All music students are required to own a laptop that will allow them to engage in both in-person and remote classes, complete their coursework and assignment while both on and off campus, and record/produce their music while using their own recording equipment or on-campus resources.
Desktops are discouraged as you will always need to have your computer with you.
Please see the Audio/Music Laptop Specifications page for more information on the current laptop requirements.
While your instructors and our I.T. department will do everything they can to support you, at this time, Columbia College Chicago has no dedicated technical support for equipment that is NOT owned by the college. As a result, students are highly encouraged to bundle their computer purchases with a support package provided by the manufacturer or retailer (e.g., Apple Care+).
All students at Columbia College Chicago are provided with 1TB of cloud-based storage via Microsoft’s OneDrive. All music students must utilize this, or any other cloud storage service, to organize and create regular backups of all their coursework and related materials so that in the extremely likely event that something happens to their computer, none of their work is lost.
We are all here to study, explore, and create music starting from the moment of inspiration through to sharing it with the world. Throughout this process, it is important that everyone is able to hear every detail of both the music we study and the music we make. Since we can’t always be in a professional listening environment, like one of our on-campus recording studios, it is important that all music students have a quality pair of studio reference headphones.
Unlike consumer-grade headphones (e.g., Bose’s line of noise-canceling headphones) which are all designed to make music sound as good as possible, studio reference headphones are designed to deliver sound as “honestly” or “transparently” as possible. Meaning that we can hear almost every detail of the sound, even the undesirable parts.
Furthermore, these headphones should connect to your computer, portable recording device, or audio interface via a cable, NOT via Bluetooth. While wireless headphones can sound great, connecting headphones to your computer/device wirelessly adds an additional delay between when you make a sound and when you hear the sound played back inside your headphones. This delay can make recording or other musical performance situations impossible.
Finally, these headphones should be both closed-back and over-ear. This style of headphones insures the best acoustic isolation between the sounds inside versus outside the headphones which is essential for recording and listening.
Several examples/recommended headphones:
More information on headphones can be found here.