Tech For The Festive Musician

It’s that time of year again when we flail about the Internet looking for gift inspiration for family and friends – and this can easily lead to an outbreak of gear acquisition syndrome in even the most resolute music producer…

Deck The Halls

Before trundling out the inevitable list of gear suggestions, one alternative idea might prove more beneficial to your actual music output. Although it’s tempting to believe the missing ingredient in your mixes is that one final preamp/microphone/synthesiser plugin, in reality all you need to create some top quality tunes is your laptop and your DAW.

Of course it’s fun to have an array of instruments and dials to play with – and this certainly does increase the scope of what you can do – but sometimes imposing limitations can spark creativity as much as the addition of a new toy. So instead of buying a new synth, you could set yourself a challenge of creating a track using only sounds recorded from your laptop’s built-in microphone, or a track created using only delay plugins – and so on.

If You Insist

Having said that, there’s always a certain excitement generated from a new piece of gear that can trigger a surge of creativity too – so here are a few things that might be worth considering as Christmas gifts for a growing musician…

If you’re looking to start out as a producer – or if you’d like a stripped down mobile rig for travelling – then you might want to consider a small audio interface such as the Scarlett 2i2 from Focusrite. With two inputs – perfect for recording a single vocal and guitar for example – this is a solid unit with good quality preamps that is nice and small and draws its required power from the USB port (so no need for any extra plugs). There are also larger versions available (4i4, 6i6) with more inputs if you need a little more expandability.

To go with this, you might want some sturdy microphones – so if you don’t have one already, it could be time to pick up one of the industry standard workhorses, the Shure SM58 or 57.

Alternatively, you could go soft – if you’re running an older version of your DAW, then an upgrade to the latest version might improve your workflow as well as adding some new features/instruments that you can try out over the holidays. On a related note, the Properllerhead team have been busy revamping Reason 10 to improve performance of VST plugins, and with the 10.3 update due early next year, this could be a good time to upgrade – as well as possibly investing in a plugin or two.

Bank balance notwithstanding, there’s basically no limit to the number of things you could treat yourself to, but if you’d like some more suggestions there’s a varied list here from Icon Collective…



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