How To Build A Spare-Room Recording Studio On A Budget

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So you want to be a rock-star. Or maybe you want to start a podcast, like almost everyone you know. Or perhaps you just want to do a really good job of reading public domain audiobooks for LibriVox. What you need is a home recording studio, and it's fairly simple if your spouse will give up their bowling trophy room.

The stuff you need is surprisingly similar regardless of whether you're singing, chatting, or reading into a microphone. The idea is to get the key components in your "signal chain" (the flow of music through your studio system) optimized for the best possible recording, according to the Give a Note blog.

Just keep your goals in mind, and be reasonable. You could easily spend $200,000 and two years setting up the perfect home studio. And while experience is ultimately the key to good recording, there are some expenses you can't avoid (via E-Home Recording Studio). Fortunately, we can give you some ways to simplify things to keep your financial investment and some of your time investment to a minimum.

We'll even teach you how to make one of those cool "On Air" signs to intimidate your kids into leaving you alone while you're in there belting out a bluegrass version of some Radiohead song. (Come to think of it, a bluegrass version of Radiohead would keep the kids away without any help.)

A room that's perfectly and completely treated to purify sound can be a fairly terrifying experience. You can read about these anechoic rooms, perhaps at Antenna Test Lab, to see how you might emulate them, but you are not likely to get very close. Nor should you, really: an acoustically "dead" room has problems of its own.

You probably don't have a lot of choices in terms of room shape or size, so you will need to make the best of the space you do have. There are two keys to making this work: Acoustic treatment, and a vocal isolation booth. A well-done, nearly dead room can cost a fortune. But acoustic treatments keep your expensive gear and efforts from going to waste, and so are the most important part of your home studio.

Mixing in a space that hasn't been treated is like driving blindfolded, says Charles Hoffman of Black Ghost Audio. You don't have any idea what the music actually sounds like. Hoffman goes into a lot of technical detail, but the gist is that you want to minimize sound bouncing off of walls. You'll do this by strategically placing sound-absorbing panels in your studio. Absorb sound above your desk, in corners, and in walls to the left, right and rear of your desk. You may also want to soundproof a door. 

It's okay for a room to have some acoustic flaws (that's "character") for general recording, but you need to isolate vocals as much as possible. You can build a booth of acoustic panels, or use a miniature portable mic booth, or both. One common solution is to hang moving blankets to form a recording booth.

Finally, decouple your studio monitors' vibrations from the floor by isolating them with pads or feet, which you can easily find on Amazon.

All of that replacing we talked about above is actually done by your Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), which makes it clearly the single most important component of your home studio setup. Because each DAW is different enough to require many hours of experience to master, producers tend to cling to their favorites with religious fervor. But the truth is that you can get DAWs for a wide range of purposes and mostly at extremely high quality for free, for relatively little, or for big bucks. In fact, some of the less expensive DAWs are equipped to enable high-end functionality you can't get anywhere else.

You can choose among several categories in choosing a DAW. Obviously, you can go full-price for the best software out there, which might be free (via Produce Like a Pro) or very cheap (via Reaper). You can choose free but limited versions of these (often expensive) packages, or you can go with free software. You might also choose software aimed at beginners, like Audacity, with the goal of upgrading later. Given the time investment you're about to make in learning to use a DAW properly, it makes sense to get the best DAW you can in its fullest form (this might be $0 or $2500) and bypass the lightweight offerings like Audacity and maybe even limited versions (there are many, often available for free, sometimes with the purchase of related hardware like a USB interface).

So how do you determine what's best for you? You likely don't know enough yet to make much sense of all the comparison charts available online (The DAW Studio, Admiral Bumblebee, and this admirable Linux software chart, for example), so it might make sense to find people online who are doing what you want to do and see what they're using.

For recording vocals and any instrument that can be miked (this includes most of them, including electric guitars), it's difficult to imagine a more important piece of kit than your microphone(s). In fact, microphones might consume half of your home studio budget, but there are some good, affordable options.

There are a handful of considerations when it comes to microphones, says Musician's HQ. First, do you need condenser or dynamic mics? Condenser microphones (like the NT1, via Rode) are extremely sensitive and clear, good for recording vocals and acoustic instruments, while dynamic mics (like the Shure SM57, via Sweetwater) handle loud sound better and are great for miking electric guitars, drums, etc. Condenser mics generally require a phantom power source, usually delivered by your USB audio interface, a stand-alone device, or sometimes by the mic itself.

Another consideration is frequency response, which is a measure of how accurately the microphone outputs the sound you put into it. Many microphones "color" the sound either intentionally for particular sound sources (this is especially true of purpose-built podcasting mics, USB models, and others) or as an artifact of their design (condenser mics will tend to bump high frequencies higher, while dynamic mics often boost the low end more). Condenser mics will generally get you closest to a flat, unadulterated frequency response (via My New Microphone).

When choosing between USB and XLR microphones, buy the XLR mic. USB microphones can be quite good for simple applications like podcasting, XLRs are generally of higher quality, and they are balanced to reduce noise that is often picked up from the cabling itself. They also have the distinct advantage of being non-digital devices, meaning you can record without a computer present if you find yourself in such a situation (via Musician's HQ).

Recorded audio, whether music or podcasts, is a thing you'll usually hear through some medium (almost always air), and as such your speakers are the most important component of your studio. These speakers might take the form of headphones or studio monitors, or preferably both.

As with microphones, what you're looking for is a neutral (flat) frequency response. This can be difficult to achieve with inexpensive monitors and extremely difficult with headphones unless they are specifically designed for audio mixing. Even the best general listening headphones often intentionally color the frequency response by boosting the low end and other trickery. You could consult frequency response test results available from the fantastic RTINGS.com, and maybe even compare your own preference targets to the raw data. Okay, so you're probably not going to do that, but you could. You can dive as deep as you want.

But here's the thing: Unless you get everything else exactly right, investing in an expensive pair of studio monitors will be, in part, a waste of money. This is particularly true of acoustic treatment. If you are recording and listening to mixes in a small rectangular room with hard surfaces everywhere, you're not going to get nearly as much out of a $1,000 set of monitors as you should (via Eastwood Sound and Vision). To that end, we recommend an inexpensive quality pair of monitors with room correction, a way of adjusting output for a less-than-ideal space. Consider the 3.5" PreSonus Eris E3.5 monitors at $99.95 a pair (or the larger 4.5" and new 5.25" versions), or the Mackie CR3-XBT ($99.99/pair) if you don't think the room-correction EQ will help.

We'll echo the common guidance on headphones, via MusicRadar: grab the Sennheiser HD 206 Closed-Back Over Ear Headphones at $28.97.

OK, remember that bluegrass Radiohead thing? That was mostly a joke, but the interruptions you can expect from family and friends are serious business. What you need is a classic On Air sign, and you have lots of options at various levels of complexity. Just remember that your pets (probably) can't read, so you're going to need a plan to deal with that, too.

Bob Clagett, who's always killin' it at I Like to Make Stuff has kids who like to make interruptions, so he created a remote control On Air light. Depending on how you feel about making your own vacuum former, Bob might be overkillin' it in this case, so have a look at a simpler but very cool version from The Frugal Girls or this even simpler one from Claire at Pillar Box Blue. If you don't feel like dealing with the DIY thing, Etsy has versions ranging from $25 to $400.