hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing
well today i've got a quick video where i
wanted to go over my new macbook pro based studio setup
as you can see here i no longer have my 2010
imac which you guys are familiar you've seen it in the videos
it went 10 years strong it was still working was having some issues
but most importantly when the logic pro x 10.5
update came out recently i found out that
you had to have a newer os and it turns out that uh apple actually
stopped supporting the hardware on that 2010 imac so
not only was i not able to get logic pro x 10.5 on there
i also can't even get the latest os which means that
you know all the software all the hardware was extremely outdated
so what we've got here is my macbook pro i've had this for a few years now this
is a 2016 i'll put all the specs to it below but
it is the same specs (on paper) you know quad core 16 gigs of
ram very similar to my existing imac
however we've got catalina running on here
and then we have thunderbolt 3 connectivity which
we'll talk about in a minute why that's made a big difference here
but for me this is a really different sort of workflow i was a little nervous
about you know starting to try to work strictly off of this and
implement it into the same setup but again
as you can see and hear all of my gear is all interfaced
the same way with the imac except we're going through
a single thunderbolt 3 connection and i'll show you how i've got that set
up it's actually a hub that i did some research on
by a company called caldigit i'll put links to all this stuff but i wanted
something that i wasn't gonna have all these crazy
adapters and you know just uh different types of connectivity if we're gonna be
thunderbolt 3 i wanted it all to be thunderbolt 3 so
that i'm getting that speed and performance out of the
hard drives you know anything that's hooked up so with that hub
i am not only able to get thunderbolt 3 connections for
all of my ssds i also have you know an sd card
for you know the video i have ethernet i have
hdmi for the external monitor there's all kinds of different stuff
there so again all i have to do is just hook up the monitor
with that one cable to the hub and you know when i want to take this on the go
when travel starts letting up again you know i can just take this and have
everything here that i would be using in my normal studio setup now as you all
know with the imac i had two setups
so that had its advantages but it also was a little bit convoluted
in terms of trying to keep those machines consistent
but this way you know i do like the fact that this is the main system
and when i take it out of the studio it's going to be identical
to what i'm working with you know minus the fact that i won't have
some of the hardware with me so a thing i like about
this is that i can have the macbook screen up and i can use that as an
additional monitor so you know let's just say for instance
we wanted to have you know some kind of monitoring or
maybe you know ozone mastering plug-in or something
like that open here you know i can just drag that over keep
that open leave the real estate for you know my faders
and all that stuff over here on the other side
now also i can just close this and use this monitor
exclusively so just gives you some flexibility and i haven't been able to
work off of dual screen in a long time it's
been a serious workflow enhancement in terms of
you know mixing in the daw so the other thing i mentioned with the imac that was
starting to really weigh me down was the connectivity so i was using usb
2.0, firewire and even though i had usb 3.0 or even some thunderbolt capable
ssds and other peripherals none of that was able to utilize the bandwidth
because my imac couldn't support it so now with purely
thunderbolt 3 connection everything is running at the speed it
should which means all my drives are performing better you
know even my sound drives you know the the session
drives everything is just loading much more snappy the performance
in the daw even though this is the same specs as
my imac it just feels like a completely new
machine with a lot more power so one thing i'm not
loving about it is the laptop you know when you're running this as a screen
you're capturing video like i am right now and you're running the daw
which i do in a lot of my tutorials this thing runs hot
and a lot hotter than my imac and the fans
tend to go pretty consistently so there's actually a couple of apps that i
found that have been really helpful with this
you know you don't want to turn off those fans because that will you know
ultimately damage the mac but if you're like me and you're in a
studio environment you know having a quiet environment
and you can hear the fans going right now if you're trying to record and
that's important to you don't want to hear that going
you can use something like tg pro which is this app that i found and i'll
put links to these but you can monitor the temperature
of you know all your cpus the battery you know your graphics card and then
what we can actually do is go in here and we can set our
preferences for you know like how much we want the
fans to be on and at what temperature and how fast we want them to
go so you can actually slow it down to
where it's not going to be as noisy but it'll still keep your computer cool now
i do want to again warn you just be careful about how you're setting
this do a little research it has a couple of suggestions
for different options for you but you can just kind of set these thresholds
of temperature and how fast the fans are actually going to turn you can see my
computer obviously is running pretty hot right now
close to 85 celsius when you get towards 90
you know that's where you kind of want to be concerned about but again that's
just because we're doing all this stuff at once right now
the other app that is really cool is called
turbo booster pro and what this will do is with you know the newer macbooks the
newer apple computers you have what's called turbo boost in an
intel processor and when that kicks in it tends to make
your fans turn on immediately because your
computer is working that much harder to get the performance so what we can
actually do is disable turbo boost completely now again this is
not something that's available out of the box on your mac there's
probably a reason for that so be careful with it
but i've been using it just when i don't need the extra speed
you know if i'm working in a session that there's not a ton going on
then i can just disable that and it's not going to have those fans going
constantly especially when i'm recording these tutorials with you guys so yeah
guys i think that covers the new uh macbook laptop setup for me in the
studio thus far you know as much hesitation as
i had with this i have been liking it and once i kind of
got going with it i just said you know what
i'm just gonna commit to this because this is you know the future of you know
my workflow and really the connectivity with thunderbolt 3 and all that
we're headed that way anyway so i just figured it was time
and you know i like the fact that i can just take this on the go and have the
exact setup i don't have to worry about keeping two
machines consistent anymore but i'm still obviously you know doing
duplicate backups backups to the cloud which again i just
want to stress use this as an opportunity to make sure
you guys back up before you're talking about
doing any os updates or going to the new logic pro that was
definitely something that i was doing and it's been a little bit of work to
get all this implemented but uh so far so good and hopefully
it'll set me up for the next 10 years uh like the imac did it was a great
computer but yeah time to get into 2020
and into the new technology so i'm learning a lot unfortunately i did have
to replace a couple of things that weren't compatible but as far as
like the main hardware you know even my other usb 3.0 hub all
that stuff is implemented the exact same way it's just
replaced the imac with a laptop but if you have any questions about how i
put this together and how it's interfacing here
with all the rest of you know my midi controllers and my monitoring and all
that feel free to leave a comment below and
if you have any suggestions this is a new setup for me so for those
of you out there who have been working in this kind of way feel free to leave
us some feedback definitely love to hear about it if you
learn anything in the video please like subscribe and consider sharing
we'll talk to you i've soon
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