Some suggestions for equipment that might help with recording and making music. Most of this equipment can be found second hand and
in good working order! You don't need any of this stuff, but if you're looking to explore making different kinds of
music, these things might get you started!
Microphone: The Shure SM58 is a good
all-rounder microphone that will be good enough for recording vocals and most instruments
Headphones: You'll need headphones to record acoustic sound without feedback from the computer.
Any you have lying around will be good enough to start with, but
Senheiser and
Audio Technica
both make relatively cheap headphones with a good quality
Audio Interface: An audio interface will allow you to plug microphones and guitar leads into it and record
them on the computer. Most have at least two inputs, and when you record, you'll see two tracks appear on your computer. That
means you could sing and play guitar, and apply effects or volume changes to vocals and guitar indepedently. There was
a TASCAM US-322 second hand in CEX, and
this Behringer looks to be well
priced with good reviews. The guitar lead with a USB on it that we used previously is also a very simple audio interface!
MIDI controller: If you're interested in making electronic music on the computer, playing music naturally
can be hard. A MIDI controller often looks like a keyboard or a drum machine, but it will use the computer to make the sound.
That also means you can change the notes you played, or the sound they're played with later on.
KORG,
AKAI and
M-AUDIO are all well known brands
that make good controllers, however as you have an electric piano, you should be able to plug a USB cable into
the back and use that to play music into your laptop too!
Mobile apps: A lot of music equipment is pretty expensive! But a lot of mobile apps are very good and cheap
or free. Search "Korg" either on iOS or Android and you'll find lots of digital synthesizer apps, and on iPad you can find a sampler
by Native Instruments (another well known brand) called iMaschine 2,
another by Akai called IMPC Pro 2 and
Beatmaker 3. These might take some getting used to, but there are
a lot of tutorials on YouTube for each of these apps. If you do end up making something good, you can record the result into a laptop
using an audio interface.