Here is a look into how to set up your own audio recording studio in your home.
Sound Design
Setting up your own home recording studio seems a lot more practical in today’s world of social networking, independent record labels, and home audio mixing software. With a certain amount of home materials, computer equipment, microphones , and associated technology you can actually create a fairly sufficient home recording studio without having to use professional money and studio space. If you are really looking at what setting up your own home recording studio means it requires you first identifying what purposes you want, what type of home audio mixing software you want to use, how much money you are willing to spend, and how much space you are willing to give up. Here is a look at a few tips on setting up your own home recording studio.
Software and Computer
The computer, and the home audio mixing software you use, is going to be the primary focus for setting up your own home recording studio. This is going to process your sound design at all levels, and the rest of the sound equipment is simply to facilitate the capture of the sound. To do this effectively you need to take a look at the home audio mixing software that you want to use, which should dictate the technical requirements of your computer. Pro Tools , for example, dictates a certain computer requirement as well as a hardware component until the most recent incarnation. If you are buying the software and the computer at the same time make them congruent as this is going to set your limits on how in depth your sound design will be.
The Room
If you are setting up your own home recording studio for recording music tracks then you are going to have to have sufficient space that is designed to facilitate performance. Essentially this means that an entire medium to large room must be isolated just for the audio recording studio, which will also require creating a furniture infrastructure that will facilitate musical and recording equipment as well as soundproofing on the walls. Beyond the computer this will be the most significant and expensive part of setting up your own home recording studio, but without this kind of dedication you will not be able to record clean music or work professionally. This is really just the bare minimum, and it would be even better to try to remodel two rooms so that performance can happen in one while the technical recording and mixing process can happen in another. This will give a cleaner monitoring of the sound and allow the person doing the sound design to have a better conception of the audio mix .
Microphones
Many electronic instruments will plug directly into the recording interface, but acoustic instruments and voices will need high quality microphones to facilitate the recording. There are a lot of different options for this, but what you should remember is that the microphones used in recording in your home studio are going to be a lot different than what you want from microphones used for live performance or recording. Sensitivity and clarity should be the main focus of your studio microphones, so you may want to avoid condenser microphones in general and this may be one of the times when a ribbon microphone is a good choice.
