You don’t have to break the bank to have a professional quality home studio.
There are a few design tips, and certainly a process to consider when visioning what you want a your full home recording studio to include. We recommend studio equipment that are must-haves to begin, and we’ll help you evolve as you have more time, money and effort to grow.
Whether you’re building a home recording studio to have the ability to record yourself for others’ music, or have other musicians record on your music, or even as a sound engineer wanting your own recording space… home recording studios have always been important and perhaps even more now since the start of the pandemic.
Having your own studio to access anytime can be an incredible tool in supporting your creativity at any hour. Its also such an important time to continue working on connectivity, and being able to record on a friend’s album is exciting.
BUILDING YOUR HOME STUDIO: PART ONE
ITS ALL IN THE TECHNOLOGY
Technically, you can start producing music with nothing more than a computer with adequate specs and a music DAW like Logic, Ableton, FL Studio or even GarageBand. At the most basic level, you can start producing music with your keyboard and mousepad in anyone of these programs and more.
Of course, for most of us, with as much as we can do with just a computer and a good program, we will want to build things out quickly, even if we have to do it in stages.
Its the same as buying a quality instrument like the top rated Moog Sub Phatty synthesizer, your knowledge will take you the extra step in great production… as long as you start with quality equipment.
HEADPHONES
While you might be thinking that your built in computer speakers are good enough to get the job done, while you start buying instruments to deck out your home studio, the truth is, you are only going to be able to be a great home producer if you can hear all the details of the music you are producing.
For that you need to invest in high quality studio headphones. Fortunately, there are quality headphones that cost as little as $100. When it comes to headphones, I think you should always be looking to improve as you grow. There is a huge leap from the $100 Sennheiser 280s and $3,000 Focal Utopia headphones.
If your home studio is going to be a place for hobby, you will never need a set of Focal headphones, but if you are going to be taking your home recordings and having another company press them to vinyl, you might want to have the best headphones you can afford. Hopefully, you will be having your music professional mastered when you get to that point in your production.