What computer do I need to make music?... Well basically you can make music on just about any PC even an old 486 but here's the catch. It depends on the way you want to make music. If you want use your PC as a sequencer to control all your keyboards,sampler's and sound modules than a minimum spec PC can do the job,example :P100, 32meg ram ,2 gig HD, SB16 sound card . With software like Cubase compact, or similar package.

But if you want to use your PC to record and play audio this is were the fun begins. First of all try and decide on which software package you want to work with (For good software reviews try Computer Music) If you already know which software you want to use check the minimum spec it says it can use. If you take your music seriously you will now forget about the minimum spec because its absolute rubbish.

Here is an example: We used to have a home made PC 166 MHz, 96 Meg ram,4 gig HD and Sound Blaster 64 Value, we could run Acid pro on this machine .We would then load a few samples in and create a track using about 16 tracks and everything runs fine until we try to run a simple reverb plugin and the audio now begins to break up, gaps appear during play back, even if you move the mouse . Basically the CPU cannot handle all the information being thrown at it. This problem occurs with other audio packages even when tried on other PC's of similar spec.

To use a PC for serious audio you need the following.

1. The fastest CPU you can get ie : PIII 800 or an AMD Athlon. Do not use a Cyrix CPU it will only give you problems.

2. Get as much ram as possible , 128meg to start with, the reason for this is windows 98 is very ram hungry and uses a minimum of 32 megs of ram, then add your software package on top and you are probably using close to 64 megs of ram.

3. The Biggest hard drive you can get , about 10 gig is a good start. (remember your audio takes up space on the hard drive ie :1 minute of stereo audio recorded at CD quality at 16 bit ,44.1K will take up 10 megs of space. Also the speed of the drive is important , the best HD's for audio are SCSI but require a SCSI card to use them. The new ATA 100 7200 rpm IDE hard drive are cheaper and are as close to SCSI drives as you'll get for the money.

4. Get a good graphics card 16 meg or higher. A graphics card?? I hear you ask , strange as it may seem you will need it. The reason for this is the amount of redraws the PC will do as it displays the audio in real time play back. If you can afford it get a mattrox G450 Dual head graphics card, this will give you two monitor outputs.

5. The sound card is very important , if you get a cheap card the sound you get will be cheap. After saying that there are good bargains out there ie :Creative Sound Blaster Live value is a cheap but good card. The best audio cards are the ones that are not in the PC . Every PC produces noise, with an internal sound card it will pick up some of this noise. So the only way to avoid this is to use an external audio interface. You can now get external audio nterfaces which use USB , so you don't have take your PC apart to fit it ie (Roland UA30 or a Midiman Delta 1010 external unit.)