How to Set Up a Home Recording Studio That Works for You

This is an excerpt from chapter 2 – Setting up a Home Recording Studio from Recording Strategies – Planning the Perfect Session.

Chances are you either have a home recording studio already set up or dreams of it in your head.

Everyone today is able to create their own little recording space for their productions. But don’t just buy the equipment like we discussed in chapter 1 and be done with it. Your most valuable equipment breaks down into two things.

Your Room and Your Ears

You don’t want your room interfering with what you are hearing. By treating your room acoustically, both with absorption and diffusion you will create better recordings and mixes. By reducing reflections and flattening the frequency response of your room to the best of your abilities, you will hear the instruments better; you won’t have echoes and reflections bothering your sound, and you will have a more controlled work space.

Setting up an Ergonomic Work Space

Let’s assume you have a room at your disposal that you can use as your studio. Some people have to make do with a corner in their bedroom, but in order to demonstrate how to have a good working home studio, we’ll assume you have the whole room at your disposal.

If you are like most home recording hobbyists, you will be doing all of the work from recording instruments to mixing and mastering in this room. This has some disadvantages but nothing you can’t work with.

Try to separate your room into two different areas: the “control room” and the recording space. I have self-made baffles out of carpet foam and blankets that create a fairly comfortable and quiet recording area in the corner of my room. The control room area consists of my desk three quarters from one of the end walls.

This is where I do all extraneous noise from outside when I’m working with MIDI, it’s very comfortable to set up your controller by your computer keeping everything within easy reach.

Recording gets a little more tedious, especially when I’m recording myself, since I have to get situated at the recording space and hit RECORD at the same time. But the benefits of having a quiet and comfortable recording space make- up for it…

This was an excerpt from Recording Strategies – Planning the Perfect Session.

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