Creating a Home Recording Studio

For a surprisingly small amount of money it is now possible to build a professional quality recording studio in your own home.  Both new and used recording devices can be bought easily and inexpensively from eBay – check out our links on the relevant posts on this site.

Getting Started with Home Recording

The Essentials for a Recording Studio

A good microphone
Its very important that you get a good quality microphone as you can’t do much with a poor recording even with digital editing and effects

For recording solo acoustic instruments and vocals the best kind of recording microphone is a called condenser microphone. For recording vocals, you should also use a pop filter, an inexpensive piece of material that protects the mic from hard "p" and sharp "s" sounds you often get recording vocals.

If you’re looking to record a full rock band, you'll need to mic up all of the instruments in the band separately using smaller dynamic mics.

The Recording Device
Your own computer can be a perfectly good digital recording device. Your PCs built-in sound card will probably work fine to start with  but if you're serious about home recording and creating professional recording, then its best to consider a sound card made exclusively for that purpose, with a high-quality digital audio converter (DAC), microphone pre-amps and MIDI input/output.

To record effectively onto your computer, you'll need sequencing software. This is software that records either analog audio from a microphone or MIDI data from your electronic instruments as you play them. Sequencing software allows you to easily edit and mix multiple tracks, add additional sound effects and  export audio files directly to CD. The industry standard for professional audio sequencing is Pro Tools (which usually comes with its own sound card), but there are options for sequencing software.

Another option is to buy a multi track digital recording device that can record onto a compact flash card to directly onto a CD.

A MIDI controller or synthesizer
A synthesizer is usually an electronic keyboard that can be programmed to play many different sounds. Synthesizers come in many different shapes and sizes and usually specific to the different sounds of an instrument, such as drum synths, guitar instrument synths or wind synths.

A MIDI controller is similar to the synthesizer, but doesn't produce any sounds itself - it is just the controller of recording process. A MIDI controller produces MIDI data output which can be used to play other synthesizers which can be either hardware or software. You can use a MIDI controller to play an electronic keyboard plug-in like ProTools or use a single MIDI controller to play a whole network of interconnected synthesizers or  drum kits.

Monitor speakers and headphones
Monitor speakers are different from stereo speakers as in a recording studio you want to hear exactly what’s being recorded to ensure your recording will sound exactly as when you were playing it.

Often recording are made in a multi-track format, laying down each track one by one (drums first, bass second, keyboards third, etc). The best way to carryout this multi track process is to use a pair of quality headphones to listen to the previously recorded tracks as you are recording the new one.

An audio interface
This can be thought of as an external sound card.  When using an audio interface, instead of plugging your  microphones and digital instruments directly into your PC, you plug them into the audio interface which connects to your computer via USB or Firewire. The audio interface directly handles the analog-to-digital conversion process and reduces the processing load on your PC.

Breakout boxes are a type of audio interface which come with some microphone pre-amps and knobs which allow you to control the recording level of each of your microphone.

 

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