How To Set Up Your Own Recording Studio At Home

HOW TO SET UP YOUR OWN RECORDING STUDIO AT HOME

Both professionals and amateurs at one time or the other wish they could make a sonic product or conduct a personal experiment. Now even with the presence of money, musical skills, and recording studio equipment, it is not wrong to be at a loss concerning what to do next. This blog discusses how to set up your own recording studio at home.

Whether you intend to set it up in your house or want to set up a full-scale professional recording studio, read on. Many that possess recording studios of any magnitude today or operate such started off just like you. The reason you and they would be the same in the end is that you went out to learn, because knowledge is power. It enables you to accomplish things you would have thought yourself unworthy of doing before.

What to do?

Here are what you need to know and some things you must have to do when trying to set up your own recording studio at home.

Use windowless, insulated rooms as prospective recording studios, if possible. Even though windows let in natural light, provide an efficient way for airing the recording apartment or apartments, and gives one a medium of looking outside at will, it also has the ability to let in outside noise. The last thing you want while listening to a perfect job you did is an impatient bang coming from some neighbour’s door. Despite your meticulous effort to edit it later, you might fail, or have to add things you don’t like very much to the mix.

Make sure the room has right acoustics. High ceilings, irregular surfaces and asymmetrical walls will help do the trick. This hinders unnecessary reverberations from making their way into your hard work.

Enable your walls to soak away sounds. Expect the bass frequencies to enjoy bouncing about your studio like reckless alien balls. To deal with this effectively, pad your walls with thick curtains or carpets. There are special products in this market for dealing with this, and you would find them if you ask about them.

The space you want to use for recording should be wide enough to to hold your gear, and also not be too cramped in the end because of those equipment. The bigger the room, the better. If possible, separate the room wherein the singer sings (called the live room) and the place the sound engineer sits to mix, edit and record (called the control room). If the place is too small, let this not bother you.

Before deciding where the singer, instrumentalists, etc, would stay to perform or work (for example, the engineer) understand how sounds bounce about the room. All rooms don’t have the same sounds, and sounds do not bring the same results when they come from different spots in any room. Mark the floor of each spot you have heard how sounds from its perimeter act, and come back to review them. You could even do a test work or two to dust your positioning to pass level.

Provide furniture for resting and for use during performance. Even though a singer should stand to sing for the best results, such should sit or lie to rest when not working or tired. Needless stress rids one of needful strength that would have been used for something more beneficial. If you are able, get an ergonomic office chair, a couch and another chair. The choice you should make concerning this should depend on whether you expect visitors or not.

Make sure the place is lit enough. This implies that you need at least a bulb or two. Be creative in the lighting, if you are able. Remember that both the lighting, pictures and setting have the ability to set the mood of the room. It is easier to visualise when parts of what you would have to imagined are already in place. Have default setting, but you could be creative when about to craft something.

Warm water is a singer’s need. It’s better than cold water, since it makes the singing instruments inside your throat soft and more flexible. Also it’s healthier for you. Get an electric jug or kettle if you can, and try to have refreshment for your body. Rest your ears after a long time of recording, since it would keep you fresh and more productive.

Have many spare cables, if you can. Many crackles that mar your sonic pieces are mostly caused by bad cables. Just be sure you have spares of tiny things that usually develop faults.

Invest in quality products. Get an amplifier, at least a speaker, and a microphone stand. Cheap things are likely to make you sweat and send you back to the market. Also, they could reduce your creativity, because bad legs are never totally trustworthy. Get a computer with a big RAM. The more the RAM, the more power it has. You need a computer that has cool speed and space, and it’s the computer’s RAM that usually tells you whether these things are to be expected from it.

You need at least two Digital Audio Workstations in your computer. They are programs used for crafting your sonic products within the confines of your computer. Some are purchasable, but there are free ones. The later include Audacity and Sonar Cakewalk (Windows only). The reason you need two is that one could start malfunctioning or misbehaving during a production. You wouldn’t have time at such moments to start making choices on which to choose.

Design a production procedure for your studio in case another person has to work in your place; this would help the person not to be at a loss as to where things are and how and when they are to be used. Define the path the product should pass through before it could become a finished product!

Remember that the work you do at the beginning of setting up your personal studio will save you much labour later. Why? If you find out during a recording session or thereabout that some equipment is wrongly positioned or tuned, or that it’s not serving you well, or that the room is rocking with saddening reverberations of vibrations, you might be able to do nothing but to stop whatever had occupied your hands to start putting things in order.

Recording is the art of crafting sonic pieces. Each sound you want to have in the tape that is the end product is like the stroke of a painter’s brush. You have to be sure that it is the best you can do at the moment. All the effort people like you put into setting up their own personal recording studios is to affect the end products of all the sound that would be formed in that place.

Be sure to read the user’s manual before using any instrument; this, needless to say, will save you time and money.

Now that you know what to do, good luck in owning your own recording studio.