The web home of Kim o the Concrete Jungle, including Kim o the Concrete Jungle, Kinsley Castle, the Mortal Taint, the Mojo Liberation Front, Creighton Keane, and the Blues Convicts.
The web home of Kim o the Concrete Jungle, including Kim o the Concrete Jungle, Kinsley Castle, the Mortal Taint, the Mojo Liberation Front, Creighton Keane, and the Blues Convicts.
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Kim o' the Concrete Jungle's 1. The ComputerThe last one of these how-to-record-yourself books I read recommended that you go and buy the best possible computer that you could get. Furthermore, you should only buy a computer made by a dedicated specialist in music computers, who can specially tweak the hardware and the OS for recording. And when you get this precious snowflake of a machine home, you should set it up in your recording studio and use it for nothing else but recording music... BWAHAHAHAHA! Yeah, right. I got a laugh out of that one. Here's what I did: I went to my local pawn shop here in Sydney.... I love pawn shops. They're full of perfectly serviceable music gear sold on by people who don't realize learning to play an instrument is challenging and requires commitment. But never mind. The other thing my local pawn shop has in pretty good supply is second-hand laptops. The thing is, there are still people out there who update their computers every year, and barely own them long enough to wear them in. Pawn shops buy these things up, test them, clean them, reinstall the OS, and sell them for half the price of a new machine. And mind you, they practically are new machines. When I had to upgrade from the computer I bought in 2003, I went to the pawn shop and got an Acer laptop. It's a 64-bit Core i3 with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. (At the time, retailers were still selling that exact same machine new for $200 more.) And yes, it's a Windows 7 machine. I'm a Windows guy. If you've got a Mac, well good for you, but you should stop reading because this guide probably won't be relevant to you. Someone else is going to have to write the Mac version. But, I hear you say, how could you possibly record on such an under-powered machine? Oh, the bottlenecks! Oh, the glitches! Oh the humanity! But the truth is, in the last couple of years computers have become more than powerful enough to record good-quality music. They only choke if you're using horrible, expensive, hipster bloatware like ProTools 10 and Waves plugins. People buy those things because they think they're paying extra for premium tools. But all they're really doing is buying a trendy brand-name that will brick their CPU.
There is one real disadvantage to making music on a cheap laptop. And no, it's got nothing to do with Windows. It's that you have to squint at a cheap LCD monitor and type on a poky little laptop keyboard. If you can last a whole year before you're cross-eyed and crippled with carpal tunnel syndrome, then you're better than me. Luckily, this was not my first computer. And because I don't like throwing things away, I'm lousy with spare monitors, keyboards, and mice. I'm guessing you are too, but if you aren't, those accessories aren't expensive. What you need is a USB hub. Get a good one with its own power supply, so you can plug in your mouse, your external keyboard, and all the thumb drives and bits and pieces of stuff you might want on your computer. It won't drain USB power and it will only tie up one USB port. Because once you start buying music gear, you'll need all the spare USB ports you can get your hands on. Most music gear will want a USB port to itself, and it won't like to share. Just A Bit More Money...Once upon a time, I went and bought a dirt-cheap LED TV to plug into my Playstation 3. That way, I could amuse myself playing Skyrim and watching Harry Potter in glorious high definition. There's a funny thing about dirt-cheap TVs nowadays -- they shove a ridiculous number of ports onto the back of those things. My $300 TV has four HDMI ports on it. My Playstation takes up exactly one of those. My cheap Acer laptop also has a HDMI port, right next to the monitor port. (How many ports do you get on an expensive Macbook?) So for the price of a $20 HDMI cable I've got a dual-monitor setup in my room, simply by making use of stuff I already had anyway. Dual-monitors are a good thing for recording, because the user interface of your average DAW can get very cramped. You can make life much easier by splitting things off to a separate screen.
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