1. Setting Up Cubase on Your Computer

After the Cubase software itself, the most important part of your setup is your computer. When you bought your computer, were you thinking about using it to make music, or did you want to use it to do everything? Do you think most major studios are running Microsoft Office on the same system with the latest and greatest DAW setup? Just how serious are you about recording music?

When I finally traded in my Atari computer for a Windows system in the mid-’90s, I thought, Wow! A computer that can do everything! I bought the latest video games. I had this digital answering machine software going on. I had the coolest screensavers. I was surfing the Internet like a madman. Of course, Cubase was still my priority, and I was using it to record audio for the first time on a computer! I was pretty new to using Windows, and after about one month, I started seeing error messages. Then one day I came home to check my cool digital voice mail and found out about the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD). My computer was fried. I lost everything I recorded and some cool programs. I had to spend a lot of money rebuilding my computer. That was my first lesson. You Mac guys are laughing right now, but maybe you haven’t seen all the little “bombs” that pop up on Macs when something goes wrong.

It’s funny, because even though I don’t see the BSOD so often anymore, it still occasionally comes up—and it’s still just as ugly as it was in 1996!

The goal of this chapter is to prevent you from seeing bombs or BSODs when you’re working in Cubase.