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Everyone wants to be a rock star, party like one, and of course make money while doing it. The truth is a lot of us will never be able to afford to buy the studio time that will get us there. In recent years though the pains of recording an album have become less due to the advent of new computer processors having the capability to handle the large audio applications and devices. Therefore, I have set out to give some guidelines to those who seek fame on what it takes to have a semi-professional studio.
Speed
When it comes to recording on a computer there should be only one word: speed. Speed will be your friend and latency your nemesis. Have you ever tried recording and you throw down a few tracks then go to lay down your amazing solo and then listen back to hear that your shredding skills seem to be milliseconds off the chord changes? Enter latency. It occurs when the computer tries to take your analog input signals (vocals, guitar, drums) and convert them to a digital signal. The faster the computer can do this process the better your recording experience will be.
Your worries don’t stop there though. Processing the analog signal is half the battle, well, maybe half. Once the digital signal has been created there are numerous things that occur. First, you need to physically record the signal to the hard drive. Again, latency can creep up again if computer is forced to use a significant about of RAM to buffer the writing of the signal to the hard drive. Second, what about all those crazy effects you have running like you auto vox? They take your audio signal and process it again. So take a guess what you’ll need to accomplish this? More speed. Finally, if you wish to monitor output/input while recording you are asking the most from your computer. In short you are telling it to do everything previously mention and then output the result at the same time. In the past this would have been catastrophic to most machines, but we live in the 21st century right?
Firewire
I know I will get a lot of complaints about this one and many will want to argue this, but Firewire is faster. USB 2.0 is grand and is fine for your mouse, but we’re not talking mice, we’re talking elephants. Firewire comes in two flavors 400 and 800. Firewire 800 is what you want if you can get it. It has potential to send data at 800Mb/s compared to 400Mb/s with Firewire 400. Notice the top transfer rate for USB 2.0 is 480Mb/s. This isn’t the only reason Firewire is faster, a big reason is how Firewire handles the data. Firewire is built on a “Peer to Peer” architecture which allows the individual peripherals to manage any conflicts. USB forces the computer to manage conflicts, which forces the use of processor cycles thus hindering the performance of your computer.
RAM
Recording is very demanding of a computer and although much of it can be handled by the processor itself there is a high demand for RAM to take care of helping out with plugins and effects. It also contributes greatly to handling live audio data when recording most often when the CPU is under-powered. Needless to say you are going to want to have as much RAM as you can afford. For light demos, running very few tracks and effects, 1 gigabyte of RAM is a minimum. From here I would suggest at least 4 gigabytes to handle most of your needs such as drum machines, live monitoring, and virtual machines. Again, being capable of holding more is simply a bonus to performance.
Hard Drive
Go big, fast or go home is the name of the game. Recording high quality audio means using a lot of storage space. Reducing the load on the CPU and RAM means getting the data written to the hard drive as fast as possible. Taking it a step forward, use an external hard drive while recording. The reasoning is quite simple: why try to read and write from the same drive at the same time? It doesn’t make any sense. The hard drive in your computer is the same drive that is running your audio application, effects, etc. Trying to write to it at the same time is not going to help your performance. Therefore, isolate it in the process of recording by simply writing to the external hard drive. You will notice you need smaller buffers and latency time will decrease. As for specs, try to use , again, a firewire hard drive and something with high RPM’s (7200+) or solid state (no spinning required.)
Audio Devices
On the market today there are many options when it comes to audio recording devices. First, let me say use Firewire. Next, you will want to determine how many tracks you would like to record simultaneously. For simple singer/songwriter just a few tracks 2-4 should do fine. If you plan to record full bands then I would suggest 8-16 tracks to account for mics for drums and the rest of the band. Some devices have mixers built in while others will have simple gain/volume controls, the preference is up to you. Again, the more tracks you wish to record simultaneously the more powerful computer rig you will need.
