laptop grooves - portable music composition

Mar 30, 2008 at 7:40 PM
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It's about 5:17pm on a Friday. I just sat down in Borders Books' Seattle's Best Coffee Cafe to continue work on our CD project's task completion list. It's raining outside and ironically, I'm listening to a track called 'Rain' by Cantoma, on my iPod.

As I sat down, sipping on Tazo Giant Peach Green Tea, I noticed a guy behind me to my right bobbin' his head to whatever is coming out of his headphones from his laptop. Upon closer inspection, he's running Fruity Loops, a digital audio music composition software package, apparently working on a tune.

As a user who has just started using digital audio workstations last year to compose my music (I use Logic Studio currently), I find the freedom of mobile recording fascinating and gratifying. As I watched this guy rock his tracks, it reminded me not only of my own portable setup, but it made me think of how far the ability (and different ways) to compose music has come since I firest picked up guitar at 14 (for those of you who know I am 45...you do the math...LOL).

In any event, the ease of composing music these days, whether you have any formal training in composing, reading, or anything similar, is definitely with us to stay. Add to that the portability of doing so, with the laptop as a tool, makes it very convenient. I took my Powerbook to Guam for a three week work assignment last summer, and composed 4 tracks alone with a software package called Logic and a 25-key MIDI controller - the video below shows what I used.

Logic Express 7.2 - Mobile Recording Setup

Anyone and seemingly everyone can now compose music, or as it's now called "make beats" (hooo boy, don't get me started, nuff respect). I definitely love the idea of being able to compose, write, and record from a mobile aspect. For one, it increases the possibility of collaboration, and is a great time saver.

I know some of you reading this are electronic music composers, and composers in general. Feel free to leave any thoughts...

Be blessed.

Fresh!