So continuing with the series, this is the gear that I brought with me on the plane:

1. Laptop, my Dell Vostro 1500 is more than enough to make as much music as we need with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 Gbytes of RAM. To many this may seem completely insufficient but when I started making music with computers I had excellent results using a Pentium IV at 500MHz and 256Mbytes of RAM. Oh! and it comes with a little firewire port to use with my Focusrite Saffire, happy days. So the laptop should be fine.
2. Soundcard, you know I love my Focusrite Saffire, so why change it? The only annoying problem (which was very annoying indeed) is that I lost my original power supply so I bought a new one from Focusrite itself. However, only a few hours before leaving when I checked it I realised that the power supply only accepts european voltage, not north american one, very well done Focusrite! So since the power supply this unit needs is an AC to AC adaptor and most electronic shops (physical and on the internet) only sell AC to DC it was a bit difficult to find one. The alternative would have been to buy a voltage step converter, but it would be very annoying having to use two units to power a simple soundcard.
3. Keyboard, my old M-Audio O2. I know now there are loads more USB keyboards to choose from but back in 2005 when I bought it it was super slim and still is very usable for creating bass lines, electric piano chords and, with a little patience, simple solos.
4. Microphone, Rode NT-1A, cheap and clean sounding quality condenser microphone. Cardioid pattern. It even comes with it’s own shock mount. Just make sure your soundcard can provide the power supply before buying it.
5. External Hard Drive, Iomega UltraMax 1TByte. I use this for all my media, movies and music but since it has multiple ports it can handle USB, Firewire, eSata. Good for music production too. Cool.
6. Belkin Sata II expresscard, I’m not very happy with the speed of USB for music making. Firewire is a bit better, I’ve done mixing up to 90 tracks with external hard drives. However, the firewire 400 ports from my iMac never were able to handle the quick triggering of drum samples from external hard drives so I always had to store the drum samples in the local drive. Very annoying. The theoretical much higher speed of SATA II should be more than capable of handling this. I’ll write about that when it’s due time.
7. Headphones, my old Audio Technica ATH-M40fs headphones, flat response, a little lacking in bass so I’ll try the mixes in cars or with a cheap set of multimedia speakers, etc. Unfortunately I won’t be able to do any proper monitoring since I will not be able to have an acoustic treated room or a decent set of monitors. But that should not stop us from getting good results.