Music production headphones with a 1/4″ adapter, an external hard-drive or USBs to save your work, and writing materials are the only equipment you need.
If you need advice on what flat-response, comfortable music production headphones to purchase, please speak with Bop DJ Manchester who are 5-minutes walk from SEM. They can also offer you discounts as a SEM student.
Every student has access to their own iMac workstation in the school which contains all the software, samples and plugins that you will use throughout the course.
Home setup
A home setup is absolutely not essential. Some of our best students have benefitted from only using SEM’s studios, as it has meant they have are working in acoustically treated studios, with the most up-to-date software, and access to in-house tutors.
With this said, if you have a home-setup, or are thinking of setting one up, these are some things you might want to consider:
Mac or PC?
We use all Macs throughout SEM, but PCs are equally fine and can be more cost-effective. If you’re working on a budget, we would strongly recommend firstly thinking about whether a laptop vs a desktop is going to be better for your needs. Once you’ve decided, we would advise focussing on processing power as this will allow your software to run more quickly. Remember that you can get up to 15% discount on Apple once becoming a SEM student.
Flat-response monitors, audio interface and a MIDI keyboard
We have some awesome music production partners which you can view on our student discount page for a range of extra music equipment. Remember – these are not essential, but ‘nice to haves’!
On the audio engineering front – we have a partnership with Aston Microphones so can offer SEM students amazing microphones at an awesome price.
Software
Pro Tools is the main music production software used on this course. This is not essential to have at home as it is on the computers in SEM. Should you wish to get Pro Tools, this can be done on an affordable student subscription basis, at the time of writing, this was £79 for the year.
Once you have a copy of this, as long as you have a computer (Mac or PC) with adequate system requirements, you should be able to use this to work with music at home as well as at SEM.