Welcome to the rig log, where I break down the tools, boxes, and relics I've driven over twenty years of music production -- and some others that I know a thing or two about -- because who knows, someone might find it useful.

Not that I'm an industry standard or anything, but I've spent thousands of hours and $$$ curating the perfect semi-professional indie music producer studio (for me), and just so happened to hit all the high-dollar, overhyped marketing branches along the way.

One look at my setup and you'll probably turn green with envy. But I'm no gear snob, honest. Plenty of great devices are humble, and we will absolutely be going over them!

If you're looking for your next fix from this list, just remember, there is almost no such thing as bad gear — only gear you haven't found a good use for. Yet.

Computers

• Acer Nitro 5 - AN515-58-73rs — Beastly laptop for music production, with all the sexiest bells and whistles. Intel Core i7-12650H, 64 GB RAM, 4050 NVIDIA GeForce RTX. Like 8 TB of combined internal and external storage. My personal experience has been middling, however, as the power rail is fairly brittle.
• Lenovo T430 - The ThinkPad never gets old... Or well, does get old, but never goes out of style. The T430's keyboard and OG display is about my only gripe for this little geezer. Otherwise it's got a nice form factor, is dockable, has great port options, and is really cheap both to upgrade and maintain in case of damage. Speakers suck though, and by no means is it strong for modern applications. Great for lazing about and doing lightweight stuff.

Monitoring

• Audio Technica m40x Headphones — Have been using these for 10 years. Very nice, flat response. Great bang for your buck.

Sound Recording

• Focusrite Scarlett Solo — Good budget interface. Few frills. Gets the job done.
• Focusrite Scarlett CM25 MKIII — Perfectly serviceable, crisp condenser mic. May or may not come as a bundle.
• Beyerdynamic TGv35s — Budget mic does well under lots of sound pressure.

Keyboards & MIDI

• Casio CTK-2400 — Entry level vintage rompler, 2014.
• Yamaha PSS-170 — Mid 1980s FM Keyboard Synth. Small keys for my tiny girly hands.
• Yamaha PSS-470 — The big brother of the PSS-470. Sliders for the FM operators.
• Yamaha PSR-E423 — More mature version of the PSR-273. Pros: looks cooler, has filter knobs and USB B midi. Cons: ???.

Analog Instruments

• Starcaster by Fender (Mod) — Ever seen a 2000's budget strat with 7 whole ass pickups that tunes to drop G? I made one, inspired by Brian Head Welch's KOMRAD20 7-string Ibanez.
• Starcaster by Fender — Yes, I have multiple. Chances are, if you're a millennial, you and your friends probably do too. Surprisingly decent student guitars.
• Peavey Millennium 5-String Bass — Definitely wears my fingers out, as any 5-string is bound to do, but there's something flat out inspiring about the look. And drop tuning to C, B, and beyond is a breeze.

Accessories

• Product Link — Description text goes here.

Computers

• HP Omen 17 Laptop — Once a gaming powerhouse. Now past its prime, but far from useless. For music production, the i7-8750H processor will get you by, assuming you're not going Hans Zimmer. The Geforce 1060 GTX is serviceable for video editing and light AI workloads. The chassis is durable, and life expectancy good if well kept. However, the audio driver sucks and must be rolled back to default HD Audio.

Microphones

• Blue Snowball — Most unforgiving USB room mic of all time. I absolutely hate this thing, but if you're really diligent about shielding it from room noise and reflections, it can work for you.
• NADY USB Mic — Budget mic of all budget USB mics, less than $20. Like nearly all USB mics, it has a terrible signal to noise ratio.

MIDI

• Yamaha PSR-273 — Fairly basic student keyboard rompler. Still, a MIDI keyboard is a MIDI Keyboard, and this one has 61 keys!
• AKAI Mini 25-key — Words cannot describe how awful the keys feel on this dinky MIDI controller. But the joystick and MPC style pads are great fun!

Brass

• King Trombone — Simple vintage trombone with no frills.
• Second hand trumpet — Very broken, dented and bent school trumpet I bought for $100 from my band director.

Note to self: Finish writing your blurb here detailing the transition from desktop computing to laptop computing, updating from 32-bit architecture to 64-bit systems, and your love letter to the big sister of the Thinkpad unit you intermittently write this layout on.

Overall: I was computing largely in 32-bit all the way up until I got my HP Omen 17 in 2016, with some exceptions, and had at my disposal absolutely nothing special. Budget tech of yesteryear. Did have some XP 64-bit machines, Vista, 7, and so on. Lots of borrowed and broken computers as well.

Why bother?

There may or may not be reason to return to 32-bit oldsters, if you're going for period accurate music production. Plus, old stuff (the 64-bit pcs in particular) is just plain fun.

My personal highlights

As above, each device will have a small summary. To the best of my ability. After all, I'm reaching back almost 3 decades lol.

Vintage Machines

• Packard Bell Multimedia series - Pentium MMX, Pentium II - 32/64 MB RAM - Soundblaster 16. 1999 approx. Suitable for DOS and Win 95. Excels in making and playing tracker music, as heard in Doom, Top Gear Rally, OSTs where space was in short supply, and low latency was non-negotiable.
• Gateway 2000 P5-75 - I do remember a socket 7 CPU. Sexy mid-tower, with tons of drive bays. Used the old processor to comb my hair sometimes. Same as above. Win 98.

Business Class/Workstations

• Dell Optiplexes - Literally all of them. Not quick by any means, but quite resilient. They make for good media servers and hot file storage. Olskool music production is doable, if you don't require lots of vsts or heavy sample libraries.

• Lenovo T410 - Not by any means blazing even in its day, but a rugged workstation that gets by just fine. I've had to fix this one a few times, usually hard disk related issues, which is par for the course. The mobo and processor are chugging on well.

Lead-Free Solder Class Action Lawsuit Ass Machines

• Compaq C700 series laptop - 2006/2007 - Win Vista. Terrible laptop. Great memories. Prone to melting its GPU off the board due to various design flaws. Reasonably easy to repair if you have a penny, an ironing board, and 2 heat lamps with mounts.
• Xbox360 Fat - 2007ish - Good supplementary storage, media center. Prone to red ring due to faulty cooling design and bad thermal paste. Rockband and Guitar hero peripherals for it are fully functional MIDI controllers. Most rhythm game CDs contain good quality song stems (encrypted).

Product Reviews

• Review Link — Brief summary.

Info & Opinions

• Article Link — Brief summary.