What hardware do I need?

To make your own music or beats you need a PC, some speakers, and a sound card (which will work as a D/A-A/D converter and translate your digital signal into something you can hear out of your speakers).

We asume you have the PC already. So let us focus on the speakers.

Don’t listen to all the freaks out there claiming you NEED some special monitor speakers made for producing music. You have some nice system to listen to your music at home? USE IT! Connect it to your pc and start! Later when we talk about mixing and mastering we will discuss the differences in speaker systems more.

In case you want to spend money on that now, check that list: Thomann Nahfeld Monitore

To connect speakers to your pc you need a sound card. You can use your built in sound card but I recommend to buy a good one like E-MU or M-AUDIO at oned point.

Remember that for example Creative Sound Cards are build for gamers and not made for music production. You can use them but you might experience problems with latency, number of out-/inputs or low sample rate at one point.

For now, just connect your speakers to the line out/speaker/headphone out (should be the green one) at your inbuilt sound card. As long as you not encounter any problems stay with that setup! Too many people get sucked in by the ‘buy more – get better’ way of producing music. That is definitely wrong! I know many very good producers making money with their art just using standard built in sound cards.

 

Most home recording studios are using usb sound cards to get better samplerates, latency values and more inputs/outputs. Connected easily via usb these little boxes offer nice volume/mono/headphones control and as many outputs and inputs as one may need. For recording purposes they come with much better latency times than standard inbuilt sound cards. Latency is the short time difference your system need to translate your voice or guitar or keyboard/piano to a digital wave form in your software. So if you start wondering: “Why does the sound comes too late?? I play it correct!!” you have latency issues and might need a better sound card. Again you can check for usb sound interfaces at Thomann.

 

emu usb interface