Choosing a PC for audio work

Assuming that budget is a concern here are my recommendations on what to look for when choosing a PC to use for audio recording:

CPU
Of all the components inside the PC, the CPU is by far the most critical. Get the fastest one you can afford. There is a big debate between manufacturers, which we won’t get into. The important thing to look for is ‘dual core’. Computers are only designed to do one thing at a time. The operating system will allocate time to each task running and continuously cycle through each, giving the impression that several programs are running. A dual core system is therefore actually able to do… WOW!!! TWO things at a time. Although this might not seem to make much difference, it does. The general rule is that a machine with two 1.5 GHz CPU’s will perform better than one 3GHz CPU.

RAM
The more you use virtual instruments and samplers, the more RAM you will need. It is recommended to have at least 1Gb for general audio production. You must pay attention to how the RAM will affect the speed of your system. E.g. an Intel P4 CPU can send data to the rest of the system at 800mhz which means that you will need a pair of DDR400 RAM modules (each module can cope with 400mhz) to take advantage of this. Therefore you should buy your RAM in pairs, e.g. if you want 1Gb total RAM, get two 512Mb modules.

HDD
Almost every DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) manufacturer recommends that you have two separate Hard Disk Drives in your system. One disk will have the Operating System and all other software installed on it, and the second will be for audio projects and files. Partitioning a single drive to give you two ‘drive letters’ will not improve performance in any way. The size of these drives will depend on the volume of work you go through. A multitrack project can take up to 4 GB of space, so if you are recording projects of this size everyday, you will need a significant amount of space. It is recommended that you back up all your completed projects on DVD’s and remove them from your Hard Disk to keep them clean.

You will obviously need several other components in your system, DVD writer, good graphics card, but the above mentioned items are the critical ones, that you should spend the most on.

Quincy Jones leaves us another thriller

This is at a live performance that we put on, for Quincy Jones (2006). My business partner Amandla Bangeni to the right of Mr. Jones and I, Mervyn Sigamoney to the left are seen here with a few of our students. These are some of our top achievers that attend the Sound Engineering course that Amandla and I head up at Damelin Bramley situated north of Johannesburg.

Study Protools or Cubase

This will seem as if it was an advert and you would be right in thinking this, but it will give you an idea of were we are and what we do.There are so many different avenues in the Sound Engineering and I try to work in all avenues and focus in a few.
AT Damelin Bramley (where i work by day) our Sound Engineering department brings you new ways of exploring your creativity.
with our hands on Sound Engineering you will be into Live Concerts, Engineering Mixing, System Design and making you the producer engineer .

Our high energy fast paced studio environment, puts you into the world of recording studios.
Pre-production, post-production to final-mix, from start to finish, plan, record and produced tracks in broadcast quality studios fitted with the latest technology and equipment.
Cubase, Pro-tools, Reason,Wavelab and the latest virtual instruments and plug-ins. Put together for sound engineers that understand what the world wants.

A sense of sound is one of the most powerful senses we have. It can bring about emotions, give life to a movie, It can make you hear things you can’t see.
creativity in Sound Engineering.