Back in the day I started with a FatMac (Macintosh 512k) with only a floppy disk drive – but with all that memory (LOL) I used to put the OS on a virtual drive and it used to chug along quite nicely. Not that we were in the same league as Herbie Hancock, Lauri Anderson and the host of others on the Apple Promo video of the time, it was heaps of fun being at the edge – recording in the front room of the house (and having to pause every time a train went by 🙂 ) bouncing tracks on a Fostex X-28 (cassette 4 track recorder) with a bunch of guitars and of course a midi synth (Ensoniq Esq1), some analog outboard gear and borrowed mics. That was a hot summer in ’88 in Sydney!
Leaping forward a few years – now its all in the box. My current gear is a Dell XPS x15 9570 with a i7 6 core CPU, 32GB RAM, and W10 OS. I moved to that when MOTU released Digital Performer for windows and left behind an old MacBook Pro (shiny, big and heavy) – I still use it to run a Vienna Ensemble server as it’s got a good few years left in it. I moved from Propellerheads Reason to Digital Performer 5 so I could get access to a wider range of samples and also play with composing for the moving image. I have stuck with it and now have DP 10.1 which is deep and powerful but at times cantankerous and not very communicative but has proved worth the learning curve.
I’ve had a bunch of different Midi controllers but as I have moved around a bit there has been a focus on 49 or 61 keys – I am currently enjoying an Arturia KeyLab 61 Mk II – a very nice instrument even though the keys are not properly weighted. The bundled software is also a great bonus providing a sampler of Arturia’s excellent modelled analog synth, pianos, outboard and stage gear. The sliders and knobs on the keyboard are all reasonably assignable so I’ve retired the other midi controllers.
Genelec monitors – the little guys – 8010A’s and a sub-woofer (7040A) suite the lifestyle. I was separated from the studio in San Francisco for 18 months (“trapped” in Australia “sheltering in place” from the pandemic) so did all my writing and mastering on Sennheiser HD660s headphones – a very nice sound with a couple of Yamaha HS5 to give the ears some relief and also for checking the stereo sound field – the image is remarkably good for price point (although tonal balance is of course unreliable from am mastering point of view).
Its pretty compact when on the road – particularly when I’m not lugging the monitors as well.
More recently (late 2021) I have upgraded my studio workstation in San Francisco to a VisionDAW built by the folks down in Cerritos CA. Its based around an intel i9-10900X 10 core CPU clocking 3.7GHz with 256 Gb DDR4 RAM and a total of hot swappable 6.5 TB of SSD (2 TB is NVMe high performance). I’m still on Digital Performer 10 and host VIs using Vienna Ensemble Pro (threading is optimized to make best use of the 10 cores). I cant tell you how much this has improved my workflow.
I have also upgraded the graphics card to an RTX3070 to support my new found passion for video creation using DaVinci Resolve (more posts on that coming in the next weeks). I also upgraded the monitor to an LG 27UK850-W 27″ 4K UHD and my joy is almost complete. Of course this rig will never hit the road so I will continue to maintain my DellXPS laptop with the addition of an external SSD docking station to easily swap in the whole collection of sample libraries so that project continuity can be maintained between studio and when on the road.
More to come.
Stay safe and enjoy