How to build your perfect travel production rig

Life does not stop for your inspiration. What we mean by this, is that producing music is something that doesn’t always fit perfectly into your life. For most artists, being able to capture a musical idea whenever inspiration strikes or staying in the creative flow is a crucial part of the creative process. Musicians and producers are often very familiar with the late nights, perhaps sneaking in a few new measures of music at work, and namely, finding ways to keep creating while traveling.

Making music, even as a hobby, is something that needs to be nurtured. Finding some form of routine and discipline in your creative practice is something we know to be crucial, but evasive. What makes this challenging is that there can be no perfect help article, book or podcast to find your routine for you. Creative practice looks different for everyone. Much like a muscle or a foreign language, the “use it or lose it” phrase seriously applies to writing music.

The struggle to maintain routine

If a routine can’t hold up when at home, it’s less likely to do so while traveling. Holidays, family gatherings, leisure or work travel all create a difficult decision for music producers: If you hope to, or need to, continue making music while you travel, what gear do you bring? Or, what gear are you able to physically bring based on where you’re going?

While we can’t build your practice or writing routine for you, we can help you decide what to bring on the road. Modern music production has allowed us to improve our ability to make music anywhere.

From analysing your workflow to choosing MIDI controllers, following these steps can help you develop a streamlined music production setup, ready to take along with you on your travels and primed to help you produce music and keep those musical ideas coming. You’ll surely return home with new music that excites you!

Start with your music production workflow

It might be helpful to bring out a piece of paper or your notes app, and take a few minutes to seriously reflect on the following questions.

As a music producer, before considering gear, ask yourself the following:

– When you’re creating music, how does your experience change from the initial idea to tracking and mixing?

– What steps of the process do you tend to have the need to be home, and/or alone?

– What is your creative workflow like? Are there any steps in writing that you need complete privacy? Not just being alone, but not wanting someone to look over your shoulder?

– When do you require a full studio setup, and when do you need your collaborators that live locally?

To understand your relationship with your creativity, writing to prompts like these can be helpful regardless of the goal you begin with. In this case, we’re attempting to unpack why and how you write music. Through this, we can identify what steps of the process you need to be in a controlled environment for, like your home or a studio, and what can be done on the go.

Anything that you define as needing to be alone, or in your home studio setup, should be removed from consideration when planning to make music on the go. 

This may seem obvious, but the next step might not be so: Make sure to take care of as many of these steps as possible before you travel. This might mean recording multiple new ideas, but not moving into the next phase as you can do this with MIDI outside of your studio, or developing a number of tracks to the mix stage when you’re largely worrying about post-production and more subtle track layering. 

Broadly speaking, one of the best ways to successfully maintain creative momentum during times of travel is to anticipate what you need, and prepare it accordingly, even if it looks different than your production process or normal day-to-day creation.

Review your existing music production equipment

Once you’ve thought about the phases of production, begin to think about what instruments you use for each of these phases. Ask yourself, for what you want to do:

– How much gear is necessary to achieve your goals, and how much of that list is actually possible to bring with you?

– Do you mainly use acoustic instruments? Is your main instrument, such as a saxophone or Seaboard RISE 2, unrealistic to bring with you?

– What is your method of travel and baggage allowance?

– Do you have an audio interface small enough to travel with?

– Do you have an extra set of headphones with acceptable quality, as to not travel with your studio set?

– Do you have a MIDI controller that’s both durable and packable?
(We would of course recommend LUMI Keys for a more traditional, but still powerful controller with MPE capabilities, as well as the recently launched Seaboard BLOCK M.)

– Do you need to consider purchases for this or can you travel with what you have?

Note that there are bound to be more questions for you, depending on how much you’ll be writing songs, mixing music, or mastering tracks. If you are in need of a new piece of gear, review some recent articles about producing music on the go here and some hardware choices you may consider as a traveling producer here, in transparency written by the same writer who has brought you this piece.

Protecting your gear on the move

When putting together a portable studio, another crucial factor to consider is how you will protect your music production equipment. Your production tools are a very costly investment, and the wear and tear of travelling can inflict some damage on expensive MIDI controllers and condenser microphones.

Investing in protective gear for portable studio equipment, such as cases for your microphones, audio interfaces, MIDI keyboards and other production essentials for flights or general carrying around can protect your gear in the long term, ensuring that you're always ready to record when you need to.

If you're on the lookout for a Seaboard RISE 2 or LUMI Keys to form part of your portable recording setup, you can also pair them with their bespoke cases. The RISE Soft case is a practical solution as it also comes with padding to keep your Seaboard safe from bumps and scrapes, and LUMI Keys Snapcases are a streamlined option for the smaller keyboard, available in an array of colors to match your personal style.

Embracing the opportunity

A far more abstract point to bring up – which we know will be most welcome from you, as musicians – is that our environment is constantly studied in how it affects our creative output. So as you prepare to travel with the goal of music-making, it can be helpful to keep in mind that the universe is literally encouraging you. Every long hike, train delay and new friend represents a new point of inspiration which you can capture and interact with immediately.

While there are plenty of benefits to locking oneself in the studio, there is another argument to be made of embracing external inspiration any chance you get with it. So if you must travel, how can you listen to your travels and reflect that in your recorded music?

You don’t quite have to go to the length of New England-based pianist Ben Cosgrove, who has famously translated landscapes to sound, but you can take some element of this idea that helps you explore your sound.

Share your music production essentials list with us!

If you have plans to travel in 2024 or spent time traveling over the holiday season, we are excited for what music you’re making. We encourage you to share what you plan to bring with you in the ROLI Creator Community, to encourage others who have not worked through the suggestions in this article. Many of these tips can be applied to creating a rig to carry around with you for live performances, so don't hesitate to share those ideas with other musicians in our community too.

And if you are still looking for the perfect MIDI controller for you in the studio, be sure to check out this handy list to choose the right one for you.