Come on. One more. We’ve survived worse

The ultimate musical Swiss Army knife... or not.

There’s this persistent myth that to start making music — for games, films, trailers, whatever — you need a cutting-edge workstation bristling with RAM, SSDs, and some kind of mystical GPU fairy dust.

As if inspiration only shows up when your system can load the whole Berlin Series, three granular engines, and a full ambient generator without breaking a sweat.

Let me be clear: that’s nonsense.

The old mule that could

Until 2020, I was working on a machine so old it deserved a pension.

A first-gen i7 — a mule, stubborn but loyal — that somehow carried me through real client work: adaptive music cues, sound design layers, foley edits, prototype mixes, even those “let’s see if this crashes” orchestral mockups.

And the thing is… it worked.

Not gracefully.

Not quickly.

But it worked.

I'm going to have to science the shit out of this

(👆 Thanks to Andy Weir for one of the most iconic quotes ever)

Here’s what I learned: if you’re a tinkerer — someone who experiments, iterates, breaks things, fixes them, and just keeps going when everybody else would call it a day the evening to gin tonics — you don’t need the latest tech to create something worth listening to.

In fact, limitations sharpen your instincts.

Can’t run ten instances of a heavyweight synth?

You learn to commit your takes, freeze instruments, export stems, and actually choose your palette — a crucial skill whether you’re scoring a cutscene or building an interactive music layer for a game.

Short on RAM for massive libraries?

You discover that a simple, expressive patch — with good automation — carries more weight than fifty cinematic mega-whatevers.

Render times too long?

You start thinking before clicking, which is a rare superpower both in game audio pipelines and in film music deadlines. Or, if really, really necessary... read a book in the meantime. That works too.

These constraints turn you into a better composer and designer.

They push you to ask: what does this cue actually need?

They make you resourceful — and resourcefulness is one of the most underrated skills in game audio, right next to gain staging and naming your files properly (which I absolutely do not do, by the way — so don't expect a blog post on that anytime soon).

Ideas don’t care about your CPU

Here’s the real secret nobody mentions: ideas don’t care about your hardware.

A theme is a theme whether you wrote it on a super-duper machine or on something that looks like it could use some Xanax every time Kontakt farts. Players, directors, and listeners react to emotion — not CPU benchmarks.

When you finally upgrade, sure — it feels like stepping out of your Italian apartment after four months of Covid lockdown, into a bright, new future. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t create before.You absolutely could.

“The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play.”— Aristotle James T. Kirk

Want another one? I find this one equally compelling:

"...if that keyboard is infinite, then on that keyboard there is no music you can play. You're sitting on the wrong bench... That is God's piano." — Nineteen-Hundred (thanks, Alessandro Baricco)

which is to say: it is through limits that we develop our greatness.

Start with whatever you have

Creativity only needs three things: a DAW that opens, a handful of tools you know well — maybe a sampler, a synth, a field recorder, or a controller you're now so familiar with that you bring with you down the road to the pub — and the urge to build something from nothing.

Whether you’re designing UI sounds, crafting procedural ambience for a Unity scene, prototyping adaptive music in FMOD or Wwise, or writing a theme for a small indie project, the gear is secondary. Ingenuity is primary.

And if your old processor sighs dramatically as you add one more track?

You just smile and say,“Come on. One more. We’ve survived worse.”

And somehow — against all logic — it does.