Best laptops for music production: portable computers for recording guitar and beyond (2024)

It doesn’t take much these days to put together a decent home recording studio using even the most basic of laptops. But if you’re looking for a laptop specifically to record your guitar with, what exactly should you be prioritising in your search? And how would a guitarist’s needs differ from, for example, a beatmaker or singer?

In this guide, we’ll outline what makes the best laptops for music production, and more specifically for recording guitars, focusing on the features and specs you should be looking for - and the benefits they’ll bring - along with a note on the headline-grabbing things you can ignore in your search.

Recording your guitar is great fun, and can lead you to hugely fulfilling creative projects, but having the right equipment to work with will make the process so much easier in the long run. Let’s begin!

Best laptops for music production: Quick menu

Want to cut to the chase and find out exactly which we think are the best laptops for music production on the market right now? Below, you’ll find a round-up of our top choices. You can jump to a more detailed review of every pick, along with our price comparison tool to help you find the best deals online today.

The best laptops for music production available today

Best lightweight laptop

If you’re set on Apple as your laptop provider of choice, but don’t have access to the funds required for a MacBook Pro, then fear not. The 2022 Apple MacBook Air is an absolute beast. Trust me, I’ve got one myself. With the M2 chip powering things, you get frankly bonkers performance from what is essentially still a midrange machine.

Things like all-day battery life, near-total silence in operation and enough power to breeze through pretty much anything make for a compelling package. Don’t be put off by the fact it has just 8GB of RAM – the way Apple’s silicone works means it’s more optimized and efficient than in the past, and in a year of use it’s never been an issue for me.

Yes, the fact you only get two USB-C ports (and need one for charging) is annoying, but nowadays we all know our way around an external USB hub. Pound for pound though, this is a sensational machine and well worth your consideration.

Best overall

If you’re a music producer, chances are the prospect of using an Apple MacBook Pro has already been factored into your thoughts. If you can afford it and are open to using MacOS, then the current crop of M3-equipped MacBook Pro models are top-notch and easy to recommend. It’s not going overboard to say the move to using Apple’s in-house silicone has revolutionised things. New laptops from Apple are faster, quieter, use less energy and last longer than their Intel-powered predecessors.

The usual grumbles about price and design remain, but the fact is that the Apple MacBook Pro is a premium laptop, and one that will stand you in good stead for recording your guitar for years to come. The model we’ve chosen matches a 14” display with 16GB of RAM, an M3 Pro chip and a terabyte of solid-state memory – more than enough to keep up with even the most demanding of multitrack recording sessions.

Best Windows options

If you’re dead set on staying away from Apple and its laptops, then the Dell XPS range would be a great alternative for recording guitars. Over time, the XPS range has blossomed into one of the best Windows-based studio options, packing in enough power and performance to justify the relatively premium price tag.

As with many Windows machines, you may need to spend some time removing the bloatware to unlock the true potential of the XPS range, but there’s plenty here to like once you’ve up and running.

Best for value

If recording the guitar to a laptop is just one of the creative pursuits you’ll be undertaking, then the Asus Vivobook 16 is a superb option. It boasts similar power and performance - on paper - to others in the list but also manages to pack in a superb Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics card and genuinely breathtaking 120hz display. This means everything from gaming to video production - alongside digital audio workstations - looks and performs brilliantly.

As with many modern laptops, we’d have loved to have seen more in the way of USB ports, with just a single USB-B and a couple of USB-C-shaped ports on offer, but that’s why dongles were invented, right?

Best workhorse laptop

If you’re looking more towards the mid-range - in terms of budget - then there’s plenty of value to be found. We liked the Acer Aspire 5, which gives you a range of options when it comes to specs. We opted for a Ryzen 7 processor, along with 16GB of RAM, and the price came in very sensibly. We also liked the way you can manually upgrade the RAM, up to 32GB, if you do find your laptop is slowing down when you put it under pressure.

It’s not the most attractive laptop in the world, let’s be honest, and the screen is actually pretty poor, but look beyond that and you’re getting a solid workhorse of a laptop for recording guitars, for a very reasonable price indeed.

Best for connectivity

An ideal place to start when you’re looking for a powerful laptop for recording music is to the world of gaming. While games may have some additional demands, like graphical power, there is a common requirement for a superfast processor and plenty of rapid-access storage.

The Asus TUF 15 certainly looks like a gamers’ laptop, with its stealthy black housing and subtle branding, but underneath the hood lies enough grunt to power even the most extravagant of multitrack recording sessions. We also loved the way Asus hasn’t skimped on its connectivity, with enough ports to cover your audio interface and a couple of MIDI controllers easily.

More options...

We’d heard for years how Apple’s dominance in the creative sector was due, in part, to the fact its hardware and software were created together, meaning they were optimized to within an inch of their lives and could offer users better performance than the competition. With the launch of the Surface range, Microsoft wanted to join the party and, in the Microsoft Surface Laptop 4, they might just have cracked it.

The new Surface Laptop 4 looks like a million dollars, with its Alcantara leather-covered front, but underneath you get the type of performance you’d expect for creative activities like recording the guitar. It’s expensive, sure, but with the Surface Laptop now being on its fourth iteration, it’s fair to say Microsoft has got things right here.

Best laptops for music production: Buying advice

How to choose the best music production laptop for you

When it comes to choosing a laptop for recording guitars, there are several crucial aspects to consider. Things like the laptop's processing power, memory capacity, storage options, connectivity, audio capabilities, display quality, portability, battery life, operating system, build quality, and, naturally, your budget. With so many variables, we can see why people might find it difficult to know what counts as a priority.

How we choose the laptops for this guide

Here at Guitar World, we are experts in our field, with many years of playing, creating and product testing between us. We live and breathe everything guitar gear related, and we draw on this knowledge and experience of using products in live, recording and rehearsal scenarios when selecting the products for our guides.

When choosing what we believe to be the best laptops for music production available right now, we combine our hands-on experience, user reviews and testimonies and engage in lengthy discussions with our editorial colleagues to reach a consensus about the top products in any given category.

First and foremost, we are guitarists, and we want other players to find the right product for them. So we take into careful consideration everything from budget to feature set, ease of use and durability to come up with a list of what we can safely say are the best laptops for music production on the market right now.

Find out more about how we make our recommendations, how we test each of the products in our buyer's guides and our review policy.

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