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Circuit bending an electronic toy is affordable and fun.

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With the financial pinch being felt on a global scale, many of us are finding that spare money that can be spent on studio improvements is no longer so readily available.

This doesn't mean that your recording space has to stay 'as is' for the foreseeable future, though. There are many things that even the most budget-conscious muso can do to spice up their studio life: here are ten that'll cost around £10 each.

1. The £10 PC
Propellerhead now offers its classic ReBirth RB-338 soft synth as a free download from and it'll run on the most basic spec computer. In fact, the system requirements are so low (90MHz Pentium for Windows or 66MHz PowerMac for MacOS 8 or 9) that you'll be able to run it on the type of computer most people throw out or give away and can regularly be picked up on eBay for £10 or less.

Once you've found yourself an old computer, install ReBirth and hook it up to the rest of your setup. Control it via MIDI and you've got yourself a really good dedicated 303/808/909 clone for almost nothing. Latency will be minimal because the computer isn't running anything except ReBirth, and it won't use up any of the processing power or memory of your main computer. You can sequence it and trigger it via a MIDI connection or just play it live with a controller keyboard.

We really like the idea of using old computers as dedicated outboard equipment. If you had access to a lot of old, unwanted computers you could even set up a kind of hardware outboard setup using them. Why not run different software on each machine to make yourself a sampler PC, a synth PC, an effects PC and so on?

2. The £10 PC overhaul
The first step is to make sure that everything's working as it should be, so carry out a standard PC spring-cleaning procedure (ask a friend or consult the internet if you're not sure how – there's no need to pay to have an easy job like this done). All the usual basics apply, so run a good virus checker, defragment your hard drives and delete any unnecessary data, including temporary files.

If you only use your computer for music, consider reformatting your hard drive and doing a fresh custom install of Windows or Mac OS. You can really speed up the operation of your audio setup by making it the only thing the computer has installed. That means ditching the games and internet software, so if you have access to two computers why not dedicate one to music and use the other for everything else?

RAM is very important to the speed of music software, so that's where we'll spend our tenner. If you're not sure what kind you need, use an online system scanner like Crucial's and then search for the cheapest supplier. £10 should be enough for 512MB or 1GB of additional RAM for a lot of slightly older desktop computers but if you can stretch the budget a bit more then go for as much as you can afford.

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