Defining Your Home Recording Goals

First Considerations For Your Home Recording Studio

The first considerations you need to make before building your home studio is what your goals are, what you are trying to achieve, and what you would like your rig to expand into in the future. This is the first stop on this tour, and let’s start to address your home recording goals by answering the following questions:

Who are you going to be recording?

What are you going to be recording?

How many inputs and outputs do you need?

How big would like your studio to grow?

What are your aspirations?

How much money have you budgeted?

By taking these questions into consideration beforehand, you will save yourself a lot of headache in the future. Ideally, you want to set the right rig up in the beginning so it will grow with you - without you having to rethink things too much or waste any time of money.

Before we start, please note: If all you are looking for is to record your speaking voice for recording say an audio program, screencast, or something of this nature, you can probably find a decent USB mic but i think its a better idea to just get a good USB or firewire audio interface and an inexpensive conventional microphone. USB mics are mostly cheap and crappy sounding and once you realize the difference in sound that you could be capturing you’ll just probably throw the thing out. As with an audio interface, the quality will be better, its a better long term approach, and you can upgrade microphones, etc.

If you are interested in taking up home recording as a hobby, or are just taking the first basic step from going from using your computers internal soundcard and want to start recording quality audio, i.e vocals, and then maybe guitar, plus have the ability to sequence/program with midi. Here’s what you’ll need.

You can easily get going for under $1,000.

If you are going the all hardware route, you’ll have to research to find something within your budget and then you’ll have to make sure you have all the other components listed below.

But... Go with a computer and DAW software, unless you have a strong reason not to.

Remember, its all in your ability to use your tools anyway, so the sooner you can get things plugged in, the real learning and experience begins to accrue. You’ll want to research a little bit, but you can get a starter audio interface, mic, cables, headphones or small speakers for $500-1000.

Now that you’ve written these goals out you’ve been able to clearly identify what your level of commitment to this project is, lets move on to what exactly you’ll need.

For some it is the eager beginning for a very driven passion toward a lifelong ambition.

For others it may be a means to an end, and seem a bit overwhelming.

Whichever boat you are in, stick with it, it’ll be worth it, and in no time you’ll be sitting down and capturing your creative sonic thoughts and musical ideas, and polishing them into outstanding song productions.

Happy Home Recording!