PRO TOOLS

Adventures in VIDEO AND MUSIC CREATION on gaming PCs

- Phil Iwaniuk

The hardware we amass and place upon snap-in thrones on our motherboards in the name of gaming frame rates is absolutely incredible. Our graphics cards can turn over gazillions of teraFLOPS, our CPUs laugh in the face of 4K video codecs, and our motherboards can interface with any piece of storage media created since Cool Britannia. And since by default we use that hardware very staunchly for gaming, reading about gaming, and talking to people about the things we’ve read about gaming, it comes as quite an epiphany to realise they can do quite a lot more, and to a high level, too.

Due to their typically powerful CPUs and GPUs, and large RAM capacity, gaming PCs also make very capable video editing machines. With the help of an audio interface they’re highly adept music production stations too. They don’t just run your games – they’re ready to power your creative urges, too.

This writer’s first foray into gaming PC music production came in the XP days, when Line6’s revolutionary Guitarport dropped. A super simple audio interface with one stereo jack input, a USB connection, and 3.5mm connections for speakers or headphones, and a great big volume knob on the front. This £100 chunk of shiny red plastic was all it took to turn a Knights of the Old Republic rig into a compact recording studio in 2004.