Overview

Setting up a home studio is easier than you may think. Learning how to 'properly use' that home studio will be harder than you think for parents; and easier than you would think for teens in music. In this article I will discuss the equipment, room acoustics, and the ins and outs of setting up your own in-home studio.
 
Setting up a home studio can be very inexpensive, or it can cost you more than your house - literally. A professional recording set-up in your home, with equipment and room treatment (acoustics), will cost you anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000. This type of set up will produce “radio ready” audio masters. A professional studio in your home will allow you to take your time recording and will allow you the freedom to experiment without having to worry about an hourly fee being paid to a commercial studio. However, it will take time, lots of time, to master the art of recording - well enough to be able to compete with professional studio engineers. You need to be able to turn in “radio ready” masters to radio stations, record labels, and others who need quality recordings to market or promote the music recorded.

If your budget is not quite up to the price tag of building a professional studio then a project home studio is what you're looking for. This type of studio will not be used to produce “radio ready” masters - but it will save you money, enabling you to work out details of your music before going to a professional studio. It will also allow you to make mp3s of your music, create music for your website, along with other utilitarian audio tasks that are needed in the career of music. A project studio takes very little technical knowledge to set it up. For under $2000 you can be up and running in no time at all. Beware, there is still a learning curve involved and you will still have to invest time and effort to learn how to properly use your new studio.

Horsepower and room acoustics are the major differences in the two options. A professional studio is designed to sound right. This means walls, ceilings, and floors are designed to absorb or deflect sound - so that what you hear in the room is a true representation of what the music actually sounds like. Here's a brief example to illustrate: Let’s say you're working on a piece of music and your room sounds like it has a lot of bass. You'll want to turn down the bass in order to make it sound right in the song. But, what if your room is lying to you? Maybe it was not treated acoustically correct and there really isn't too much bass but the room sounds as if there is. When you turn down the bass to sound right in the room (a room that's lying), and then take that music on a cd to your car or another room it will sound like you have no bass. Why? Because you turned down the bass to sound good in the room that was not treated properly. This is a very basic example; however, it happens on a daily basis in more home studios than not. A professional studio has to be treated so that the music you work on sounds correct across the entire frequency range. Meaning - what you hear in the room must sound like what is actually recorded.

Treating a room to sound correct is not cheap. Nor, is it easy. A professional acoustic contractor can cost you upward of $90 per hour for time alone. If that person is using “off the shelf” items instead of building custom options then your costs can go sky high. “Off the shelf” options are very expensive and in most cases don't perform as well as custom-made acoustic devises. In fact, if you are building a professional home studio you need to find a contractor that only builds their own devises instead of buying pre-made acoustic panels. Custom options made on-site can be tailor made to work exactly as needed to correct any room issues, while pre-made options may only fix certain aspects. It sounds funny that a custom made acoustic panel would cost less that pre-made - but it is true. Pre-made panels are very expensive while the material to make custom panels can be bought inexpensively at Home Depot.

Horsepower is another difference between a project studio and a professional home studio. In a project studio you can spend as little as $500 on a computer. However, in a professional studio - using professional software - you will need to spend more than four times this amount to get the right computer. In addition, the software for a project studio costs between $400 and $1200, while the cost of professional software will run between $7000 and $25,000. These are only two differences between project and professional studios and the costs are already miles apart. Add another $1200 to $2500 more for professional speakers. Another $500 - $1200 for professional microphones and you can see why the horsepower of the two studio options is so different. But - does all this extra money equal better performance? Yes.

Basic recording features do not vary much from a project studio to a professional studio. Room acoustics, microphones, and other factors change - but the core software element of recording audio does not. Many aspiring pop stars and musicians choose to spend the money to properly treat one room as a recording room and buy one good microphone so they can record in the comfort of their own home. They can then take the recorded tracks to a professional studio to have mixed and mastered by a pro engineer in a pro studio. This is a great option and will be the core element of the rest of this article. For those of you with the extra money to build a professional studio you can contact me through email ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and I can assist you in your endeavor.

In Part 2 of this article I will dive deep into treating your room, buying a good microphone, and picking the best software/computer your budget will allow.