Do-It-Yourself MIDI Workstation

Here’s the scenario: You’re a hobby musician without a whole lot of time for a band. But you like writing music and you are looking for a medium to develop and share your ideas. Your preliminary research has introduced you to the world of MIDI, and you’re seriously considering getting yourself a MIDI workstation. But they’re very expensive. You can save some cash if you build it yourself, but where do you begin? That’s a question I’m hoping to answer today.

What is a MIDI Workstation?

A MIDI workstation is literally just a specialized computer with some specialized software. An ideal MIDI workstation is going to have a lot of hardware that you will not find on a typical machine bought from Best Buy or Dell. But that doesn’t mean you can’t build one. You should have some basic understanding of computer hardware as well as a good idea of your overall intent. A DIY MIDI workstation is no project for technological beginners.

Getting Started

The easiest thing to do is to catalog your current PC. You may already have a good starter machine. I recommend that people build onto their existing machine and worry about upgrading later. The important hardware can get expensive compared to the rest of your computer’s components. First, let’s address a few basic items. Your current machine should meet these simple requirements:

Processor: You want a fairly current processor – one that runs at least 1.5 GHz. Faster is, of course, going to be better. But MIDI is surprisingly not very taxing on your processor. If you intend to use a lot of Virtual Synthesizers (VSTs), you’ll want as much processor power as you can get your hands on. But even 1.5 GHz can handle a lot. Dual-Core processors are very well suited for MIDI workstations, so if you can get one, use it.

RAM: You absolutely should have at least 1 Gigabyte of RAM. Since RAM is relatively cheap, get as much as your machine will handle. 2 Gigabytes is ideal.

Hard Drive: If you do not have the cash to spend on upgrading your hard drive, you will want to spend some time uninstalling any programs or items you do not need. Hard Drive space is important. MIDI files themselves are not very large, but they are useless to anyone who does not have your exact hardware setup. You’ll need to mix-down all your files to Audio Files (WAV) for post processing and uncompressed audio can get incredibly large.

All the track data for a 4-minute song could round out to be as much as 10 Gigabytes if you have a lot of tracks. The good news is that this is temporary storage, and once you get your final mix-down, you can easily backup these track files to a CD and remove from your computer. Later on in this article, I’ll discuss things like Hard Drive performance and upgrades. But save your expendable cash for your sound card.

Sound Card: If your soundcard has MIDI inputs and outputs, you’re more than welcome to mess around with it to get the hang of things. But Nine out of Ten times, your existing soundcard is nowhere close to the quality you’ll need for a MIDI workstation. If your soundcard is a generic card, it won’t work. If you have a SoundBlaster, chances are it also won’t do.

While it is possible to run two soundcards on your machine, I typically recommend removing your soundcard in favor of an upgrade, which I’ll get into shortly. If your soundcard is part of your motherboard, you may be able to disable it in the BIOS.

Primary Upgrades for Your Machine

You must think of your MIDI workstation as a work in progress. Unless you have tons of expendable cash, you really won’t be able to do everything at once. I will list the following items in order of importance, the most important items listed first. This is the order in which you will want to upgrade your machine as you get deeper into the world of MIDI.