Embarrassing newbie question

[RainyWoods]

Thank you all for the help and advice. My Nord arrived yesterday. I was afraid to even turn the thing on, just staring at it in awe for a good while. It's magnificent, truly a beautiful thing. Eventually turned it on after thoroughly reading the manual so as to make sure I did not do anything too stupid on it.. I was blown away! Incredible. I have spent most of my time thus far in the synth section fiddling around with stuff. It's a real treat and despite it's abundance of buttons and knobs, i'm finding it easy to use and enjoyable to learn.

I'm going to order some speakers today although still not sure which ones i'm going to go with.

I've another (probably) silly question i'm going to ask here. In the future, I plan to buy myself an Apple Macbook and what I want to do is record what im playing straight to the laptop. I have not decided what programme I want to work with yet.. until now I have only recorded low quality live performances in Audacity using a microphone(classy I know). I'll probably go with fancier music software when the time comes. I have been trying to educate myself on the matter of recording. Would it say, be as easy as just buying for example, an Akai Eie Pro sound card and then plugging the nord by some kind of wire into the sound card?

There is just soo much to think about for a technophobe like me but for some reason, im strangely enjoying it all

[juhana]

I've another (probably) silly question i'm going to ask here. In the future, I plan to buy myself an Apple Macbook and what I want to do is record what im playing straight to the laptop. I have not decided what programme I want to work with yet.. until now I have only recorded low quality live performances in Audacity using a microphone(classy I know). I'll probably go with fancier music software when the time comes. I have been trying to educate myself on the matter of recording. Would it say, be as easy as just buying for example, an Akai Eie Pro sound card and then plugging the nord by some kind of wire into the sound card?

Apple's GarageBand is also quite usable for recording, IMHO more user friendly than Audacity and has an upgrade path to Logic Pro if you ever want to go that way. One thing to note about the latest Macbooks: they do not have an audio line input, so you'll have to have either some simple line-to-USB device such as iMic or a small mixer with USB audio, at least Behringer have a couple of those, for example Xenyx 1204USB. Mixer would be also good with whatever speakers you are planning to get, you'd have an external, global EQ to adjust the sound to your speakers and environment. (NS2 internal EQ is per program, so it would be quite tedious to use it to adapt to the speakers...)

[juholaatu]

I just note that you may well start with the Macbook, Audacity or Garageband, and an audio cable between the two machines. You will then see if you need more software and/or hardware.