Both.

Headphones are like microscopes where speakers are like looking through glasses. Best metaphor i can come up with.

But you should always be biased towards monitors, because that's how your music will react in an open environment compared to an isolated aspect.

I use both for different reasons, but you should try to match quality of speakers and headphones.

Speakers relate to headphones, but headphones don't always relate to speakers. (unless you drop like 2grand USD on some headphones, then i'd be expecting some things...)

Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as innate talent. There are people who have had more exposure to an artform or skill, or people who have had more practice. But there are no people who are born gifted with no previous stimuli. Everyone has the potential to be a great composer as long as they put their 10,000 hours in. The people who pick up an instrument or DAW for the first time, and immediately have abilities beyond others who have spent more time practicing, usually already have a skill where there is overlap. Or, in some cases of autism the brain is wired in such a way where there is a natural ability, but this is extremely rare. For most people it just takes years of practice.

I personally was extremely lucky to be exposed to music even before I was born. My mother consciously sang and played violin to me while I was still in the womb because she wanted me to have musical abilities. Then when I was born she consciously taught me methods such as the Kodaly approach to further my musical abilities. Even still, if you listen to my early tracks they're absolute garbage. It still took years of practice to create anything worth listening to.

Quote from: FarleyCZ on January 26, 2016, 08:12:03 am

Quote from: Laced on January 26, 2016, 06:41:58 am

I'd recommend a macbook pro. I know people say "They're too expensive for the power you actually get" but i think just the overall quality of the parts and the OS in general is unparalleled. Besides, mac has always had a prominent place in music production. I got my macbook pro 13in retina with an upgraded 2.9ghz i5 and upgraded 16gb of RAM for about 1500.

Don't want to start this war here, but imho it's not just bells and whistles with Macs. There is also quite solid history of OS updates that messed up plugin compatibility that sometimes even developers had to step in. Last time with El.Captain. Apple doesn't give a damn about backward compatibility, so your ability to use certain plugins will depend only on their developers being active.
Windows has it's flaws too, but from my experience backward compatibility is stellar. Last year I've autoupdated from win7 to win10 and except two plugins needing re-authorisation everything worked like a charm.

Quote from: Xan on January 25, 2016, 05:47:34 pm

Too lazy to build myself. So that's a non-option. Although I will want space for customization and additions.

Too bad. Pre-made gaming PC's are made for graphics power, meaning the CPU is on the same priority level as GPU. For music production, I'd spend a bit less on GPU and bit more on CPU as that's where all your rendering is happening. Having said that ... I'm running 2.5GHz quad core laptop CPU and it's more than enough.

I wouldn't want to go with a gaming pc company if possible.
I would spend a lot on my cpu, ssd and ram. gpu will be secondary.