The difference between building a track from scratch now compared to the late 90s is huge. Where once a roomful of tactile hardware was needed to fashion sounds, now you can lock down a release-ready track on a smartphone. Let’s detail the major differences

“The past is a foreign country,” a wise man once said, though when you compare the different methods used to record music at home between the 1990s and now, it may as well be Mars. As we established in the first part, the music production sphere was predominantly hardware dependent, even as we entered the early 2000s, we only had a mere handful of computer musicmaking software tools (which we were eager to spread the word about!).

Work from home

Though Pro Tools was an increasingly commonplace standard in many high-end recording studios throughout the early 1990s, it was simply too expensive or CPU-dependent for many home musicians, as the average computing power in 1998 was around 64MB of RAM, with around 400MHz on a good day, a far cry from the 8-16GB of RAM and 3.5 to 4.2 GHz, single-threaded processor speeds of modern computers. Essentially, everything was much, much slower in the 1990s, and more prone to system lock-ups.