How many of you have gone to a laptop-only studio?

borg · Post by **borg** » Thu Feb 02, 2006 7:27 pm

up till two years ago, i used to work only with the G3. nice, because of the creamware dsp cards. enough juice. then i bought a PIII 1gHz laptop, which was nice, but was just a bit on the light side to run on its own. no problem again, as i could run live on the laptop and still use the desktop as a synth/fx/mix rack. last year i bought the 1.67 powerbook, and have grown fond of it. have used it intensively for my work as a theatre technician (for audio, but mostly video), but find it a bit weak when doing my own thing with Live.

i'm sorry to say i'm in quite a busy period of my life. the last six months have been weeks of rehearsing and touring with theatre productions, rebuilding a house, moving to a friends house who is travelling (because i had to leave my old apartment and my new house isn't ready yet), building small hardware synths from scratch,... so i packed all the studio in octobre, apart from the powerbook.
damn! how i miss my supersounding creamware synths and pro effect plugs, without draining the cpu. i love to sequence on the laptop, changing midi and audio (for sampling) through the RME to the desktop.
buying a BCR and a faderfox LX1 eased the pain a bit, but i barely find the time to set them up in a well thought out plan.

if you're buying on of the top range PC laptops, i guess you can easily run all your stuff on it and have a DAW. for me, the powerbook (which was the fastest apple laptop until a few weeks ago) just doesn't cut it as a complete DAW.

i also feel portability isn't that much of an issue. i'd be lost without a set of controllers. then there's the rme, harddrive, cables, ... it's good when i'm just doing video stuff, or when only triggering clips during rehearsal, or for a jam with a friend. but when going out to do some serious music, it'd be very clumsy on the public transport, dangerous with a bike, and very annoying and sweaty on foot to have everything with me that i need. i'd have to go with the car anyway. and i have a nice flight case built for the G3 and a monitor+keyboard. it just takes two midi and two adats cables to connect the bunch.

if you don't have a specific piece of gear you really love and isn't available for the laptop, the top of the line PC's will do the trick.

Anubis · Post by **Anubis** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 4:34 am

tomperson wrote:As for the double monitor, I guess that's not really an issue, since most laptops nowadays have a second VGA out, so it would be just a thing of getting a second monitor and that's it, wouldn't it?

Yeah but that's precisely the point. Once you have to park yourself down and and connect a cable to an external monitor, then you're no longer mobile are you. Unless you're gonna throw a small LCD display in your backpack and carry that around too.

onyxashanti · Post by **onyxashanti** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 5:01 am

Although i've been using a laptop for about 10 years or so, to do music, I've been "laptop only" for the last 2 years. I love it. i consider my laptop to be part of my mind. i know it sounds strange but almost all of my communication goes thru it, ALL of my artistic output as well as input [mp3s, movies, news, etc] goes thru it, all of my contacts, i buy most things that i cant buy at a corner store from it. when i dream about things i want to do or build, i create them in there. i never leave home without it. even after a gig and I'm at an after party, i break out traktor and dj on who evers' stereo. so thusly, i only ever use my laptop to create everything. and when i do studio session gigs, i have only to call up any of the dozens of sounds and beats i have, and play directly into their system, which more and more, ends up being another laptop.

I've always been a geek with these things, but with my laptop, it's gotten to a scary level of obsessive dependency. i left it in someone from works' car one day and couldn't get it til that evening, and i though i was gonna have an anxiety attack. and actually, i dont think that i've bought anything, other than clothes, in quite a few years, that doesnt in some way interface with my laptop...hmm

onyx

dpel · Post by **dpel** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 5:24 am

tomperson wrote:I wonder,
How many of you have totally replaced your workstations with laptops? How are you finding the transition? Do you think it benefits your workflow? Do you think nowadays laptops can really compete with workstations in terms of performance?

Questions...

sold all of this:

for this:

connected to this:

much better.
more productive.
much more!

Anubis · Post by **Anubis** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 5:25 am

onyxashanti wrote:but with my laptop, it's gotten to a scary level of obsessive dependency. ...i consider my laptop to be part of my mind. ...i though i was gonna have an anxiety attack. ...i dont think that i've bought anything, other than clothes, in quite a few years, that doesnt in some way interface with my laptop...hmm

That sounds pretty serious... you're freakin' me out! I think they have pills for that.

jazz_e_bob · Post by **jazz_e_bob** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 6:05 am

Replaced P4 2.6 with Centrino 1.73 laptop.

Added Behringer FCA202 firewire audio. ( Internal sound and ASIO4ALL not really up to the job. )

A little slower than the desktop but I am yet to go over %50 cpu under LIVE.

mr-e · Post by **mr-e** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 6:39 am

only use a laptop (HP nc6000)
- onboard soundcard on the road
- plug in 1 usb-hub connected to my emi2/6, triggerfinger & 4*4 m-audio midiport when I'm home and all my keyboards & virusses are connected at once

the only downside for me is the slow harddisk : I can run more realtime vst's than freezed ones

Casual Beats · Post by **Casual Beats** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 6:51 am

mr-e wrote:the only downside for me is the slow harddisk : I can run more realtime vst's than freezed ones

have you looked into replacing your internal drive with a 7200rpm one? I just did (upgraded from a 4200rpm one) and definitely see the difference.

eddit · Post by **eddit** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 6:52 am

-> dpel

you probably should have kept the chair. That looks comfortable. Oh, and maybe the pot plant...

I have just done the same, although my before photo wasn't nearly as dope

onyxashanti · Post by **onyxashanti** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 6:56 am

I just very philisophical about what a laptop actaully represents. to me it is a pandoras box. right now, i'm at a cafe with my wind controller, working on sounds for a club gig this weekend, and beats to street perform with tommorrow, while chatting with a friend in SF and googling parties going on around NYC. if i get writers block, i can work on graphics or email some clubs or skype some friends in london. never before has my attention deficit been put to such great use.

onyx

mr-e · Post by **mr-e** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 7:36 am

have you looked into replacing your internal drive with a 7200rpm one? I just did (upgraded from a 4200rpm one) and definitely see the difference.

I got my laptop from work (the Belgian State) and I'm not supposed to tinker with it , in fact I'm not even supposed to be able to access most parts of the harddrive though they should have made it more difficult if they really wanted to stop me ... upside is they'll automaticly replace it with a better model in 2 years

I was thinking of buying a faster firewire drive , but that's pretty useless on the road.

tomperson · Post by **tomperson** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 11:33 am

Anubis wrote:
tomperson wrote:As for the double monitor, I guess that's not really an issue, since most laptops nowadays have a second VGA out, so it would be just a thing of getting a second monitor and that's it, wouldn't it?
Yeah but that's precisely the point. Once you have to park yourself down and and connect a cable to an external monitor, then you're no longer mobile are you. Unless you're gonna throw a small LCD display in your backpack and carry that around too.

Well, in fact my idea was that you could still be portable enough carrying your lappie and soundcard and maybe midi controller, leaving everything else at home. And when you come back, you connect the portable "core" of your studio back to the non-portable part (video monitor, audio monitors, more controllers, external HD, etc.). That's the thing with a laptop, you can be as portable as you wanna be, and that doesn't take away the possibility of being not-portable. Get it?

Errrrr. Whatever, i'm at work, and it's early in the morning

My main idea was that I think we've got to the point where laptops are a REAL alternative to workstations. Some years ago, this was just impossible. Not even a possibility. Processors sucked for mobility, RAM was not a lot, hard drives were painfully slow - And the damned things costed a fortune!

minimal · Post by **minimal** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 12:12 pm

I was tempted to go laptop only but I just can't... I love tweaking hardware, even if emulations are getting better and better I feel more confortable to have the real thing, even if this implies the need to have a studio to store all the things, more cost and more manutention and so on.

markaugust · Post by **markaugust** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 12:17 pm

i was running on a g4 half a year ago.
had to have a laptop for the live-situation prospect, and just had enough money for a secondhand powerbook; or a pc-laptop.
took me a few weeks of reading the live-5 performance-test and searching and looking on the net.
bought myself a 2,26 ghz Pentium M dell.
thought it woulde be such a big switch, going from beloved osx to windows, which I only had a prejudgment about, without really knowing.
now; I couldn't be happier; my lappie is like 20 times faster then the g4; runs supersmooth, and the g4 became a nice internet computer; keeping the lappie virus free.
I love that litlle beast.
make music at home, connected to al the hardware. make music when I am somewhere else with a controller and the plugins...

mr-e · Post by **mr-e** » Fri Feb 03, 2006 12:21 pm

for me , the greatest thing of using a laptop is never ever to have to listen 5 hours in a row to the damn fannoise and harddisknoise coming out of a desktop computer

How many of you have gone to a laptop-only studio?

Re: How many of you have gone to a laptop-only studio?