Virtual Studio Guide
Virtualising Your Studio

Take a look around a regular well equipped studio control room and you'll usually see a big mixing desk, a couple of racks full of effects processors, a multitrack tape recorder and a couple of big speakers hooked up to a power amplifier.

Straight away there are a few items that can be virtualised instantly, the multitrack, effects processors and mixing desk. But these items still have a place, even in the Virtual Studio, especially if you are unable to afford a nice new G4.

So instead look for items that can be emulated easily by any kind of computer and straight away you'll have your hands on the trusty old sequencer.

These things have been around for as long as I can remember and are usually the first items of studio equipment to be moved somewhere else to make room for a computer.

With a tiny LCD display to let you know what's going on inside and little more than a scroll wheel and a few sets of multi function buttons to edit paramenters and so forth it's about time you moved on, so get rid of it and replace it with its virtual equivalent.

The obvious choice for those on a tight budget and running a pre-PowerPC Macintosh is Studio Vision from Opcode systems. This has many of the features of its big brother Studio Vision Pro but at a much reduced cost.

If you have a Macintosh with a PowerPC inside and a bigger budget you can't go wrong choosing either Studio Vision Pro or Pro Tools from Digidesign. Take a good long look at both of these products before choosing which one will work best for you. Whichever one you choose you'll be able to record directly to your hard drive as well as use those things called plug-ins, which we'll get to later.

There are many technical factors to consider when you're out choosing your computer, not least of which is wether you want to go for one with a SCSI or IDE hard drive. If you have a choice SCSI is without doubt vastly superior for recording digital audio, in fact that's just one reason why we prefer to use a Power Macintosh because most PC's can only use IDE drives, just one of many major drawbacks of using a PC as a virtual studio which we'll address later.

So that's the sequencer out of the window. What's next? You guessed it, the multitrack tape recorder.

Next: Virtualising your multitrack.

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