Sunday, November 27, 2005

My Way To Create Music: Tools Part 1 - Hardware

Hi again! 

May be you have enough money to rent Vienna's symphonic orchestra, but in most of cases that is not available to us.Well, don't panic! with a computer, an audio interface and some software you can get some aceptable results.  

Bear in mind the most important element to create a good piece of music is yourself. I may explain this later, but for the moment let's focuse on something more tangible: hardware.

First of all you're going to need a computer. You won't need a high-end one with the latest processor, motherboard or audio interface. Any modern computer will do this job very well in most cases unless you want to use a hundreds of tracks running at the same time with tons of plugins and virtual instruments loaded in memory. In my opinion, and for the sake of simplicity, any 2-4 year old or newer computer will do a great job; 4-8 year old computer will do a decent job, and anything older than that may struggle to accomplish the objetive. But keep in mind that all this depends on the specific hardware you got and how you're going to use it.  For example if you're going to use your computer as a virtual instrument/sampler, asequencer and mixer you may need something more powerful than a computer that is only going to be needed as sequencer or to mix. 

One of the most important aspects or your computer will be the amount and speed of its RAM, usually just called "memory". Depending the amount of samples/virtual instruments you use, you may need A LOT of RAM, so get as much as you can afford. And if it's fast better than if it isn't, of course ;-)

To have a fast CPU is critical too, as it generates the processing power of your computer. As with memory: the more modern and fast, the better.

To have a good hard disk is very important too. Today you can buy cheap SSD/PCIe hard disks (which are very fast) with hundreds of GB available. If you are going to use samples you'll need a lot of disk space to store them. 

Then there is the audio interface, which nowadays is usually a computer peripheral connected to your PC using a USB or other kind of interface. This device is used to record any audio input and also will send the sound from the computer to one or more outputs (ie: studio monitors or headphones). So if you want to record yourself playing a guitar, a synth or singing this is what you need (depending on what you're going to record you may need to connect it directly to the audio interface or use a microphone, which connects to it also). If you're a begginer you usually don't need to spend a lot of money in your audio interface to start creating music. Just to give you an idea a good amateur audio interface may cost around 100€, but if you plan to record a lot of inputs at the same time (ie: a fully mixed drum set or a full band) or you need aditional/pro features (better mic preamps, built in processing power...) you may need something more expensive. Keep in mind builtin PC soundcards are not good enough in most cases to handle music production properly, so I strongly suggest you to check the market for whatever you may need.

Last but not least it's not a bad idea to get a MIDI controller, for example a MIDI keyboard or any other MIDI device. You can use it to play or edit easily the music you record. Of course, you don't need a MIDI device to create the music, you can write the score directly in the score screen, piano roll or other edit screen of your secuencer program, but for those of you who don't know a lot of music theory the easiest way will be to use one of these MIDI instruments. A cheap option is a MIDI keyboard controller. This is a piano keyboard which can't play any sound by itself. You need to connect it to your PC or other MIDI device capable to generate sound from samples, etc. You can find a cheap one from around 100€. In the other hand, if you have a MIDI keyboard with onboard synth/sounds you can use it to generate the sound. This is may be a good option if you have an old computer which can't handle a lot of samples by itself.

Ok, so this will cover the basic hardware you need. Of course, you can add as much hardware as you can afford, and probably if will help you to get better results. But may be not. Try to avoid going down the gear adquisition syndrome ("GAS") hole and keep in mind what I stated at the beginning: the most important thing to get a good song is YOU. You can have rack of digital effects and tons of expensive keyboards, effects or sounds libraries, a 3000€ computer, a professional mixing table or the best studio monitors money can buy. But without inspiration, a good melody to start and a lot of work you won't get a good song, dude ;-) 

See you in the next chapter: Tools part 2 - Software

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