My decision in the end, was to buy the base 256/16 Mini M4, and see how far it would take me.
I love my VST soft-synths, and sample-players, but I have limited my stuff now to the BFD drums, and lots of Abbey Road plugins from Waves. Then it’s guitar and real bass, with vocals. Maybe some keyboards, but I am avoiding having huge sample libraries loaded - maybe for colour, a Grand Piano, and a String Synth or two. Elec pianos and Padshop 2. Halion Sonic 7 covers a lot of ground, but it’sso easy to get bogged-down in keyboard productions, when you should be nailing those killer riffs. All of my other samples are individual ambient field-recordings and sound-effects.
I considered East West Symphonic for a while, and would have bought an M3 Ultra Studio for that, but I want to get back to my guitar thing, and the base Mini is perfect.
An M3 would see me disappear for 10 years in a steep learning-curve, and come back as bloody Vangelis or something.
Doodling with synths gave me a lot of 2-bar loops, but I wanted to sit and compose from guitar again.
My current projects are emulating Concert Harp style with clean guitars open-tuned. I fly in edited solos from other previous recordings, and this ethereal thing pleases me no end.
The Mini M4 isn’t taxed at all by my Waves stuff, and I have “Chambers” running on most tracks, including individual drums - whereas my older 2015 Intel MacBook would struggle very quickly.
My approach to imaging is important. I want every source in stereo, with its own width and ambient field - positioned at the required depth. Chambers is ideal to get that, with sensible proximity-based EQ.
Every source then has it’s own secondary reverb, panned elsewhere, so note-ends dance around in the image. My sound-system is high-level professional, and so far, the Mini M4 has met all my plugin demands very well, albeit with say only 24 tracks of audio, and 8 tracks of sub-grouped drums.
I’m not sure the M1 could have even handled the complete Drumkit I use, as each drum has its own compressor and Chambers, with EQ, and added reverb. The M4 flies.
I have no doubt I could easily add a full chamber Orchestra to proceedings, and take a ‘mixed’ stereo feed from that plugin. But if I wanted to treat the imaging of the individual instruments the same way I do with my other tracks - then the base M4 would not be sufficient. Widening memory bandwidth, and speeding up RAM, TB5 externals, more performance cores - only the Studio Max or Ultra would let me work freely with Orchestral, to my particular imaging ethos.
Up to you to decide your depth of skill/commitment. I would say it takes a year just to learn how to articulate a VST violin properly, plus EQ and ambience learning-curves. Then we have Viola, Cello, Bass, etc. Then Brass, Woodwinds, Percussion. A daunting task, which few will succeed in, if at all.
I personally don’t have that required 10 years left in me, but were I writing full Orchestral scores, then I’d figure out something. But standards must be kept high, and starting from scratch and working alone is a young man’s game.
If you currently don’t know the highest note on a Bb Clarinet - then forget the idea completely, and use a ‘lesser’ Orchestral emulation, or get A.I. to process it for you. I wouldn’t myself, but then I expect people to scratch the surface of my solo work, and discover huge depth. Took me a lifetime to get here.
So, single-core speed is superb on the base Mini, and Reaper, and Cubase will map fully over the Mini’s 10 cores very well.
Incredible machine for the money. I do feel 16GB is a limiting factor, so 24GB or 32GB are a sensible choice, especially if you want lots of tracks.
Do feel free to PM me with any questions.
I’ve been music computing for many years now, and there’s not much I’ve missed.
