Home recording studio setup

A home recording studio setup can be one of the most fun and annoying part of playing guitar. To break in to home recording you can spend thousands upon thousands of dollars before you ever lay down a track. After you lay down that track you find that this was not even for you.

The other method is the slow and steady approach to building a home recording studio setup. Meanings before you send your kid’s college fund on a recording studio build it a few pieces at a time.  What do I mean by this? Well start out slow. Ask yourself why am I considering making this? What am I going to do with this once setup? Do I really need this? These are important things you need to ask yourself.

When I started doing home recording I went through the same sort of thoughts you are going through. How can I do this and not take out a second mortgage? Well believe it or not you can and for a relatively decent price. If you take your time building this.

First thing you need to do is find a location. Whenever possible a location where you can leave your setup up and not have to tear it down. I am not talking about gutting a room or basement just a decent location to setup and have some relative quite. Before I go to much further this is going to be a setup where you can make some basic recording of you and or your band so we are not going to be doing an over the top setup.

Ok so you have your place now comes the fun part the equipment. What will you need? Where do you start? And how do you get it? For your let’s call it an entry level studio we are going to go with the basics. This is what I would recommend you have.

·         Digital recorder

·         Mics (at least 2)

·         Drum machine

·         Digital effects processor (such as digitech, line6, boss something like that)

The really great thing is digital products have come down so much over the past few years we can set this up under $400.00 if not less. There are great digital records on the market now for $150.00 and up. Products like fostex, tascam, boss and zoom these are just to name a few. Here is the kicker many of these digital records come with a dc burner and drum machine build in. That is why I say take your time and look around. Now the mics I would not spend a lot of money on a mic to start out. Yes it can make a difference on the recording but to start go cheap you can always find a min on sale for very cheap online or at your local music story.

Ok to wrap this up I am going to tell you how I setup my studio with mics digital 8 track with drum machine and cd burner build in and guitar effects and I added a drum machine just for good measure for just under $300.00. EBAY! I am not knocking online music stores and online stores they have great stuff and good deals. But I was not sure how much I wanted to do and how much I was going to use this studio. As it turns out a lot and still don’t need an upgrade. Basically all I did was put this small list together and just kept adding on. I would keep looking and looking and when I saw what I wanted for the price I wanted it for I would use the buy it now for the price they were asking on ebay. I have never had success with bidding I always loose. The one exception being the mic I got them on clearance. I recommend going this route first. Build your studio slowly and make sure it is really something you are going to use rather than spending a lot of time and money only to find out you don’t want to do this.