If you plan to always study in SEM
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 will 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.
If you plan to study in part at home
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.
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 options. Remember – these are not essential, but ‘nice to haves’!
Software
The latest Ableton Live Suite is the main music production software used on this course, or Native Instruments Komplete (if you already have a copy of Ableton Live Suite). Please note that the software is given upon full receipt of course fees, or can be received early with a £250 deposit which is refunded upon final payment of your course fees.
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 make music at home as well as at SEM. We recommend getting Ableton as early on in the training as you can should you wish to make music at home.
3rd Party Plugins
You will receive a year’s free subscription for Roland Cloud, which will be taught on the course. You will not need any other plugins or software on the course.