Hello Friends!

This week I want to answer a question that has come up a few times recently and that is what type of computer do I use, what are the specs and what to consider when making an upgrade.

Let’s start off by telling you what I am currently using as of the writing of this article. I have a 2013 Mac Pro (trash can) with an eight-core 3.0GHZ processor and 32 GB ram. This also has two video cards, which are ADM Fire Pro D500 cards. The internal hard drive is a SSD 500GB drive and that runs the OS and all the applications. All of my recording sessions run off an external RAID drive set-up, which has three 2TB, drives and this RAID set-up is connected via thunderbolt.

Now prior to this I was using a 2008 Mac Pro, which had a Quad Core processor and 24GB of RAM. I used this every day in my studio for 5 years and it worked like a champ. I upgraded for a few reasons, which I will talk about in a moment. This 2008 Mac Pro is still in use in my home office and it is as reliable...

Buying new gear for our home studios:  What is more fun than that, right? We all do it. No matter how many people tell us we don’t “need” new gear or that the new gear won’t make our recordings any better and “it’s all in how we use the tools we have”, right? I know I have said this a million times to my students and even myself; but there is something exciting about upgrading our gear or adding a new tool that we didn’t current have. I am just as guilty of this as many of you reading this.

So if we have a few extra bucks and want to make a purchase for our studios lets at least make a smart purchase. Lets at least make a purchase that can really help and really be a true “upgrade”. For example, if you already have several vintage style compressor plugins and some plugin company adds their version of the 1176 emulation do we really need to spend $300 on that when we already have 3 other versions of the 1176 in our...