I was trying to do some music, using Reason on my dual G5 Mac, and for reasons (sic) that aren’t clear to me, started with two tracks of arpeggiated Combinator patches. Believe it or not, just those two tracks was enough to give me the dreaded “Your computer is too slow” message. Ugh.
Normally, when this happens, I go through the rigamarole of rendering one of the tracks to audio (then slice and reload), or simplifying the sounds I’m using or some other hack to reduce the CPU load, but just for grins this time, I decided I try installing Reason on my PC instead. Time to figure out just exactly how much faster the C2Q is than the G5s!
So, I installed Reason, the driver and automapper for my Novation keyboard, and the absolutely required to do anything useful musically on a PC ASIO4ALL universal ASIO driver. [Ah yes, I remember the “joys” of doing music on a PC.] And finally, I was ready to go.
I recreated the original two tracks I built on the Mac, and then started layering more; not, you understand, to build something musically pleasing, but rather just to see exactly how many layers I could end up with. The result was this:
What you are looking at is 13 Combinators, for a total of somewhere around 135 (!) individual modules. The result is, of course, an absolute mess, but if you want proof click here:
Remember now, I started with the original two tracks that brought the G5 to it’s knees, and it has another 11 layers added on after that. Unfortunately, that really was the limit, I tried for one more layer, but hit the “your computer is too slow” boundary. But still…
Wow!
Hm… Now if that’s what you can do with a Core2Quad, I wonder what you can do with one of these. 🙂