Uses

From the moment I got my hands on Logic Pro 9, Macbooks have been my default. Some time around 2010 an older friend of mine lent me theirs for a weekend – he wanted me to make some changes to something he was working on. He had gotten me into music production a few years earlier; I’d been using FL Studio 7 on Windows since he gave me his copy in 2006.

I started to experiment with third-party plug-ins as I ventured deeper into music production – my first industry-grade suite was Native Instruments Komplete 9. After years of squeezing every bit of realism I could out of the stock plug-ins that came with the DAW, I suddenly had access to a substrate of realistic, synthetic sounds I could use to craft layered, multi-dimensional pieces. NI-9’s Session Horns Pro is where my appreciation for big brass came from.

Next came depth and timbre: I discovered the world of algorithmic and convolutional reverbs; I layered rich sampled drums over focused synthetic ones; I drowned naive string sections in expensive-sounding room emulations. I learned about how our hearing evolved to be extra-sensitive around 2KHz because it helps us pick out the human voice against the backdrop of nature… how carving that space out with an EQ was how songs on the radio made those lead vocals sit clear amidst all the chaos.

Soon, the things I wanted to create were constrained by the tools that I had available; the projects I had spent weeks on refused to open any more.

I discovered RAM… and how little I had.

In 2012, I bought my first computer part, two sticks of 8Gb DDR3 RAM, back when Apple products had screws and seams. My sole requirement for personal computers became as much RAM as possible – RAM meant I could create, and that’s all that mattered.

Fast forward to 2014, the heart of my Liverpool studio setup was a 27” iMac. It had 32Gb of RAM – I made sure of that – and was supported by 2 LaCie rugged drives and an Allianz insurance policy. None of the other specs mattered to me: I could run Logic Pro X, I could create.

I ran a number of vocal chains in that studio, but a Neumann u87ai through an Avalon 737 was the main one. It would be a year before I even knew what to do with a chain like that.

When I moved back to London in 2019, I took it all with me; the iMac stayed the heart of the small studio I ran out of BSMNT for about 8 months in North London. That was the prettiest my setup ever looked – shout out, Phillips Hue.