 So this is it. The final video I'll be making in this studio. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you well. Now I found out just a few days ago that the landlord will not be renewing the lease on this place. So I've got four weeks to find a new place, pack everything up here and move. That's a lot of work and I'm feeling a little bit sad because I started Creative Source from zero from this very room just a few years ago. So it really holds a special place in my heart and it's the end of an era. But we have to move forward. Now in the meantime, while I'm going through this process, I want to put together a much more scaled down setup, okay, almost like a mobile setup. So I can keep making some videos and keep making some music for you guys. So in this video, I'm going to be going through some of my choices with this. It's really going to be the smallest setup that I can think of. And you can let me know in the comments down below whether you think I've made some good choices or not. Now if you happen to be releasing some music, don't forget to follow the link in the description down below for DistroKid, the sponsor of this video. If you follow that VIP link, you'll get 7% off an already incredible price. Now the first thing that I'm considering is the sort of core of the studio and that is the computer. So my regular PC is an 11th generation i9 processor with 64 gigabytes of RAM and I've got 10 terabytes of SSDs in there. It runs super quiet with its magnetic levitation fans and water cooling. So it's a really efficient beast. It does everything I need to do. It very rarely fails with me in any way. But that's a bit too much to be lugging around to different parts of the house. So I'm going to go with some sort of laptop. Now I've got two choices. That's four. I've got two choices available to me. I've got my old 2016 MacBook Pro. This is an i7 with a 500 gigabyte hard drive in it. This is great. I use this every day for things like sort of emails and anything I do on the web. Okay, so it's pretty handy machine, runs nice and quiet. On the other hand, I've also got this laptop. This is the Lenovo. It's an 11th generation i7 processor again with 500 gigabytes of hard drive on there. And they're both really very capable machines to be honest with you. But the thing is I run both. I run more than one door. One of them, that's Katewalk, is only compatible with PC where Studio One, my other one, runs on both. So the decision's kind of made for me to be honest with you. It has to be this one. I'm pretty happy with that choice as it goes. The only downside to this is it doesn't have a thunderbolt connection. So that's going to restrict the audio interfaces I can choose from. So for all kinds of crazy reasons, mostly to do with video editing, I actually run three audio interfaces on a daily basis. Those being the Antelope Audio Discrete 8 Pro, the Universal Audio Apollo X4 and also the Discontinued Prasonic Studio 192, which I still really like as an interface. And it lives in the rack down below here. So you don't normally get to see my videos. However, I'm scaling down to something much more simple for the next few weeks. So my choices, all the ones that are available to me were these three small audio interfaces. We've got the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2, apparently the most popular audio interface on the planet, according to them. Then we've got the Arturia Minifuse 2, and then we have the Audion ID 14 Mark II. So the Focusrite is great, a really rock solid interface, nice quality, but it's not very sort of feature packed. And I do have the choice of all three and they're all about the same size. Yeah. So my next consideration was the Arturia. Now what this has, which this doesn't, just so you know, if you're in the market for these, is this has some MIDI connections, some old MIDI connections on the back. So you can connect old sort of MIDI synths, drum machines, etc. directly to this without needing to convert to USB, etc. That's not important to me over the next few weeks at all. So this is fine, but I'm actually going to be going for this one, the Audion ID 14 Mark II. The reason for this is, firstly, although it still has the two inputs that all of these have, it actually has some additional outputs, actually got two extra outputs, which could be quite handy. You never know. Okay. So I don't really know what's going to be happening over the next few weeks. So I like that option there. And it's also got ADAT, which is great for expanding this. And you never know, I may be getting hold of some other ADAT gear. I may want to test with this. So I think this is a good choice overall. They're all USB powered, meaning that none of them need a power brick or anything. And that's really, really handy. Okay. If I want to keep things simple, just a cable to my computer and it's powered by itself there. So that's my choice for the next few weeks on this channel. So all of my choices here are about keeping things simple, which reminds me of our sponsor for this video, DistroKid. By using DistroKid, you get to release your music directly to some of the best platforms on the planet. We're talking Spotify, iTunes, TikTok, Amazon, you know, all of the household names and you don't need to open any accounts there because DistroKid does all of that for you. Now, once you've created your master and your album artwork, it's as easy as filling in a friendly form, uploading them and DistroKid takes care of the rest. All for one flat annual fee and DistroKid takes none of your royalties. Sign up with my VIP link in the description and you'll get an extra 7% off. So one thing I won't be doing over the next few weeks is mixing with studio monitors. For the first time really for me, I'll exclusively be using headphones for the next few weeks. Now, I had a lot of choices of headphones to choose from in this studio. People send me headphones for review. I review them. Some of them I use a lot. Some of them not so much. I've probably got about 20, 25 pairs of headphones, but I wanted to talk about my short list of three. Okay, so first of all, the Audizi MM500. The reason these are in the three here is because I actually use these every single day at the moment. I have done for the last few weeks and months. These are easily the best sounding headphones I've ever, ever heard. They're great quality and with all of that, they've got a price tag in the thousands of dollars to match the way they sound. So this would be the one I would use, right? Well, not really because these are open back. So if I do any tracking, any recording over the next few weeks, these are possibly not going to be a great choice. And although they're really, really good, I'm a little bit hesitant because I'm going to be wearing these things a lot. And I don't know if they're going to be that comfortable because they're quite heavy if I'm sort of wearing them like eight hours a day. Okay, normally at the moment, I wear them for sort of two hours since maybe. So look, probably not going to choose those. I know I'm not going to choose those. Next up, we have these. These are all, I'm going to get the model number right. These are S5Xs. This is their newest model. They sent these to me a few weeks ago and I've been testing them out. Okay, super high quality headphones, pretty comfortable to wear as well. So they're in the shortlist, but they're a little bit, I'm not so familiar with these. And I feel like you've got to be familiar with some headphones if you're going to use them a lot. Okay, and they're also open back as well. So the ones I'm actually going for are the old Faithfuls, the Bayer Dynamic DT770 Pros. Why am I going for these? These are closed back. Okay, not ideal for mixing, but I think I can get away with using these for mixing. And I won't be doing serious mixes, just sort of quick mixes for demos on the channel, etc. over the next few weeks. They're just a bit tried and tested for me. So I think these are the headphones that I'm going to be using. So I wanted to choose just one microphone to use over the next few weeks. And this is my kind of shortlist out of my microphone collection. The first one over here is a C12 clone. This is made by Nude. And it's a lovely sort of vintage, warm sound. I won't be using this one, despite the fact I really like the sound of it, because it's a tube microphone, it needs its own power supply. Okay, that's just too much to be lugging around with me. So that one's out of the picture. I also considered using this AKG C414, an absolute classic microphone, incredibly versatile, because of all of its different polar patterns and things like that. But we'll get back to why I'm not choosing that. It's a wonderful microphone that could easily have gone for that. And then we have this absolute classic Neumann U87 AI, probably the most legendary of all studio condenser microphones. So why wouldn't I choose this? Well, for the same reason, I'm not choosing all of these three microphones. And that's because they're condenser microphones, wonderful in the studio, if it's well treated. But I'm not sure that the places where I'm going to be recording are going to be that well treated. I'll do my best to have some furniture and things around. But there's too much for a risk. I really need to go for a dynamic microphone, because they're much nicer in terms of using them in a not so perfect room. Okay, so I have the two most classic of dynamic microphones here, the Shure SM58 and the Shure SM57. This is a legendary vocal mic on stage especially. It's good in the studio, but it's best if you've got like a really loud, aggressive singer, okay? Other than that, I'm not a big fan of the sound of this on my voice particularly. So that's out of the question. This one is a dynamic, very similar, it's an SM57. But this is much more suitable for instruments, okay? It's not so good for vocals. So I won't be going for those two. And then this one's a little bit of an outlier. This is a Biodynamic M70 Pro X, quite a new microphone, just came out a few months ago or a year ago or so. It's a really nice quality microphone. This, however, sort of not tried and tested enough for me to have complete confidence in in terms of using it every day for the next few weeks for as many different things as possible. So I will actually be using this. You see this in most of my videos. It's a Shure SM7B. It's a great microphone for my voiceovers, as you've seen me use it on most videos. But it's also very good for vocals, okay? And great for loud vocals, but don't have to be loud vocals. This to me is the closest of these microphones that you get to the sound of a condenser microphone with a dynamic microphone. So this is the microphone I'm going to be using. Now the only downside to it is it's not that great. I don't think it recording like acoustic guitars and things, but it's usable. You know, take the foam off. It's a little bit better, but it takes a lot to power this. So whether it's going to work all that well with the ID14 interface by itself, I don't know. But I have this handy. This is called a cloud lifter, which sort of boosts the signal of this microphone before it goes to the interface, and that's going to be usable. So when it comes to keyboards, my absolute favorite is just behind me here, the Arturia KeyLab 88 Mark II. I have never regretted buying that keyboard. It's just so wonderful in so many ways. It's incredibly powerful, but it's also incredibly big and incredibly heavy. So it doesn't quite fit the bill for the next few weeks at least. Definitely my second choice would be this one. This is a Native Instruments S61. Quite a different beast, okay, because this is not a sort of a, hasn't got that heavy weighted keys that you get on a piano type keyboard, but it's a wonderful quality keyboard. This is a great keyboard if you're in that kind of Native Instruments ecosystem. Yeah, if you're using complete or something, you want to browse instruments easily. This is really wonderful for that. It's one of the reasons I like it, because I'm quite often in that ecosystem. However, it's still too big for me actually, so I want something much, much smaller than this. My next choice, and it was a choice of mine for a long time because I do record mobile once in a while, is this one here. This is the Arturia Keystep 37. If I was just going for keyboard alone and a small keyboard, almost certainly would be this keyboard, okay. This great quality, that sort of range of 37 is a nice sort of choice of keyboards to have. There's lots of connectivity on the back of it. There's different ways you can connect it to different things. So it's sort of really, really good, especially for a small keyboard. Love the quality of Arturia keyboards as well. But it's not my final choice. I still want to go even smaller and kind of lighter than that. And there's some specific reasons why I've actually chosen this one. This is Arturia Mini Lab 3. This is the sort of newest iteration of this, came out just a few weeks ago, I guess. This is probably just enough keys for me, but you'll notice that what it does have is a lot of control knobs, okay. This is potentially very, very useful for me, because I use a lot of virtual instruments and I may well be reviewing a few more virtual instruments over the next few weeks. So look how small it is, good quality, lots and lots of functionality on there. So that's my choice for keyboard, isn't it, Dinky? So look, it's not ideal. I definitely wouldn't have chosen to pack up this studio and this house and move somewhere else over the next four weeks or so, but that's the choice I have. And I've learned in the life that sometimes these things come along. You don't want them necessarily, but they open up new doors and new opportunities, which you couldn't have predicted. So let's see what happens over the next few weeks. I'll keep you posted. And it has given me the opportunity to sort of assess what I really need to make music and make videos for you guys. If you want to know a little bit more about what you actually need for a studio, then you may want to watch this video here. This is aimed at beginners. So if you're just starting out with equipment for your first home studio, it's definitely a video you should watch now.