one are the days when songs were made only in studios with high-end equipment to play and record music. The one thing that the recent viral “Rasoda Rap” taught us is that music that resonates with crores of listeners can be produced at home. Off-late, musicians and social media influencers have been producing quality content with just a simple laptop.
Equipment Required by Home Musicians
All that is needed to produce music with a laptop is to own one that can support digital audio workstation (DAW) application software. Plus, it should have plenty of ports to be able to plug-in all the hardware peripherals required for music production, like microphones, headphones, audio interfaces, studio monitors, various types of cables to interconnect these devices, just to name a few. In the current times, DAWs are used for producing and recording music, songs, soundtracks, podcasts, sound effects, Instagram videos and for any other purpose wherein complex recorded audio would be required.
Some of the DAWs that are popularly used at present are FL Studio, Logic Pro X and Ableton Live. Furthermore, third party plug-ins such as virtual studio technology synthesizers and sample packs of drums, snares, and other percussion instruments required to make the desired music will have to be downloaded on to the laptop.
Also, software suites such as Adobe Audition and Audacity, which are both audio editing tools commonly used for sound and audio editing are popular among musicians for sound quality enhancement, and file repair and restoration.
The Right Laptop Specs for Musicians
Let us now come to the most pertinent question. What laptop specs does one need to make music from their home? While the answer to this depends on several factors such as the complexity of the music, the number of plug-ins and applications that the users plan to use at the same time, and so on, the basic specs required are as follows:
- A minimum of 2.4GHz i5 or i7 quad-core processor power
- A minimum of 4GB RAM. Although, when it comes to making music with laptops there is no such thing called as “too much” RAM. So, owning a laptop with 16GB RAM would be apt
- A good battery backup
- A minimum of 512 GB SSD for the OS, and 1 TB HDD of additional storage to store all the music that will be created.
- A large screen of 15 inches that supports Full-HD resolution
- 64-bit operating system
- Plenty of ports like USB Type C, MMC card reader, Thunderbolt, separate jacks for headphone and mic, HDMI, etc.
Furthermore, to handle the above-mentioned suites, a laptop needs to have good storage, and plenty of ports to connect all the hardware peripherals we mentioned earlier required to support musicians. Besides the ones we mentioned earlier, some other hardware that musicians commonly work with includes digital recorders, USB MIDI Keyboards, FX processors, synthesizers, USB mixer and so on.
Keeping the above specs in mind, you should check out one of the HP Elitebooks or Probooks for the job. Their cost starts at around 89,000.
