Simply Piano is a fast and fun way to learn piano, from beginner to pro. Works with any piano or keyboard. Chosen as one of the best iPhone apps. Tons of fun songs like Imagine, Chandelier, All Of Me and Counting Stars, also J.S. Bach - Includes courses for different musical tastes and playing le. Free Piano If it seems to good to be true, it probably is $0. //FREE11' MacBook Air 2012 i5 4GB// $0 (snj) pic hide this posting restore restore this posting. Priced at around $800 it has 88 keys and some solid piano sounds. It too has a USB port for either storing songs or making a connection to your computer. It also includes built-in speakers, though.
Selecting the right keyboard rig for your worship band can be a daunting task. In this article, I’m going to walk you through the setup we use at our church plant. Rather than spending thousands of dollars on a Nord, Roland, or Yamaha keyboard, we are able to produce amazing sounds with an inexpensive MIDI keyboard and Mainstage running on a MacBook Air. Keep reading to the end and you’ll know exactly what to buy and how to set this up at your church.
The question of the day: What keyboard rig do you use at your church? I love learning from you guys so let me know below in the comments.
I’m going to walk you through the keyboard setup we use at the small church plant where I lead worship. I am not a professional keyboardist. I’m a worship leader and guitarist. But as the worship leader, it’s my responsibility to make sure my volunteers who play keyboard have the best tools to produce the best sounds possible.
I wanted to build a rig that can reproduce the sounds we hear today on most modern worship albums. That means the rig must have piano, pad, synth, organ, and bass patches to play the wide variety of sounds that are popular today.
There are two pieces to any keyboard rig. The first piece is the hardware which is the physical keyboard itself. The second piece is the software which produces the sounds. There are a couple of options for how you can go about combining hardware and software for a keyboard rig.
First, you could buy a keyboard that combines the hardware and software into one. While this setup is portable and convenient, there are a couple of issues. To have a keyboard with high quality sounds built it, you need to spend a lot of money on a high-end Nord, Roland, or Yamaha. Most churches cannot afford that. Instead, they buy a cheap keyboard for a few hundred dollars which ends up not sounding good and cannot produce the pad and synth sounds required in modern worship bands.
The second way to build a worship keyboard rig is to purchase the hardware and software separately. That’s what I did to set up the keyboard rig for my worship band. There are several advantages to this. First, you can buy an inexpensive MIDI keyboard controller from M-Audio or Akai. In our setup, we use the M-Audio Hammer 88. It has 88 weighted keys and feels great for only being $400. Remember, MIDI keyboard controllers do not produce actual sound. You will plug the keyboard into a laptop with USB cable, and the laptop will be creating the sound.
We have a MacBook Air with Mainstage installed on it to run our keyboard sounds, also known as patches. Mainstage is available for $30 in the Mac app store. Sorry PC user, Mainstage is not available on Windows. You do not need a super powerful Mac to run Mainstage. The MacBook Air we have is a 2014 model with 8GB of RAM. We have never had performance issues.
Once you have MainStage installed on your computer, you can start using the piano and pad sounds built into the software. That is what we did for a few months at our church plant. Recently, I purchased Sunday Keys. Sunday Keys is a template of premade Mainstage patches that are designed specifically for worship. Here's a link to a video where the creator of these patches demos all the sounds. The template costs only $50 which is an incredible value. Once you purchase and download the bundle, you open up the MainStage concert file and bam; you have amazing worship keyboard patches ready to go.
Let’s talk about cost. Assuming you already have a Mac computer available, it only costs $30 for Mainstage, $50 for Sunday Keys, and let’s say you purchase a MIDI Keyboard like the one we use at my church for $400. For less than $500, your church has a phenomenal worship keyboard rig. If you went and spent $500 on a typical keyboard with sounds built in, you’d have a very mediocre rig. To me, it’s a no-brainer. Even if you need to buy an additional laptop to run Mainstage, you can find a used MacBook Air for less than $1000. In the end, this setup is still a fraction of the price for a flagship Nord, Roland, or Yamaha keyboard.
But I’m not done showing you how cool this setup is. At my church, we use Ableton Live to run a click, tracks and automate lighting and lyrics in worship. If you’ve been following my blog for any amount of time, you probably know I’m a huge Ableton Live geek. Software update download. Ableton Live can also control different features within Mainstage. It can cue up the right Mainstage patches at the right time, so my keyboardist doesn’t have to worry about selecting the right sound. Ableton can also tell Mainstage what tempo a song is in so that delays and arpeggiators align with the tempo of the song.
Want to master Ableton Live for your worship ministry? Click here to enroll in my free video training.
The final thing I want to touch on is how to get audio from your Mac to your sound system. You will need a 3.5mm to dual ¼” cable, a stereo DI Box, and two XLR cables to plug into your stage snake or sound console. With this setup, you will have a left and right channel from your computer. Stereo is not totally necessary, but it can be nice if you have patches with panning features in them.
I hope you now see that a phenomenal keyboard sound is achievable with a simple MIDI controller, Mainstage, and Sunday Keys. As a worship leader who wants to quickly implement the latest and greatest in worship tools for my team, this one was a no-brainer from the second I heard David demo these patches on his channel.
Thanks for reading. If you want to learn the #1 worship leading software, enroll in my free training, Lead Worship with Ableton linked below. You can also download my Worship Ministry toolkit which contains links to everything covered in this video. If you found this article helpful, hit the heart button and share it with your friends. Leave your love, opinions, and details of your keyboard rig below in the comments.
Apple wants people to fall back in love with its latest MacBook Air.
For many users, the pre-Retina, 13-inch MacBook Air was one of the best laptops ever made. For too long, though, it fell behind the curve as Apple introduced better performance and higher-resolution screens to the rest of its lineup. Finally, Apple brought the high-res Retina display and some other improvements to the Air in 2018. Maybe the world's best laptop was back?2018's Air was a pretty good machine, but it wasn't a candidate for world's best laptop anymore, thanks to the prone-to-fail butterfly keyboard design and a painful lack of ports. A refresh in 2019 brought some refinements, but it didn't address either of those issues. Now, finally, Apple has pulled out the butterfly keyboard and put in something we hope will be much more dependable.
So is the 2020 MacBook Air again worthy of consideration as the world's best laptop?
Table of Contents
Specifications
Specs at a glance: 2020 MacBook Air | |
---|---|
Screen | 2560×1600 at 13.3 inches |
OS | macOS Catalina 10.15.3 |
CPU | 1.1GHz 4-core Intel Core i5 (3.5GHz Turbo) with 6MB L3 cache |
RAM | 8GB 3733MHz LPDDR4X |
GPU | Intel Iris Plus Graphics |
HDD | 512GB SSD |
Networking | 802.11ac Wi-Fi; IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n; Bluetooth 5.0 |
Ports | 2x Thunderbolt 3, 3.5mm headphone |
Size | 0.16–0.63 inch×11.97-inch×8.36-inch (0.41–1.61cm×30.41cm×21.24cm) |
Weight | 2.8lbs (1.29kg) |
Warranty | 1 year, or 3 years with AppleCare+ |
Price as reviewed | $1,299 |
Other perks | 720p FaceTime HD camera, stereo speakers |
Apple MacBook Air (2020)
![Macbook Macbook](https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2016/01/irigkeysmini_lifestyle_android2.jpg?quality=82&strip=all)
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The new Air offers three CPU options. The $999 entry-level configuration has a 1.1GHz, dual-core Intel Core i3 with Turbo Boost up to 3.2GHz and a 4MB L3 cache. That's pretty anemic even for the price, but it should be powerful enough for a decent portion of the machine's target audience.Buyers can spend an extra $100 for a 1.1GHz Core i5 with 3.5GHz Turbo Boost and a 6MB cache; if you can afford it, the cost here is worth it. There's also a 1.2GHz Core i7 with 3.8GHz Turbo Boost and 8MB cache option for $250 over the base config, but if performance is that important to you, at this price you might consider a MacBook Pro instead.
For graphics, you're looking at Intel Iris Pro graphics matching whatever CPU you pick.
In standard configurations, the Air comes with 8GB of 3733MHz LPDDR4X memory, but you can opt to upgrade to 16GB for an additional $200—which I'd recommend for a lot of people, especially if they use a bunch of non-Apple apps like, say, Google Chrome.
Storage starts at 256GB in the base config, up from 128GB in past Airs. Apple has been doubling storage across its MacBook line, and that's very welcome. 128GB was pretty tight even for light users, but 256GB is just right for those using this as a basic productivity computer. You can go up to 512GB for another $200, 1TB for another $400, or a beefy 2TB for an extra $800.
The Air has the same Retina display as before. It's a 13.3-inch IPS panel with a native resolution of 2,560 by 1,600 pixels. Apple really made HiDPI displays take off when it first introduced Retina displays, but while the company is strong on things like color accuracy, competing products now offer much higher resolutions.
The Air's screen is above the threshold beyond which more pixels make for diminishing returns, though, so its resolution isn't much of a downside. But buyers should know that the Air's display can't match the photographer-friendly color accuracy of the MacBook Pro.
This is a good time to mention that the laptop defaults to a screen area that is equivalent to 1,440 x 900, which is pretty cramped by today's standards. You can bump it higher, but it looks a bit less sharp, and UI animations (like swiping between Spaces) get just a teensy bit choppier. It's not a big deal, but it's also not ideal.The part of the spec sheet that disappoints me most, though, is the lack of Wi-Fi 6. Instead we get the same old 802.11ac. Sure, Wi-Fi 6 is new on the scene, but you might expect to keep this computer for three or more years, and Wi-Fi 6 will probably be ubiquitous by then. Bluetooth 5.0 is present, though.
![Air Air](https://webstockreview.net/images/keyboard-clipart-digital-piano-18.png)
This machine also has stereo speakers, Dolby Atmos support, and a 3.5mm headphone jack, along with what seems to be the same 720p FaceTime webcam Apple has been putting in its laptops for ages. The camera is fine, but in an age of telecommuting, you wouldn't be wrong to ask for a 1080p camera at this price.
Sadly, one of the biggest problems with the 2018 and 2019 MacBook Air models persists here: only two ports, both Thunderbolt 3/USB-C. More on that in a moment.
Design
It's refreshing to see Apple not try to 'change the world' here—but just designing a solid workstation.
The Air is thin, it has the classic tapered shape, it looks and feels sturdy, and it wastes no space or material. From an industrial design point of view, it's one of the best things Apple has ever made.Macbook Air Vs Macbook Pro
It's also slightly more repairable than it used to be, according to a recent teardown by the good people at iFixit. They found that new wiring for the trackpad allows for easier access to both the trackpad and the battery without messing with the logic board, among other things. Repairability is still not a strong suit of the MacBook Air, but it seems to be improving.
The new model is almost imperceptibly thicker than the 2019 Air, but its form is otherwise unchanged, and that's a great thing. It's still a sleek, tightly designed little laptop, which is one of the main things so many people appreciated about the Air over the years. There aren't a lot of laptops out there that feel this good to carry and to use.
Macbook Air Versions
The Achilles' heel of the design is the port situation, though. I'm not even talking about the fact that it uses Thunderbolt 3/USB-C; most other laptops in this class also use USB-C instead of larger USB-A ports, and it feels like that ship has sailed. I'm instead referring to the fact that it only has two ports, which may not be enough for much of the target audience, as one of those ports will usually be used for power. To make matters worse, the ports are both on the left side of the machine. Is your power outlet on the right side of your desk? Hope you're cool with running a cord across the desk or in some awkward arrangement behind it.
Piano For Macbook Air Refurbished
The ports remain the worst thing about the MacBook Air—but they're also the only thing I can criticize about the design. Now, on to the question everyone has: how is that new keyboard?