilst I readily support various high grade software synths that you can load on your computer, there is simply no replacing the intuition that can be honed by having a standalone hardware synthesizer.

 

Computers

There are many artists who still prefer to drive their studio using a dedicated hardware sequencer. This is fine and there are some fantastic items of kit available for the producer. With the advancement of home computer technology, there is a strong allure to create tracks with a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) package such as Sonar or Cubase. These packages essentially become 80% or more of the studio. Many external pieces of equipment can be emulated and included in a virtual realm, cutting down on studio space and also saving considerable amounts of time as well as your electricity bill.

If you're absolutely sincere about creating music and you really want a very stable and powerful platform then buy a decent Apple Mac. PC's are fine and really can complement a studio nicely, a Mac both presently and traditionally always outperforms the PC when comparing the same applications run on them.