 This video is sponsored by DistroKid. Follow the VIP link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Over the years I've shown you a lot of the gear from my studio and I stand by my opinion from those videos. However there's probably something that some of the makers of that gear don't want me to tell you. You don't really need it. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Want versus need. They're terms which are easily confused in the studio environment and in life in general I guess. For example I really do want a McLaren F1. I've lusted after them for some years now. However what I need is a vehicle that gets me from A to B safely, economically and reliably. Which is why I own a Mazda 6. Well that and of course I can't afford a McLaren F1. Now in the studio my need is to produce music at as high a quality as I possibly can and there's a surprising amount of gear which if I'm honest with you doesn't really contribute towards that. Let's take this for example. Smack bang in the middle of my desk is something which to the untrained eye may look like a mixer or a recording console of some kind. However it isn't. This is a midi surface controller and what it does is it enables you to control various aspects of your door using physical faders, knobs and buttons etc. Importantly however it doesn't actually increase the abilities of your door in any way and even more importantly it doesn't actually improve the actual audio in any way because there's no audio running through this. It's simply sending signals, midi signals to your door via a USB cable. Now for some of you you may find this far more tactile experience to be more fun or improve your workflow and that may have some truth but I don't think that this could ever be described as a need. Now with this particular one which is the Icon Qcon Pro G2 I've had it for about three years now and if this is something you want I can't recommend it enough. It's built really solidly, it's worked really well for me with both of my major doors which is Cakewalk and Studio One and I think it's an enjoyable piece of equipment. This is the Arturia Keylab 88 Mark II. I bought it about three years ago and it's one of the more expensive but most loved pieces of equipment in my studio. It's built extremely solidly and it's full of useful features but how does it sound? Let's have a quick listen. So let's compare that sound to the much more humble Arturia Keystep 37 that you can see above it here, a much less expensive piece of equipment. Well the answer is of course it sounds exactly the same because it doesn't actually change the sound. The sound is coming from the plug-in, in this case the Mod Art Piano Tech 8 plug-in. So importantly with MIDI controller keyboards it is important to understand that they don't change the sound at all, they are a convenience. A large one like this makes it much easier to play the full range of notes that you'll generally find in music. It's also got things like drum pads and a lot of sliders and knobs which you can use to control the instrument as well as some really nice transport controls but essentially it doesn't make this instrument sound any better than it does if we're using this Keystep 37 here. So just because some gear is not technically needed doesn't mean it's bad. I've got a lot of gear I really enjoy, it's really well made and designed. However once in a while you'll buy something and you really regret it. Now for me it's this, the Behringer FCB1010 MIDI foot controller. I wanted to control MIDI with my feet and this is actually pretty well made, it's really heavy, the switches and everything are good but my goodness it's so difficult to figure out how to actually use it. I've read manuals, I've looked at YouTube videos and it's just really badly designed in that way which is why I just never ever use it. Let me know in the comments down below which piece of gear you have in your studio that you really have buyers regret about. I'd love to hear from you on that and I think I'm going to make your comments the basis of another video. Mike Preamps, do you need them? Well yes technically and you've probably already got them built into your audio interface so I'm specifically talking about external Mike Preamps. I own a few of them and whether you need them or not may depend upon your circumstance. For example, what if you want to record some live drums or a whole group or some situation where you need to record with multiple microphones at the same time and your audio interface only has perhaps a couple of inputs. In this case you really need to expand it with a Mike Preamp, perhaps something like my Audion ASP800. It's great quality, it's really easy to use and you can expand those capabilities of your audio interface very easily indeed. Now in another example what if you have a microphone which needs extra gain. Now this does happen sometimes and if you try to use a regular audio interface and turn the gain all the way up, noise can be introduced. So in this case you may need a high quality external Mike Preamp but I would highly then question your need to use that particular microphone at all. Perhaps that is for another video. Now there's another class of Mike Preamps, those which add some sort of color to the signal or character we might say. That's maybe not something you need to do, it's something you desire. I don't think it really makes a difference to whether the listener really enjoys the song or not. You may disagree with me on that. I think that's a bit of a close call. However in this case I would say that if you want to add that kind of color or character to your sound the plugins get really really close. Now I'm not saying that I don't enjoy using my Mike Preamps which adds some character to the sound but I think it's a real stretch to describe that as a need. Now if you want to release your music to places like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google Play etc then you really need a distributor and that's why I'm happy to recommend the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. They're already really affordable but if you follow that VIP link in the description down below it gets even cheaper. Now the Mike Preamps that we discussed earlier fall into a larger category which we generally describe as hardware or outboard gear. The kind of thing that you'll often find in Iraq like this one next to me here. So the answer to whether you need this gear is actually really short and that is no you don't need this gear for two reasons. One because the plugin versions of a lot of this gear are often really really good but two the subject of whether they're better or not is actually pretty subjective or even the subject of whether you would want to color your signal in the way some of these components do. It has a subjective answer to it so I don't think we could really describe these as a need. Now do I really enjoy some of the gear I have in my Iraq? Yes particularly the compressors. I enjoy the process of using them and I enjoy the sound that they create on my recordings. However is there a lot of other gear that you should spend your harder and cash on before this? Well be careful when you're watching YouTubers like me or commercial studios. We often have a lot of extra gear that you don't really need. For example I have many many pairs of headphones and many microphones. I keep them mainly for review purposes in case I want to compare them to each other for future videos. Commercial studios will have many headphones because they've got many ears coming in and they'll also have a selection of microphones for the various different voices and instruments that they will be recording. But for you a couple of pairs of decent headphones open and close back is just fine and maybe a couple of microphones for different purposes. You don't need to go overboard with this. Now if you're just starting out and you want to know what you really do need as the basis of a home studio I highly recommend you watch this video right here.