There are some tricks you can use to make using VSTi’s easier with less powerful computers. Mind you, nowadays even pretty entry level computers (like Mac Mini M2) are so powerful that a lot of the ‘old school’ workarounds aren’t nearly as necessary.

The big problem is, if you want a VSTi to feel like hardware keyboards, you want to set latency as low as you can get away with. But while you have it set that way, now the computer is trying to play the entire project at that super low latency! So the main trick a lot of us used was to render the master mix as a stereo audio file before we get to playing the next part in. Once that is rendered, you turn off ALL the other VSTi Parts, and now the computer is hardly doing anything else (playing that one stereo submit is easy for even ancient computers!).

Once you have settled on the new part and got the MIDI right and edited, render a new ‘master mix’, delete the old one, and work on the next sound. This way, you can probably set your soundcard to sub-5ms latency (which is where I start to feel like I’m playing hardware) and not get dropouts in the VSTi.

But if even all that can’t stop your computer glitching, then it’s probably time to look at a new one. Or investigate other similar plug-ins that are more CPU efficient. Plus many plug-ins allow you to record using a less CPU heavy version, then switch to the best possible sound once you wind your latency back up to mixing levels.

You can also get some headroom for live playing by turning off the reverbs on other tracks. And check your DAW features. Some of them can turn off all effects on tracks that are muted, which helps.

But a very basic modern computer completely blows away anything from ten years ago. If using computers to make music seems like where you’re heading, upgrading the computer is going to give you the best bang for the buck.