Baby Home Studio Upgrade

I recently made an upgrade to my home studio that I'm having fun with. I've done a lot to my little setup over the past few years, and I think it has finally replaced my old setup from 1999-2002 completely. Of course, the old setup had nothing on this one sound-quality-wise. I'll explain my old studio setup in a later post. Right now, I wanna talk about the new shit!

I had to pawn my entire studio setup back in 2002, because I was broke, poor and angry. I didn't want to do it, but it had to be done. I had every intention of getting it back, but I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that it was gone forever. When I finally started getting a little money in '04, I went against the traditional outboard system and went for a desktop computer. Ironically, I found it at a pawn shop for $400 bucks, and bought Fruity Loops and Reason for it. All was well, I thought, but I couldn't get any kind of punch from it - I had absolutely no clue what I was doing. This is when I decided that I was going to go to school to learn about audio engineering. Of course, once I started school, I realized that I also hadn't an inkling about how music worked, either, so I pursued both.

I eventually scored an Oxygen 8 midi controller, and was making little hip-hop beats and whatnot, but as more software became available, I started seeing the computer having a hard time with multiple applications. I knew that it was time for an upgrade, but I had to wait for some money. I had also acquired a MiaMidi PCI card, an AKG Perception 200, and a BlueTube pre-amp by this time. Before my last major addition, I began understanding the importance of flat-response studio monitors, and being low on funds, I got a deal on an EXO system that has served me well so far. But the biggest improvement to Poor and Angry studios was the brain of the whole system - the computer. I was surprised to get it for the price I did.

I kept my old monitor, but I went to CompUsa and found a barebones kit that was at the highest standards I could afford. Here is what I got:

1) 750G hard drive by Seagate
2) 8G RAM by Corsair
3) Asus Motherboard
4) AMD Phenom Quad-Core 2.2GHz
5) Black steel case with Plexiglass panel and LED fans
6) New copy of Windows XP
7) For $600 flat

It sucks that I had to get XP 32-bit. After all, I have 8G of RAM in this beast, and it's not even utilizing half of it! XP 32 can only read up to 4G of RAM, and it automatically allocates half a gig to Windows (although mine is apparently allocating 1.25G - I've tried to fix it, but haven't figured it out). Getting a 64-bit system would have been trying for me I'm sure, though, because drivers may or may not be available for all the software that I use. I felt the need to play it safe with the 32-bit.

The new monster has enabled many times the amount of production than with the dinosaur. On the old comp, opening AIM while using Reason or Acid would cause instant lockup. Rendering tracks out of Acid would take as much time as going outside for 2 beers and 6 cigarettes at last measure. Photoshop and Illustrator were so taxing that just one of these running for more than 5 minutes would drain resources bone-dry. Burning CDs was a chore, and watching DVDs was an unpredictability at best. I remember countless times while in Acid, opening a new and obscure plug-in, only to have Ms. Mia glitch-screaming from lack of memory and continue to do so until the computer had shut all the way down - usually by holding the power button in.

When I first got the new computer fired up, everything shuttled into its bays and slots and customized, I decided to try and bog it down. I didn't like the stress test at first, because I don't like locking up the computer on purpose, but it had to be done. I opened 4 heavy DAWS - all with different songs playing, Windows Media Player with an mp3 playing, 3 instances of Firefox with 2 or 3 tabs each - playing YouTube videos, Thunderbird quietly checking for mail, Winamp with yet another mp3 running, Photoshop, Illustrator, and a conversation running in Pidgin. None of the DAWs had any overruns, and no music skipped. I had an orgasm.

Final touches on the system are:

1) Axiom 49 midi controller
2) Pen Tablet from Wacom (Bamboo Fun!)
3) Massive quantities of software

It is truly a 180 from the old studio, and an awesome thing to have such power at the fingertips. Even though it is by no means top-notch, it has the ability to make CD and radio-quality tracks, and it can handle the most CPU-hungry plug-ins (9 instances of Massive in FL Studio). This is my new baby. Now I need a system of backing everything up for quick retrieval if it all crashes and burns. But DVDRs are expensive - I spent all my money on the equipment!
;)