How to pick/build a computer for music production

For most producers nowadays, the computer is the central part of the studio. As such, it should be up to spec and able to handle what you throw at it.

This guide will explore two options for producers looking to obtain a new production computer. The simplest method would be to buy a pre-built computer, the other option would be to build your own.

The first thing to do is look at the pros and cons of both.

A word about pricing:
Hardware costs money to make and so there is a minimum price where you get a good return. Any computer under £300 generally has serious compromises and will offer a lower “performance per pound” than its £600 counterpart.

You can generally get the best performance per pound in the £500-£1000 range. For music production, you really have no need to spend more than £1500 on a PC, and at that price, it can double up as a pretty beastly gaming rig if you shop right. Above, and especially, below that range has seriously diminishing returns for the needs of most producers.

Buying a pre-built PC for music production

I would recommend people who have little experience with computers to go with this route. It is simpler and the (likely) additional cost covers the convenience and peace of mind.

I do recommend if you go with this route that you consult with a tech-savvy friend, or even bring them to shops with you to chat to the sales clerks and prevent the classic sleazy “car salesman” scams.

I have accompanied several friends when they have bought new computers, and have seen first-hand staff trying to push additional deals or options on them.

Don’t be convinced to buy on the spot, a good trick is to take photos of the labels for the PCs you like and look them up later.

If you are looking online, steer clear of the “gaming” buzzword. More often than not you will see inferior PCs hyped up as gaming PCs when they would struggle to handle even the lighter modern games.

Building a PC for music production

This is my recommended option for everyone else. If you are happy spending a few hours watching YouTube videos of PC builders and tutorials, you will be up to scratch with what is needed.

There are really good websites such as PC Part Picker which allow you to pick the parts and then it will flag up if things are incompatible.

The brief

Firstly, this PC needs to be able to run audio production software smoothly, even with large projects.

It needs to be able to handle many instances of VSTs running at the same time, and have a low latency.

Secondly, we need to be able to have a quiet PC, one which won’t make unnecessary noise that will be picked up by sensitive studio microphones or interrupt the mixing process. Bear this in mind when picking a PC online and look for reviews discussing noise. If you are building your own, you can buy high-quality fans such as Noctua fans which are well known for their quiet cooling.

Thirdly, we need it to have a safe way to store all of the expensive sample libraries, and your music projects, all of which would be a nightmare to lose.

I have tried to write the next part so you can follow it with both the intention to build your own or grabbing a pre-built.

The computer parts to look out for

CPU

The CPU or central processing unit is the brain of the computer. These days they are fast and have lots of cores.

A CPU core is like a brain that can carry out tasks. If you have multiple CPU cores (standard nowadays to have 4 to 8 cores) it is like having multiple brains or team members working on a task.

Consider having a desk full of paperwork that you need to sort through. It will be faster if you have many fast workers going through it and sorting it.

is not solely The big trade-off is that the speed of the cores and the number can often be each important for different tasks. Computer games require fewer cores working at faster clock speeds.

Other applications such as video rendering can work with more cores and a small sacrifice of clock speed isn’t as bad as sacrificing cores.

The thing to look out for is how many cores your music production software needs and what speed is essential for them to run smoothly. This is easy to find, just look up the system requirements for your DAW.

If we look at Ableton, it is able to handle up to 64 cores, which is currently available in some CPUs, but if you are reading this guide, out of your price point and use case.

A key thing to remember is that generally, a track in a DAW can use a single thread, a series of instructions that a core works on. If you are only working on a few tracks per project, the core count won’t be as important as clock speed, which will allow you to use more CPU intensive VSTs and effects.

If you have need for many more tracks then more cores will suit you better. Again, if you intend to use CPU-heavy synths and effects like Serum and professional-grade software effects then you will want the CPU to also be fast.

CPU names
There are lots of different naming schemes for CPUs, Intel uses the “i” classification (i3, i5, i7, and i9) whereas AMD’s latest CPUs have Ryzen (3, 5, 7, and 9).

The higher the number, the more cores you will have but these also come in generations.

The higher the number after, the newer it is. A Ryzen 5 1600 is older than a Ryzen 5 3600, and will have slower speeds. An Intel i7 9700 will generally be better than an i7 6700 because it is a newer generation.

As of April 2020 Look out for Ryzen x 3xxx (eg Ryzen 5 3600), or Intel ix 9xxx (eg Intel i5 9400). With this naming scheme, you will be up to date and in the most recent generations.

I recommend aiming for around 6 cores as a sweet spot of price and performance. More will be better, but don’t go below 4 cores.

One thing to keep an eye on if you are building a PC yourself is whether the CPU has integrated graphics.

Generally, Intel CPUs include them (but double check), whereas the main lineup of AMD processors will require a dedicated graphics card.

Unless you want to game or do graphics editing, you can settle for a cheap graphics card like the GT 710 which will handle desktop and software use but not intensive gaming.

The final thing to say here is that additional cores allow better multitasking, so you can have your DAW working with other apps in the background.

For reference, I can run Ableton projects with Chrome and other apps in the background and even a video render (chugging away slowly as I’m multitasking) at the same time. I run a six-core processor with 12 threads, clocked at around 4GHz.

RAM

RAM, or random access memory, is what the computer uses to store its current tasks. Going back to the paperwork on your desk analogy, if you have a large desk, you can have more sheets on it at once, a smaller desk would require you to go back and forward to your filing cabinet which will slow you down.

Brief Guide:
Aim for 8GB of RAM at the very least. Better yet, 16GB.

If you don’t have enough RAM your computer will have to access data from the slower drive storage which will slow down tasks.

For music production, I would recommend 16GB of RAM. This will be plenty and also future-proof your PC. I wouldn’t recommend anything below 8GB and even 8GB can be a bit small if you use massive libraries like in Kontakt.

More RAM also means you can keep more internet tabs open in the background and multitask better.

RAM is easy to upgrade and, if there are spare slots, you can just add more. If not, you can generally upgrade for £100 or less.

Take note of what type of RAM is used. Older CPUs only work with DDR3 RAM or older. The latest CPUs from the past few years will use DDR4 which is faster. If you see a system has DDR4 RAM, it is a good indicator that it is relatively modern, whereas one with DDR3 will be quite outdated.

One thing to note is that you can go higher (but probably shouldn’t). My computer is running with 32GB of RAM to allow for video production on Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.

I have never come close to using all of that in a purely audio production scenario and so 32GB will be a waste of money if you don’t intend your computer to be a multimedia workstation.

The final thing to pay attention to is RAM speed. This is important but moreso if you are running an AMD CPU. Aim for at least 3000MHz but a good quality 3200MHz kit is not much more expensive and will show a small performance boost.

Storage

Storage can be one of the easiest to upgrade parts of a computer, but that doesn’t mean you should get it wrong.

Storage is where all you system data, files, photos, and sound libraries are held.

Brief Guide:
Producers should have at least 500GB of storage, ideally on an SSD. It is best to get a fast boot drive and if it is small, an additional drive for your sample libraries.

The traditional hard disk drive (HDD) is a great storage medium for holding many large files, but is really quite slow. A solid state drive (SSD), on the other hand, has no moving parts and is usually much faster but you pay for the speed.

I recommend you have a fast and a slow drive at the minimum. Modern computers should have their boot drive (where Windows and apps load from) as an SSD which will make the system very responsive.

Ideally, if your motherboard allows it, it should be a type of SSD called M.2 which is ultra-fast.

These drives can read data at up to 5,000MB/s compared to older hard drives which may have figures in the low hundreds.

They will make your computer super responsive and the slight premium price you pay for them will yield massive returns in your computer’s day-to-day speed when carrying out tasks.

The above element links to some examples on Amazon (may not show with certain adblocker settings). The first two are a good example of cheaper M.2 drives with a price of around £120/TB, the latter is an example of one of the faster ones where you pay for speed over storage capacity.

My main recommendation is the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB. It has more than enough storage for your operating system as well as a large number of apps (e.g the full Ableton Live Suite) and even some video games.

For some producers, this will be enough, but I recommend adding in a separate drive for all you additional files needed for running a production computer.

I personally use a 1TB hard drive and a 4TB external drive for my sample libraries, these free up the boot OS and keep things a bit more organised.

Having my sample libraries on an external drive also means I can bring it with me when I need to produce or work on my laptop away from home.

For sample libraries, you could use an SSD but since the samples can often be loaded into RAM, the speed hit is negligible.

The only times I notice a difference is if I’m quickly previewing through hundreds of samples in the browser – some may take a quarter of a second to load instead of a near-instant loading time.

For the price of a 1TB HDD being as low as £30, this is worth it for me.