What You Need For Your Home Studio
Having worked in radio for most of my professional life, and having a formal education in audio production, I am quite familiar with recording studios, both of the commercial and production house variety. It was only a matter of time before I set myself up with a studio to get some work done at home. Not only was I able to move some of my work to home, but I was able to set up a situation in which the majority of my work was done from home, including a fair amount of freelance work. The studio I have set up is best for production, particularly for radio, voice work or podcasts. If you want to record a whole band, this may not be what you want, but the theories are still the same, you just need to make it bigger.
Where Are You Setting Up?
The first thing you need to do before setting up your studio is to figure out what you have and what you need, including space. If you are planning on working in your studio more than occasionally, you may want to think about devoting a whole room to your studio. If you have a spare bedroom and can make that your studio, that is always recommended. But if you have to share your space, that’s plenty fine, as long as you have a work space that is suitable to your needs. If you are going to be doing any recording, like voice work, you don’t want to be right next to the air conditioning unit. If your neighbor is always working in the garage with power tools, you might want to situate your studio as far from that as possible.
Your Equipment
After you’ve mapped out a location, you need to figure out what you’re going to need to get your studio running. Every basic studio needs a mixer, a microphone, a computer and lots of cables. You can build a suitable studio with only those main ingredients nowadays. I’ll let you in on a little secret as well, you don’t need the world’s best soundcard for all of your audio to be top quality. I managed to survive for a half a dozen years doing radio production from my home studio by using only the factory sound card and the default 1/8 inch audio input and outputs. Don’t tell the people I worked for that, but I never once found a pair of ears that heard the difference. If you can get the better soundcard, financially speaking, it’s not a bad idea though. If you plan on recording multiple tracks simultaneously, you’ll need to buy a sound card for that.
You’ll need a decent computer, preferably with a bunch of RAM and you’ll need lots of hard drive space. I always recommend external hard drives. They can be moved from computer to computer when necessary and when they fill up, you can just get a new one. Generally speaking, your computer is only as good as the software you’re running. Depending on your budget, there are a lot of different options here. You can start with the basics, like Audacity or Cakewalk, or you can step up to Adobe Audition or ProTools, the latter being the industry standard. I personally have used both Audition and ProTools, and find them each to be very good. You have many more advanced options with ProTools, but I find Audition to be an easier to use product. Currently, I use Adobe Audition for all of my production.
There are benefits to using analog equipment, from reel-to-reel recorders to 4-track or 8-track analog recorders, but in today’s world, if you’re on a budget, digital is just so much more convenient. You may lose some of the warmth that an analog recording provides, but for the price and convenience, you can’t beat digital editing.
As for the hardware, you’ll need to get yourself a mixer, and this will be the base of your studio. Everything you use will run in or out of the mixer, so this is where you want to get something decent. By decent, I mean get something from a brand that specializes in pro audio. Something from Behringer, Mackie, or Yamaha is always a good place to start. I currently use a Behringer 2222, which gives me eight mono channels and 4 stereo channels. I have found this to be sufficient for the last few years for the type of production I do. I’ve also used plenty of Mackies, and can recommend them without reservations.
As far as microphones go,I have used many. If you can afford a good mic, and you do a significant amount of voice work, spend the money. There are a few good budget microphones, such as the Marshall MXL 990. For under $60, this microphone is very, very good. It’s far better than several mics I’ve used that cost two or three times as much.
If you can spend a bit more, for radio or voice work there are some solid options. The Shure SM7B is a staple of many radio stations, and delivers a great “boom” for your voice. I’m also a big fan of the Electro-Voice RE-20, another industry standard in the world of radio and voice work. As your budget gets higher, there are some great microphones out there that may be more of what you’re looking for. If the microphone is a major component in your work, you may want to look into brands like Neumann and some of the upper level Sennheisers.
These are the basic ingredients for your studio. Now, all you have to do is hook it all up and customize it.
So, on to the recipe for these ingredients.
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