I try to post to { WMM! } every Monday and Thursday and leave a little something random on Fridays, but this week was a bit different. I spent this past weekend back home visiting family, and spent most of Monday making the 8-hour trek back to my apartment. And since I spent the past several days away from home, I decided that maybe I should write about what kind of things I take with me as part of my “mobile setup.” After all, you can’t take your entire office with you, can you?
So to start, here’s what I use to carry everything: A Body Glove Series One 25-key keyboard bag. I somehow found this on the shelf at Best Buy, and have had trouble locating much information about it (it seems that it’s a new line from Body Glove). If you’re carrying around a compact MIDI controller, this bag (or similar ones from Korg , M-Audio, or Novation will do the job.
In the front pocket, I keep various USB cables, product manuals, the M-Audio Micro , and a USB 10-key keypad (which comes in really handy with Sibelius).
In the main area I keep a compact MIDI controller (an M-Audio KeyStudio 25), several Mollard conducting batons, a Sony Playstation Portable, a spiral-bound book of manuscript paper, several of my preferred pencils, and an external hard drive (which I use to store backups of files from my desktop). Of course, most of the items in this section are self explanatory (manuscript paper, pencils, MIDI controller,) but the others seem out of place. For example, the external drive. Starting out as a young composer, I never know when I will have the opportunity to show someone my work, and the external drive works better than trying to keep track of paper files or hoping my desktop computer is awake at home. Conducting batons, I’d love to say I keep them in case I have a conducting emergency, but when was the last time there was really a conducting “emergency?” I keep them here because I have to keep them somewhere, at least here I know where they are.
And then finally the PSP. While I do use mine for gaming, I get much more use out of the internet and media functions. Like the external drive, I never know when I may need to show off examples of my work (this has actually happened, where I run into someone I know, and I end up pulling out my PSP and showing a video of some performance or another).
Of course, most of the things I carry around with me require a computer. In my case it’s an HP laptop, which I’ve not included because it normally lives in my school bag rather than my composing bag.
