Your young artist wants a studio. You want to know what it really takes.

In Brad Huett’s view, after a lifetime of buying gear he did not need: start with what costs nothing.

• A free music program. Mac and Windows both have free ones, and the free ones finish songs.
• The headphones already in the house.
• The four free tools on this site, which show a mix what it is doing.

Buy nothing until one piece of music is finished start to end. A finished song is the proof that the next purchase will get used. That is an opinion, and it is labeled as one.

The tools on this site run without an account. What they do with the audio is in the rulebook, in numbered statements, and the build is checked against them:

Your audio never leaves your machine. It is decoded and analyzed in your browser, and it is never transmitted.

An account is optional. It asks for one email address and sends one link; there is no password, and signing up adds nobody to a mailing list. We cannot speak for other sites where music gets posted, only for this one.

If it is a laptop or a desktop, almost certainly, for the tools here: they run in a normal web browser, with no software to install. If it is only a phone or a tablet, no. Those can play the song back; making it needs a computer. On a phone the tools’ examples still run, so a young artist can see what they do, but the work happens at a desk.

In Brad Huett’s view, “this” is two different costs, and only one of them lasts.

• The gear. This is where the money pit is: equipment bought before the skill to use it, which ends up in the garage.
• The learning. This is what you are really paying for: a young artist who can walk into a friend’s studio and pull his weight, and who, the day he works with a real producer, can talk like a composer and a musician instead of a customer.

How the money pit usually happens:

• Buying on advice that is years out of date.
• Buying for the studio you picture, not the one your artist needs this year. For fun, for demos and for release are three different rooms at three different costs.
• Buying new gear before there is a finished song to justify it.

The one thing you cannot skip is a laptop. A phone or a tablet is enough to play the song back; it is not enough to make it. Your young artist is a creator now, not a viewer, and a creator needs a computer recent enough to run a free music program well.

Everything after that waits. Start with the free tools. Paid tools come once your artist has shown he can use the free ones, because a paid tool makes no sense to someone who has not yet learned what the free one does. So spend after a finished song, not before, and let each purchase answer a problem your artist has actually hit.