Pointers on Making a Home Recording Studio on a Little Budget
When you decide you want to build a mini recording set up you are starting on a journey which will bestow you with an investment that will last a lifetime. The beauty of recording your music is that even if you don’t advance it to the peak of the charts you can capture a point in your life which will go on forever for your future descendants of family to have and see a snapshot of your time on earth. If that’s not a good rationale to get one I don’t know what is.
On to the musical side anyway, to make your set up the very basic item you need is a computer or laptop. You need the top specification you can buy as sound recording can really stretch the possibilities of its potential. you should keep this computer unplugged from the internet. The main reason is loss of information from downloading something and crashing the whole thing. Also it could simply slow it down and affect recording.
I’m assuming you’re already a talented musician but just to confirm you’ll need instruments, the most obvious being a guitar, bass and drums. You have these so let’s start a studio. The initial thing you need is a condenser microphone. This is a designated studio piece of equipment, not suitable for live shows due to the sensitiveness of the diaphragm which picks up the music. Make sure you pick one with phantom power, specifically 48v. This is a small amount of electricity which passes through the microphone to enhance the distinctiveness of the sound.
Your next piece of equipment is an audio-midi interface. This is a small box which plugs into the USB port on your computer and then you can connect in a variation of guitar and speaker wires to process the sound into your computer for recording. Make sure you can work with XLR, quarter inch jack and MIDI cables.
Now you need to hear the sound so you need two items, get some decent headphones ideally the big ones that completely cover your ears and drown out outside sound, these will be used for vocals when you want to sing but not capture the accompaniment sounds at the same time. You also need decent studio speakers. These have a higher variety of frequencies than the usual home stereo ones as you will be capturing in top quality definition.
At this point a good optional but not essential is a MIDI keyboard which is almost identical to the standard musical keyboard but can be used to not only lay down piano type sounds but using special computer applications you can record drums via the MIDI keyboard instead of setting up a kit in the corner of your room.
Last but not least, you need a computer music editing program. These days there are a huge number of choices, to select one to get you started take a look at Cubase and go from there. This is essentially where you process the music from the audio interface into the computer on the application where you can mix, edit and generate.
The benefits of this arrangement is you can put all these items in your spare room at home and with a bit of hunting you can snap these up even on a small budget. This is a basic mini set up but it is ideal to build a complete song which up against the help of internet music websites could be the next big number one. Good luck to you.
Best One Entertainment is the provider of live bands to the North West and UK-Wide. Music For A Wedding We also offer advice on the site for the planning and organisation of your day.
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