5 Great Pieces of Kit For Your Home Recording Studio
Last time we looked at getting a demo recording done in a studio. This week it’s the home recording studio. At the end of the day, for professional sounding recordings there’s really no substitute to a studio BUT; It costs money. The advantage, if you can afford it is that you and your band mates are free to concentrate on the creative side of things. You don’t need to worry about placing mikes, minimising spill, and a host of other processes. You just play your parts.
Home Recording On A Budget – Old School Rocks
Personally though I’m from the old school and prefer plugging into a dedicated bit of recording equipment. For a long time now that’s been a Roland digital 24 track recorder and if needs be the recordings made on that can be moved into the Mac and further processed. This all depends on how hands on you want to be when it comes to home recording. I personally like playing with microphones, compressors and machines in general – you might not.
The Home Studio Advantage
What we used to do was cart the Roland, and a pile of mics and headphones to our rehearsal room and record everything there. I went to the extent of recording the individual drum sounds onto separate tracks and using them to trigger midi drum sounds later so that there would be no spill.
I was looking for perfection on a budget and lost site of the fact that perfection is not really necessary on a demo. We were not thinking demo at the time though as we were producing CD albums that we sold at gigs to finance support tours – so it was worth the extra effort. For home recording demo’s I’d take the following approach.
I’ve assembled a few inexpensive home recording devices here that will do what you need. If it won’t offend your drummer I’d also programme the drums – our drummer was ace at doing this and so didn’t feel miffed at not actually being on the recordings – it was after all what he would play in real life. The drums also sounded a lot better than they we could do recording them live in an old barn.
Later on we invested in a set of electronic drums and they were a godsend. We could record everything live in a bedroom sized home recording studio, at hi-fi volume using a pod for guitar and bass. The keyboard was just plugged in direct and vocals done later. This is a great way to work and you can get some superb results.
Here then are a few bits of kit you could look at investing in. Given the comparative cost of studio time they will pay for them selves many times over in a short space of time. Click on pics to learn more and buy them (these are all from Amazon so if they are not available in your country click through to one of our preferred partners on any of the banners to the right)Hint: Older home recording equipment is a steal right now
