New To Midi Options

[johnmichaelhruby]

I understand the concept. I just want a few opinions. I want to use MIDI live. So I want to go controller to a rack mount unit? If so... what type of rack units am I looking at? I am curious to know about expensive and inexpensive models. Does the routing then go to a laptop? Is an Ibook good enough to run this? I also wanted a program to run pre-recorded audio during the live performance. Will the ibook be able to handle both? Am I an idiot? Answers to any of these questions is appreciated. Thanks all.

[mortalengines]

Controllers can be as cheap or as expensive as you want them to be- it just gets down to the amount of bells & whistles (or knobs & sliders) that you want. I have an M-audio Oxygen 8 that only cost around 120 bucks & eventually, I may want more, but for right now I am pretty happy with it. It's small & travels quite easily in a gig bag made just for it.

The I-book issue is another thing altogether. You will need alot of RAM & a fairly fast processor & I don't know about the I-book but I have to be fairly conscious of resource usage with my G4 powerbook while running Ableton Live (which is great by the way for using Loops & virtual instruments). However, you will probably be in pretty good shape for using Reason as it doesn't require an outrageous amount of RAM or CPU & if you bought Recycle to go with Reason you can use whatever loops you want in the form of REX files in addition to Reason's pretty good selection of synths & effects.