Designing For Music 15
When someone visits your website you only have a few seconds to make a big impression. The quickest way to grab their attention is with a noteworthy header image. A header image is arguably just as important as your music - it will give your visitors a reason to click that play button.
Designing for Music 15
With a cohesive color scheme and a handful of stellar images, you can create a music website design that keeps your visitors attention by using styled sections. A section is a horizontal block of content, within which your content can be structured and styled.
If you have a great promotional image, one that sums up your artistry at a glance and creates a full impression of your sound, use that as a centerpiece to create a modern website design for your music.
It also works nicely for a one-page website, using sections to block off content above that main image. Sha'Lil does a great job with exactly that, drawing upon her fantastic imagery to build a music website that scrolls seamlessly.
The linear structure of one-page websites makes it ideal to contain snippets of your music career. You can also focus a one-page website on a new release, adding album or single details, your artist bio, press, and a music player in your sections on the page.
Nothing brings together music website branding like a logo. You can create a text logo easily by choosing a font that suits the rest of your content. But if you have a logo created for you, use it throughout your branding for a sense of consistency - with your own artist website being no exception.
Indie singer-songwriter Jacob Rose has created a website design rooted in neutrals, matching his heartfelt music. Using sections in cream, black, and white with contrasting font colors to create a one-page site design really makes each area of his project pop off the page.
If you're unfamiliar with No Straight Roads, it's a sort of rhythmic, music-driven action-platformer, and it features two playable characters in the form of indie rock band members Mayday & Zuke. Each has their own unique weapons and attacks that they'll need to deploy in order to stage a musical revolution against the evil EDM empire No Straight Roads.
Like college art or music professors, these educators typically teach multiple courses within their field of specialization to higher education students. They may also conduct research, publish original research, apply for grants to fund their research, or supervise graduate teaching assistants who are teaching classes.
Storage memory comes a close second. For audio applications, particularly those involving sample libraries where audio is streamed from disk, you'll want to use a solid state drive (SSD). The benefit of these drives is the rapid data transfer, meaning files load quicker, although they are slightly more expensive than their hard disk drive (HDD) equivalent. For music production applications, however, the extra expense is totally justified.
For years now, Apple has produced some of the best laptops for music production. As the only portable platform for Logic Pro X, the MacBook Pro is synonymous with the craft of music-making. By comparison, those of us using a PC have traditionally been chained to the desktop format, but that has changed considerably in recent years. Dell, Microsoft, Razer, Lenovo and others big tech brands are all muscling in to give Apple a serious run for its money, and some of them have proper music-making clout too.
Regardless of which platform you opt for - Apple or Windows - there are some considerations which remain consistent. When it comes to choosing the best music production laptop for your home studio, you'll want to pay close attention to the power and memory specs of the machine you're eyeing up. While the basic requirements for most DAWs is a multi-core processor, around 4GB of RAM and a few gigabytes of storage, this won't be enough for real-world applications.
For any DJs or traveling musicians reading this guide, weight - and portability - is likely to be another major factor. Some of the highest spec, beefiest laptops also weigh a fair amount, and your shoulders will quickly tire of lugging those behemoths around.
While we have music production laptops for most pockets in this buyer's guide, there's a good chance that you will need to shell out quite big numbers for the kind of power that your mobile music production demands.
If you want something a little more lightweight, there are two MacBook Airs now vying for your cash. The latest MacBook Air M2 version is a genuinely capable proposition as a music-making laptop for most users and the original MacBook Air M1 will deliver decent power for less outlay.
The latest model features a 12th-generation Intel Core i5-1230U, and a fantastic InfinityEdge Anti-Glare display. This might not be the show stopping headline feature a music maker will go for, but if the laptop is to serve other purposes like watching films or generally staring at in wonder, then this just be the perfect option.
Apple's latest M2 MacBook Air feels like a new chapter of Apple use, and one that will drag your laptop music making to another level. At just 1.24kg, the MacBook Air M2 is Apple's lightest machine and also its thinnest, just 11.3mm deep. The all-new colours are great too (we opted for the light gold Starlight, although the Midnight option was a tempter).
The sound emanating from the Air's four speakers (which also support Spatial Audio) is so much better than a small form device like this should be capable of. You're not going to be using it for detailed mastering, granted, but it's almost good enough to mix with and very decent just for music listening. The battery life of the Air is good, although at a quoted 18 hours it's not quite up there with the 20 hours you get on a new M2 13-inch MacBook Pro. You also only get two Thunderbolt USB 4 ports on the MacBook Air, so if you want more than a monitor and said interface connected, you might need to think a little outside the (small) box.
Some have said that not having a fan to cool it down is a big disadvantage when you compare this MacBook Air to the latest MacBook Pro. As music producers we'd disagree, to a point, and say that having no fan is a huge advantage, just in terms of noise. Does the new Air get hot though? For performance tests, we used the benchmark projects from logicprohelp.com (opens in new tab) and music-prod.com (opens in new tab) and found an 8% uplift for the M2 Air chip over our M1 Mac Mini in both Logic and Ableton Live tests. During these tests the Air did get warm, but not spectacularly so.
The M2 MacBook Air is beautiful, powerful and just about the best silent laptop you can buy for music production. One final footnote is that several sites have reported that the base model Air M2 (with a 256GB drive) is one to avoid as it suffers from the same speed problem as the M2 MacBook Pro 256GB (because of its chip configuration), so make sure you spec yours up to at least 512GB. Otherwise, we can safely say that, after making music on laptops for more than 20 years, the Air M2 is the music production laptop we've been waiting for.
Apple's latest 13" MacBook Pro is - alongside the Air M2 above - the company's latest laptop to feature the M2 processor and it certainly packs a punch in speed tests for musicians. However, while it outperforms the Air on some tasks it's not by the country mile you might have been expecting.
The latest MacBook Pro M2 also still carries some of the baggage from previous designs - the infamous Touch Bar being a prime example. This was dropped from the latest 14" and 16" MacBook Pros but still lingers on with the 13". It's a divisive feature that may or may not sway you either way. Personally, we think it delivered solutions to problems we didn't know we had, so we are quite happy to see it absent on the Air M2 and 14" Pro, which are our current favourite Apple laptops for music production.
You should also now consider the new M2 MacBook Air M2 over this M1 Air. However, while it will give you extra speed, it does cost considerably more, and the Air M1 is still the cheapest way to get into Apple's more stylish world of mobile music production.
If you are a Windows fan and music software user then you can also consider crossover, 2-in-one tablet laptops. And they don't come much more refined than the daddy of them all, the Microsoft Surface Pro. You can buy it without the keyboard, although we consider that a must-have accessory. It will therefore be weightier on both your pockets and wallet but, as the keyboard is detachable, you can run the device just as a tablet while out and about.
With the 8th incarnation, we get some much needed improvements and a completely modernised design. The biggest feature for musicians is the inclusion of Thunderbolt 4 which should keep it relatively future proof in terms of adding music production peripherals. This comes at the expense of USB-A though, so check your connectivity needs before buying
Of course, all of these additions and enhancements come at a price - a lot more than its predecessor, the Surface Pro 7, and you can expect to pay well over $/2k if you really up the specs. Yet Surface Pro 8 really is the update we've been waiting for and a truly powerful Windows laptop and tablet for musicians.
There's a wide selection of ports for musicians too, including an HDMI and two USB-C ports on the left plus an audio jack and USB-A port on the right, so you can connect a decent number of both old and new audio interfaces, for example.
Samsung Galaxy Book Pro is powerful and portable, and delivers most of what you need for music. It's a little pricey but a great option for people with other Samsung devices. It's a solid laptop with a lightweight feel and extended battery life that justify the price.
At the higher end of the gaming PC spectrum - not a bad place for music producers to look when sheer power is required - there are some serious studio contenders. The Asus Rog Strix Scar is evidence of this; with an Intel i7 processor and a base spec of 16 GB of RAM, you know this machine can chew through any audio production task you throw at it.