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## The Eight Essential Keys to Great Recordings

- Post author
  By Tasman Hayes
- Post date
  December 30, 2011
- 10 Comments on The Eight Essential Keys to Great Recordings

Do you want to make great recordings? Do you want to get a studio-quality sound? These eight keys cover the essentials to make great recordings.

This article is written with the Mac in mind, but I started out recording music on Windows, so I know these essentials work for making music on Windows 7 as well.

We use Sarah’s current recording setup as an example. Sarah, a Mac Crazy reader, uses Garageband and her MacBook Pro’s built-in mic to record herself singing and playing guitar. Sarah wants to improve the sound quality of her music recordings, and she’s on a budget. Here’s Sarah’s original question:

> Heyyyy i have the 13 inch macbook pro, i play acoustic and electric guitar and sing aswell, when i go to record i simply use the macbook pro microphone and either play guitar and sing together or record each seperately. i use a Goodmans ACC2011 microphone which is pretty old and uses a jack lead ( i think thats the name ) which you cant detach from the microphone and im guessing its just a karaoke one.. i use it with a ALBA karaoke machine haha and i plug my guitar into a big good amp ive got using a jack lead? (peavey). im wanting to make my sound quality a lot better but dont know where to start, i also use garageband to put it all together. i was thinking a new microphone, a pop screen thing and a interface? but im not sure which to get and what will be compatible with what ive already got. im only 16 and the music is only for home use which will be uploaded to soundcloud or something so its nothing major.. yet and as im only young i really seriously need it to be affordable as i have hardly any money haha! if you helped i would seriously appreciate it as ive been searching the web for ages trying to find help thanks

> oh sorry i also use a yamaha PSR-262 sometimes to record keyboard and singing or just a keyboard part.. so any leads needed for that would be helpful 🙂 thanks

> Source: Comments from “What’s the Best MacBook for Making Music?”

### Recording Equipment, Setup and Environment Affect the Sound

When you record, a number of factors affect the quality of the recording and “color” the sound:

1. Which recording equipment are you using (e.g. do you use a studio microphone to record your vocals or the mic in your laptop)
2. How have you setup that recording equipment (e.g. when mic’ing guitar amp, do you put it more to the center of the speaker cone, or more to the side)
3. What environment are you recording in (e.g. are you in a room with tiled floors and a tall roof, giving a natural, spacious echo to any sounds, or are you in a small bedroom, with carpet and duvet damping any echo)

Let’s take Sarah’s current recording setup as an example of how these factors affect sound. Sarah’s using a Goodmans ACC2011 microphone for vocals. From what I can gather, it’s a cheap dynamic mic ($3.21 for a used one on eBay) with a quarter inch TRS (tip-ring-sleeve) plug. Sarah is using the Goodmans mic with an ALBA Karaoke machine. Together these two lo-fi items will most likely conspire in a sonic assassination of any singer. There’s always the possibility of a fluke where the combo suits Sarah’s voice, and perhaps brings out her unique sound. For example, to record Michael Jackson on Thriller, a relatively inexpensive Shure SM7B Dynamic Microphone was used instead of a high-end expensive studio mic, because for Michael’s voice it sounded better.

Sarah is running her electric guitar to the Peavey amp and then recording this through a mic (albeit a laptop mic). While it’s possible to plug the guitar directly into an audio interface, going through the guitar amp adds more character to the sound, such as overdrive. It’s a good choice. Put a mic in front of the amp, to the side of the speaker will give a warmer guitar tone. Putting a mic behind the speaker will give a muffled tone, giving a different sound. It is possible to record directly from the guitar and have the computer simulate the sound of different amps and effects pedals, for example with Guitar Rig.

There’s lots of options for recording the acoustic guitar. Does the acoustic guitar have a pickup in it? We could plug it straight into the audio interface, put a mic on it directly, run it through the guitar amp, or even the karaoke machine for something different. The different method will give different colored sounds. If the acoustic guitar is recorded unamplified with the MacBook Pro’s built-in mic a few feet away, the guitar may sound a bit flat.

The tiny condenser mic built-in to the Mac laptop, two to six feet away from your lips, instruments or amps, won’t really give a rich, full sound. The intensity of the sound is lost as it merges into the room, and more of the room’s character is added. As Sarah sings or plays guitar, the sounds will echo off the ceiling, walls and floor, and that echo – distinct or muddy, pleasing or not – will be coloring all her recordings.

The Yamaha PSR262 Keyboard has small built-in speakers giving a fairly tinny sound. The tinny sound recorded at a distance through the Mac Pro’s mic is unlikely to give an inspiring, emotionally evokative sound.

### Improving Home Studio Sound

The good news is there’s massive room for improvement in a recording setup like this. We’re at an incredible time, where high quality recording equipment is cheap and easily available. You can achieve a near studio-quality sound on a budget. Here’s some keys to to improve your sound and great great recordings.

### Key 1 – Try Close Micing

Close micing doesn’t mean putting mice close together! It means getting the mic closer to the sound. The closer you get to the source of the sound, the more of its essence you capture. The sound will have more presence. It penetrates more. It’s more intimate. You’ll hear more detail. They’ll be a greater range of sound, from soft to loud: At a distance a whisper is nothing, and a crashing sound can be shrugged off. Up close, a whisper is inside you, and crash rings your body like a bell.

If you’re recording from your laptop mic, you can move the laptop much closer to the sound source. (Be careful not to dent your MacBook Air or Pro while moving it around excitedly. The aluminium is easy to scratch & dent. Put it on something stable and not slippery. Ensure its elevated a bit to make it hard so noone steps on it. At least until they release indestructible carbon fibre Macs.)

As the mic goes closer, the color of the sound changes. For example, as the mic gets closer to a singer’s mouth, the bass in the singer’s voice tends to become more pronounced. This is called the proximity effect. You may bring the mic in close, and then take it back out slowly to give the mic a bit of “air”, until you get the sound you want.

You may need to drop the recording gain on your audio interface or in software so the recording doesn’t clip – where the level meters hit their maximum and turn red. Digital clipping gives an unpleasant transient mufflings of the sound – a lot of very short lived dull thuds.

If the recording still sounds distorted, but it’s not going red in the meters, the sound may be too powerful for the mic, i.e. above the maximum sound pressure level (SPL) it can mechanically register. If this happens, put more space between the mic and the sound source.

### Key 2 – Monitor the Recording and Adjust

Plug in some earbuds or headphones you have lying around to listen to how you sound when you record. This is called monitoring. This is useful because you get immediate feedback on how you sound, and make adjustments on the fly. Choosing to monitor your recordings as you make them will make you a better recording engineer much faster. (Think how photographers are are now getting better perhaps five times faster because they don’t have to wait for their film to be developed. Don’t deprive yourself of the instant feedback monitoring gives you.)

For example, while you monitor your recording, you can play with the distance between the sound source and the mic until you hit the sweetspot and get the sound you want. You can hear the effect as you move close into the mic while you whisper a passage, and then move the mic out while you sing a loud note.

Music production software, such as Logic, Cubase and Garageband can loop what your recording back to the headphones, along with a click track, or the other tracks in your project tracks. Effects to your track, such as reverb or a vocoder, can be applied in real time, so you can hear how the final result will sound. There is a slight delay – the latency – between the sound travelling into the computer and the sound coming out. This latency is typically 0.01 of a second, but it can throw time sensitive people.

Most external audio interfaces offer hardware monitoring, where you hear whatever is plugged into the interface directly over the headphones, without any processing by the computer. It’s good to have a good set of “cans” (headphones) to monitor the recording. Open-back headphones leak a lot of sound, which could be picked up by mics during a record, so better to get close-back headphones. You can use earbuds to start with. Sound isolating ones earbuds would be better, again because they leak less sound out. There’s a range of studio headphones here from $18 to $300.

### Key 3 – Mic Each Vocalist & Instrument

Recording everything together off a single mic is simple and can work, particularly if you’ve really got the guitar and vocals well practiced, you’re using a beautiful mic, and the mic is positioned perfectly to balance your voice and guitar. Sometimes a stereo pair of mics is used for this type of recording.

Still, have you noticed that it’s rare for a commercial album to be recorded with just one mic recording all vocalists & instruments at once? That’s because it’s far easier to get great sound by recording each vocalist & instrument in the music with a mic focused on just that vocalist or instrument. This makes it far easier to capture each sound source clearly.

### Key 4 – Record Each Vocalist & Instrument to a Separate Track

By capturing each vocalist & instrument to a separate track, each part in the music can be modified individually – for example we could make a vocal track louder, or add a reverb effect to piano track. GarageBand provides multitrack recording for free.

To get a separate track for each voice and instrument with only one mic, record just one voice or instrument at a time. Singing or playing one part at a time really allows you to just focus on that part and put everything into it. Even musicians who are very accomplished and practiced with singing and playing their instrument(s) at the same time, such as Stevie Wonder, will often just focus on either singing or their instrument while laying down a track. If you have multiple mics, you can get a separate track per part by having a mic per vocalist and instrument, and recording all the parts at once. For example, to record a song with guitar and vocals, you’d need two mics and an audio interface with two mic inputs. If you played a stomp box as well to give a bass beat, you’d need a three channel audio interface to record them all at once.

### Key 5 – Try Using Some Effects

You can add effects to fatten up your sound or give it depth. It’s normal to give vocals a bit of “reverb”, otherwise known as delay or echo. For electric guitar, you can play with adding a stereo delay.

### Key 6 – Mix the Tracks

By having each instrument recorded in a separate track, you can adjust their volume levels so they sit together well. More advanced is to adjust their levels over time (like bringing the guitar up louder for a solo).

You can also “EQ” tracks so they sound better, and sit better together as a whole. Equalization (EQ), is where you cut or boost specific frequency bands for a track. It’s a more advanced version of adjusting a graphic equalizer on a stereo.

### Key 7 – Use an External Audio Interface

The next key is to use an external audio interface. An external audio interface allows you to connect mics and instruments to your computer. Mics use a TRS jack (also called an unbalanced connection) or XLR connector (also caller a balanced connection). You can also directly connect instruments to an audio interface for recording, such as guitar and keyboard.

If you’re on a budget, I’d try the ART USB Dual Pre Two-Channel Preamplifier/Computer Interface ($99 list price, currently $49 at link). You could plug the Goodmans mic into this, and then you can close mic your voice, your acoustic guitar and your electric guitar amp, hopefully giving a richer, more dynamic sound. The unit above is cheap and got great reviews.

I like that the ART Dual Pre just uses normal USB sound standards, so it doesn’t need any special drivers. In the past, I have wasted a lot of time on Windows with drivers and firmware updates to get external audio interfaces working. Apparently this still happens, even sometimes for Mac. So, if you plug an audio interface into a Mac, and you can’t see it listed in the Sound panel of System Preferencesstraightaway, don’t waste too much time trying to get it to work. Swap it for something that works out of the box, and won’t give you trouble.

I also like that the ART Dual Pre has two active channels, so you could record two mono tracks at once, for example guitar and vocals. The M-Audio Fast Track, which costs twice as much or more on the street as the Art only handles a single channel at a time.

Another great feature of the ART Dual Pre is that it provides phantom power to mics, which is necessary for most studio-quality mics. The ART Dual Pre draws the power it needs from the Mac over USB. You can augment this power with a standard rectangular 9V battery, and for some mics you might get you a cleaner, crisper, livelier recording – more juice can help the mic respond faster and more accurately. I wouldn’t bother with a 9V battery at this stage. Apparently the battery tends to get stuck! If you do try it, just put the battery in half way, and pull the battery out when you’re not using it.

### Key 8 – Use a Good Mic

Next step would be to get a decent mic. Professional mics use three pin balanced XLR connections to reduce noise from cables, rather than a TRS jack. Dynamic mics are hardy mics that you typically see handheld by performers on stage. For recording, people tend to use condenser mics, as they give a richer more detailed sound than dynamic mics. Condensor mics need a power source. This is provided by phantom power from the “mic preamp”, a battery, or a separate power supply. Note that the ART unit above does supply phantom power.

Large diaphragm condensor mics work well for most people for vocals. Large condensor Instead of a mic capsule the size of pin, large condensor mics have a diaphragm about an inch across. Very nice mics of this type tend to have tube electrics for warmth.

A high quality, well reviewed condenser mic is the Rode NT1A Anniversary Vocal Condenser Microphone Package ($369 list price, currently $229 at link). I own a high end Rode mic (a K2) and have visited Rode’s headquarters in Sydney, Australia – I can recommend their mics without hesitation. This is a mic you can keep and use for a long time.

The darling of the cheaper mics is the green & gold MXL V67G Large Capsule Condenser Microphone (list $279, currently $99 at link). Users of this mic just gush about the sound:

> This mic is fantastic! I’ve been singing, writing, and recording for almost 30 years and this mic is pretty much just as good as all of the silly expensive German mics I’ve used in larger studios over the years. There’s a very slight presence peak, but nothing like most of the other Chinese mics. It isn’t shrilling or peaky at all. Male tenor vocals and acoustic guitar sound great without any need for EQ whatsoever beyond a hi pass filter for the sub 100hz stuff. This mic is also an excellent candidate for a Michael Joly mod, he calls it one of the 7 audio wonders of the world because it makes no sense that this mic is this good at under $200. Michael mods these mics and you’d be hard pressed to be able to tell the difference between this one and the famous U87 with the German name that starts with an “N”. I’m using it totally stock and it’s been great. Buy it.
> – R. Jackson, Newburyport, MA USA

If you’re really on a tight budget, there’s the Behringer C-1 Studio Condenser Microphone (list $88, currently $39 at link), which people report to be competent.

For the cardioid mics, you’ll need a pop filter if it’s not included.

Sarah could use a condensor mic for vocals and then try using her existing Goodmans dynamic mic for recording the electric guitar from the Peavy amp. If the Goodmans doesn’t cut it, the weapon of choice for micing the amp is a Shure SM57 Dynamic Microphone (list $146, price at link $86). There are cheaper mics, but this is keeper.

For all mics, check a microphone stand mount is included, and if not buy the mount to suit that mic. Also buy a microphone stand, and microphone cable (usually XLR male to XLR female), unless they’re included.

### Conclusion

I hope the eight essential keys of making great recordings help you to cut some great tracks. Link to your tracks (e.g. on SoundCloud) in the comments – I want to hear!

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## What’s the Best MacBook for Making Music?

- Post author
  By Tasman Hayes
- Post date
  May 25, 2011
- 85 Comments on What’s the Best MacBook for Making Music?

Updated January 2012: What’s the best MacBook for making music? Is it the MacBook Pro or MacBook Air? What size is best? 11 inch, 13 inch, 15 inch or 17 inch?

This article considers Mac OS X Lion and the latest 2011 / 2012 MacBook Air models with faster Intel Core i5 & i7 processors.

If your planning to buy a Mac laptop for music, there’s some links at the end of the article where you can save some money.

### Which MacBook for Making Music? Things to Consider

Here are questions to consider to see which would be the best MacBook music rig:

1. Do you want a new or secondhand Mac Book?
2. Do you want the “best possible setup” (you’re happy to spend a lot) or a “good enough setup” (spend just enough money to get the job done)?
3. Do you know what music software you’ll use? (e.g. Logic, ProTools, Cubase, Live, GarageBand, Reaktor, Kontakt, Traktor, Reason, Sibelius, Vienna Symphonic Library)
4. Do you have any existing instrument or sample libraries?
   If so, how big are they?
5. Will the Mac always be used in a portable music setup, or mostly in one place?

To set the scene for your purchase, you may want consider the different ways you might use your Mac to create music, and in what settings:

- Will you be recording real instruments? Does you sound interface use USB or Firewire? (MacBook Pro models all have Firewire. MacBook Air models don’t have Firewire.)
- Will you be using the Mac at home, in a studio or at gigs? (If you’re moving around, smaller MacBooks are more convenient.)
- Will you be using pre-recorded samples or loops? Will you be loading sampled instruments, e.g. Galaxy Steinway piano? (MacBook’s hard disks will generally be big enough to swallow lots of sample and instrument libraries. MacBook Airs have faster but smaller capacity flash storage – a consideration if you have a large amount of music tracks, software and samples.
- Will you be using any special hardware, e.g. the Guitar Rig pedal. (Is your hardware compatible with Mac OS X Lion on new Macs?)
- Will you be scoring music? Will you need to print sheet music? (Is your software compatible with Mac OS X Lion?)
- Will you be using the Mac to play live? Might you do some live DJ’ing, mixing and beat matching (e.g. using Acid)? (Is your MacBook big enough for the screen to be useable, but small enough to be easy to carry around?)
- Will you be making soundtracks? (If so, you’ll probably want a bigger screen to make room for the video track.)

My friend’s answer to these questions were:

> I’m looking to use Ableton, with a portable set up and about 30GB worth of sounds/synths. I guess I would like bang for buck as opposed to spending for no reason, but if it’s worth it I will get it. Something that I would use live but I also travel a lot, so portability is important.

Here’s the good news. All Macs are great for music.

### All the MacBooks are Good

All the current model MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models are good for making music.

So, really it’s a choice between:

1. MacBook Air – 11 inch
2. MacBook Air – 13 inch
3. MacBook Pro – 13 inch
4. MacBook Pro – 15 inch
5. MacBook Pro – 17 inch

Let’s look at choosing between MacBook sizes first of all.

### Choosing Between MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Sizes

In choosing between the sizes, there’s a trade off between three factors.

### No. 1: How Big a Screen Do You Need for Making Music with Your Mac “On the Road”?

When making music, it’s great to have a big screen, so you can see and get straight to all your tracks and virtual instruments.

You’ll probably find the smaller screen MacBooks (MacBook Air 11″, MacBook Air 13″, MacBook Pro 13″) cramped for making music. They’ll be lots of scrolling and shuffling windows around.

You might be okay with a smaller screen if you’ve just recording a few live instruments or if your patient.

The 15 inch MacBook Pro screen is workable, and 17 inch MacBook Pro screen is good.

You don’t necessarily need a big screen on the laptop. If you’re mostly making music in one place, I’d recommend buy a 23 inch external thin HD screen for $170 that’s great to work off. (I have one! – cheap HD display for MacBook Air.)

### No. 2: How Much Weight are You Prepared to Lug Around?

The 17 inch is a lot to lug around. I would not recommend travelling with it unless you really, really want a big screen.

I’ve travelled with a 15 inch every day for a year. I’m over it! It’s just big enough to be awkward.

If you can cope with the smaller screen, and you can get to a big screen when you want to work quickly, the 13 inch will be by far the best to travel with. It won’t take over your entire backpack!

### No. 3: Do You Need the Power of a Quad Core CPU Versus a Dual Core CPU for Making Music?

The 13 inch MacBook Pro has two CPU cores. The 15 and 17 inch models have four CPU cores. This means that a 15 inch or 17 inch can handle roughly twice as many tracks as the 13 inch, before you need tricks like “freezing” or “bouncing” tracks to disk.

Still the 13 inch will handle a bunch of tracks. It will handle a bunch of virtual instruments, samples and recorded vocals and live instruments.

If you’re doing massive arrangements with 60 tracks and giant orchestral libraries with heaps of effects like convolution reverb, you’d really appreciate the quad core models (15 and 17 inch). Otherwise, you may not even notice the difference in power between a dual core and quad core.

### No. 4: The Current MacBook Pro Models, and the Larger Screen MacBook Models May Be Quieter

Macs get hot from thinking hard, for example when playing back a 20 track music project with lots of virtual instruments and effects. When this happens, the fan runs to keep the processor from overheating. The harder the Mac works, the hotter it gets, and the faster the fan runs to compensate. The faster the fan runs the more noise the fan makes.

Since the heat also passively dissipates to the MacBook Air’s case, larger Macs may be able to sink more heat into the metal shell before the fan is seriously needed.

The current MacBook Air (the model released mid-2011) has a reputation of being a bit of a hot head. This may be because its the first generation of a processor technology from Intel that combines a Core i5 or i7 processor, with a graphics processor (HD3000 graphics) on one silicon chip. In the Pro, the processors are still on two separate chips, which may spread out the heat. Reports are the MacBook Air can get hot fast, even under moderate load. That means fan noise.

There is a fair bit of conjecture here: it hasn’t been measured, tested and proven that the Pro stays quieter longer than the Air. It hasn’t been proven that the smaller MacBooks need to fan earlier. I could be wrong.

I thought it’s better I mention it, as I have had a lot of people whinging about fan noise for the current model MacBook Air.

### Best MacBook for Music – The Simple Answer

The “safe bet” for a MacBook Pro for easily-portable music production is a 15 inch MacBook Pro. The screen will be big enough, if not roomy, to work with. It’s okay to carry around. It’s got a quad core processor, so the technology is never likely to slow down your creativity – with a quad core you can have music projects with many, many tracks, virtual instruments and effects.

If you want really portable, and (i) if you can work off a big screen where you mainly create music, and (ii) if an 11 inch or 13 inch isn’t too small for you to create you’re out and about, and (iii) if you don’t have massively complicated music projects, you will probably fall in love with a MacBook Air 11″, MacBook Air 13″, or MacBook Pro 13″.

The MacBook Air is thinner, lighter, more portable than the MacBook Pro and has flash storage instead of hard disk. The flash storage (or solid state disk – SSD) is much faster than a hard disk, which is great for loading virtual instruments and music projects quickly. The downsize is flash storage is relatively expensive, so typical flash storage capacities are much less than hard disks. MacBook Air’s don’t have a built in DVD drive. If your music software comes on DVD, you’ll need to buy an external DVD drive from Apple ($79). You can read more about choosing a MacBook Air 11 vs 13.

If you want a big work space, don’t want to ever use an external monitor, and don’t care about lugging around a giant laptop, the MacBook Pro 17 inch is a amazing laptop for creativity. (It’s so wide, you can see your music tracks really well. It’s also great for doing video in the field, but that’s another story…)

The base models for all MacBook Pro sizes would serve your requirements well. For the MacBook Air’s, don’t buy the entry level model with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of flash storage. This will not be enough RAM or storage for most people making music with their Mac. All the other MacBook Air models have 4GB of RAM (good), with 128GB or 256GB of flash storage. If you don’t have a lot of music libraries you could get away with 128GB. If you’re a heavy user with lots of software, samples and virtual instruments, go for the 256GB. The cheaper i5 MacBook Air models have plenty of power for music; you can compare i7 vs i5 MacBook Air models here.

### MacBook Air for a Music Production Setup?

You can use a MacBook Air for music. This is incredibly sexy, because the MacBook Air 11 inch weighs only one kilo. I throw a music keyboard, the Air and some portable speakers in a courier bag, and the Air handles a sample Fender Rhodes piano and a high-end sampled piano (Galaxy Steinway) in its stride.

I have the previous model MacBook Air, a late 2010 model, which has a more sluggish processor than the current model (a Core 2 Duo vs a Core i5 or i7), which has the advantage that it doesn’t get hot easily, so I haven’t gotten fan noise from just playing live. You may not want to use a late-2010 MacBook Air for serious multi-track music; it could struggle with a lot of tracks and effects. (Still you could freeze tracks to disk pretty easily.)

The MacBook Air 2011 / 2012 models (released 20 July 2011) have Intel Core i5 or i7 processors, making them up to 2.5 times faster than the previous models. A MacBook Pro 13 and a MacBook Air 13 have about the same music processing power. The MacBook Pro 15 & 17 have about double the music processing power of the 13 inch Air & Pro.

The i5 and i7 processors in the new MacBook Airs make them amazing for portable music! I never want to carry a MacBook Pro again. I can barely feel the weight of the MacBook Air in my backpack.

The MacBook Air has only two USB slots, so it can run an external music audio interface and a USB music keyboard at the same time.

If you won’t use an external monitor, the 13 inch Air would generally be a better choice than the 11 inch so you have enough “screen real estate” to work on your music.

Remember the caveat: Some people are complaining about fan noise from the current model MacBook Air.

### Back to the MacBook Pro

All MacBook Pros come with at least 4GB of memory, which is great for music production. Typically only complex music projects, for example projects with many sampled instruments, would benefit from upgrading to 8GB of memory.

Most professional music producers end up with a lot of virtual instruments and sample libraries, as well as a big iTunes library of music. If this could be you, you may want to get the hard disk upgraded to the biggest size.

If you’re a speed freak (like me), and you love your music projects and virtual instruments to load very quickly, a solid state disk (SSD) is wonderful. As SSDs have no moving parts, they can get to samples in virtual instruments much faster, so an SSD can support more sampled instruments. SSDs are still quite expensive, particularly if you buy them as a factory option from Apple, instead of aftermarket. They also typically have lower storage capacities than hard disks. Think of an SSD as a high-end or luxury option for a music rig.

### Is Your Music Software OS X Lion Compatible?

New Macs all come with OSX Lion, which is relatively new. Not all music software has been updated to be fully compatible with Lion yet. Check the music software’s website or Google for up-to-date information on compatible. For example, you can Google “propellerheads reason lion compatible” to find a webpage to answer if Reason is compatible with Lion.

If you’re buying a new Mac, make sure your music software runs properly on OS X Lion.

### Save Money on New MacBooks

If you’d like to save money on new MacBooks, check out the prices here:

- MacBook Pro and other MacBook models, new and used
- 13 inch MacBook Air

- MacBook Air i5, 256GB flash storage
- MacBook Air i5, 128GB flash storage

- 11 inch MacBook Air

- MacBook Air i5, 4GB RAM, 128 GB flash storage
- MacBook Air i5, 2GB RAM, 64 GB flash storage – not recommended for music

Look out for Mac laptops with free shipping.

### Extra Tips

1. For travel get a small and light external two channel audio interface to connect mics or instruments. (Or four channel, if you need it.)
2. High end audio interfaces tend to use Firewire instead of USB. I’ve found Firewire interfaces to be more reliable and responsive than USB. There are posts on the net to back this up like this one. Apparently USB has been getting better over the years. If you buy a MacBook Pro, you’re in luck, because the MacBook Pro has both USB ports and a Firewire port, so you’ve got the option if you need it. (The MacBook Air doesn’t have a Firewire port built in. There’s plans for a 3rd party Firewire interface using the Thunderbolt port.) Firewire sound interfaces will typically only be relevant if you want to record 8+ tracks at once, or if you want super high quality recording or if you’ve got concert pianist like sensitivity to how quickly sounds play when you press keys.
3. I love Presonus audio interfaces. I have one of their eight channel interfaces. They’re famous for having great mic preamps. Not cheap, but great quality.
4. Rode Mic are an Australian microphone company who make very good quality mics at a great price. Registered mics get a ten year guarantee. I’ve had two of their mics. Highly recommended.
5. M-Audio make good, cheap, light music keyboards with great feel. They plug straight into the Macs USB port. I have one. You can buy them in three sizes (49, 61 and 88 keys). Avoid the eKeys models – they’re not velocity sensitive (i.e. you can’t play softer by just press the keys more lightly).
6. I recommending avoiding Behringer keyboards – the graduation between soft notes and loud notes is very sudden and natural.
7. If you shop around on the Internet, you can find much better prices on audio interfaces, mics and keyboards than list price.

Do you want to get a studio quality sound? Then check out the Eight Essential Keys to Great Recordings.

Hope this helps you get a great MacBook for making music!

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  MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Making Music, New MacBook Air July 2011