
They will work brilliantly with your DAW software providing a much higher quality of sound and remove the delay or latency you might hear when playing software instruments. To get started all you need is a laptop and some headphones and that’s true but once you want to record real sounds then you are going to need an audio interface.Īn audio interface is a box that usually connects to your computer via USB and provides you with proper connections for microphones and guitars and also high quality outputs for speakers and headphones. How are you going to plug your voice, microphone, guitar or piano into your computer? Sure, computers have audio inputs or inbuilt microphones but are they really any good for music recording? No, not really. There’s one more thing which is out of the scope of this article but needs a mention.

For more information on that check out our article on the best audio interfaces. However, if you want to record audio, guitar, instruments or your voice then you’re going to need an audio interface to give you the right inputs to plug yourself into. A DAW brings these ways of making music together so you can produce music in any way you want from recording orchestras to generating beats with a mouse.Īs a bedroom producer, you’ll probably be working with virtual or software synthesizers and sounds that are already in the computer and you can do that just with your laptop and headphones. Somewhere in between, you can work with samples and loops. The other side is MIDI sequencing which is all about using virtual (or hardware) synthesizers to create tracks, songs and rhythms.


Once you’ve recorded your performance you can then edit the audio, add effects and mix it all down as a track or song. It’s great for recording bands, musicians and singer-songwriters.

The Digital Audio side will let you record sound from a microphone like you imagine studios would do. A DAW will usually enable you to do a few things. A DAW is your main piece of recording software and stands for Digital Audio Workstation, which is not a great description of what it does.
