Step 1: How To Build a Home Recording Studio
Building a home recording studio can be a daunting task, especially if it’s your first home studio. We’ve put this guide together to help anybody who’s looking to build a recording studio at home.
In this course, we will cover all the steps to set up your first home recording studio. We will teach you:
- How to choose the space for your home studio
- How to acoustically prepare your room
- Which operating system and computer you should use
- A detailed summary of what equipment you will need
- What software package is the best for you
- We will also teach you how to use basic software tools such as EQ and Compression
Home Recording Tips:
We’ve put together a list of helpful tips. Hopefully, these tips will help when you are building your home recording studio and when you are recording your music. These are popular tips that are widely known by experienced musicians.
Creativity Will Always Win – No matter how expensive, or how professional your home recording equipment is. If you are lacking creativity it’s always going to impact your final outcome. Don’t get too caught up in buying expensive equipment. A $100 microphone could easily sound better than a $600 microphone if the person making the music is experience and adds a flare of creativity.
Don’t Buy Overly Expensive Gear For Your First Studio – Imagine buying all the equipment and then finding out you don’t enjoy it or no longer want to it do it. When it’s your first studio it’s best to stick to reasonably priced gear. Music equipment has improved hugely over the years and you can now get great sounding gear for a good price, there’s no need to buy expensive gear for your first studio. Here’s the gear we recommend.
Don’t Be Too Cheap – Although you can be too cheap. If you cheap out on your equipment then there will likely be limitations with what can be accomplished. The gear we recommend is perfect for your first home music studio.
Practice Makes Perfect – Creating music will always get better with experience. Nobodies first song or track is impressive, so don’t worry about your music sounding bad at first. It takes time to sound like a professional. If you look back at huge artists, their firsts songs are likely to sound terrible compared to the music they are making now.
DAWS Have Instruments – The software that you will be using to record your music will more than likely already have a range of built-in instruments. So don’t panic if you don’t have enough money for lots of instruments!
Record with 24-bit – Bit depth is the rate at how much data is being captured every time your analog to digital converter takes a sample. The higher the bit rate the more information that is going to be captured. Therefore a higher data rate will capture a higher quality and more accurate representation of your recording.
Rather than recording at 16-bit, you should try and record at 24-bit to maximum the quality. The only downside is that this might take up more computer resources.
Check your recordings for background noises – Even the smallest background noise can interfere with your recordings. Even bleeding from your headphones can affect the quality of your recordings. Make sure all computers, fans, ac vents and anything that can distribute the recording is turned off.
Microphone distances – The microphones distances from the sound source can really make a difference. Test all different distances out. Each recording may need a different microphone distance and position.
Rehearse before you record – Simply rehearsing your recordings 2 to 5 times before you record them can save valuable recording time. It also feels amazing when you’re able to record it perfectly in 1 take.
Don’t stop experimenting – Keep experimenting! It’s fun and it will show in your music.
