You may be asking whether to get a Mac or PC. There is nothing worse than losing all of your work because of a faulty drive. Always back up your projects to external drives.

You can always move the project to an external drive later on when you need more space on your internal drives. Using them while recording can lead to crashes. This is because external drives have slower read and write speed. If you can, try to record to an internal hard drive.

The more hard drive capacity you have, the longer you can record for.

At the time of writing, 8 GB of RAM is the minimum you will need for a decent recording system, 16 GB or more is better. 64-bit software allows you to make the most of your RAM.

RAM is the most limiting factor on the amount of tracks and plugins you can run at one time.

If you want to record with large track counts and many plugins, try and aim for at least a decent quad core CPU.

A CPU with a higher core count deals better with more processes running simultaneously.

However, three things will determine the maximum workload capacity of your system. Even cheap desktop and laptop computers should be able to handle a recording project from recording through to mix and mastering. To get into computer music production, the first thing you’ll need is not surprisingly, a computer.

Monitors or Headphones (preferably both).Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) Software.If you want to get started in computer music production, there are four essential pieces of studio equipment you’ll need: Welcome to computer music production for beginners part 1: The Essentials.Ĭontributed by David Jiang for the Roland Australia Blog These days, with computer power on the rise and very affordable hardware and software, digital computer music production set ups are easily accessible to the public. Not long ago, studio quality recording, mixing and were only in reach of those who had the money to hire out a professional recording studio.

Daws for music production