Welcome to our Start It Up department where we hope to give you a really good idea about what equipment you'll need to build a virtual studio from the ground up as well as offering some practical advice in our Studio Help department.

Before you begin here are a few important things you need to know about virtual studios.

1. Your studio will need upgrading at some point in the future so whenever possible make sure that what you start out with can be upgraded. We''ll do our best to ensure that the equipment we suggest you purchase has plenty of room for improvement. There's nothing worse than buying a sampling keyboard only to find that the memory expansion kit costs a fortune.

2. The virtual studio will have at its heart a computer of some kind and we just happen to prefer computers made by Apple running Mac OS X as opposed to those made by everyone else running the Windows operating system which we just happen to think totally sucks. But if you really have to use a PC running some version of Windows for your own sanity make absolutely sure that all the extra hardware you''ll need to buy in order to make it work properly is fully compatible with your existing system.

The iMac Studio
How do you make a computer that doesn't have a floppy drive, ADB ports or SCSI into a state of the art screamingly fast recording studio? Easy - go here

The Bare Bones MIDI Studio
You''re not even sure you want to sell all your multitrack gear but it doesn''t make sense anymore to record to tape.

The K12 Special MIDI Studio
Your music department has ten trumpets and an out of tune piano - hmmm read on

Demo Studio
If you need to produce a demo tape for yourself or for others we think you'll find this list of equipment very useful

The Mr. Fritz Disco Yacht Megaplex
Read this and dream, or record a hit album and make it a reality.

http://www.electronicmusic.com/features/siu/index.html