Home Recording On A Shoestring Budget

Home recording on a shoestring budget had really never been more possible. I’ve been doing it for many years and now have my best set up yet. Ironically it has cost less and involves far less equipment than ever before. Here’s a walk through of how it has evolved – might save you sone time and give you some ideas.

I first started recording semi-seriously in my first little one bedroom flat. Actually it wasn’t even a one bedroom. It had two big rooms – a living room and a second room which had a bed alcove and a tiny kitchen in it. My partner (in music and life) and I used the living room as our studio. We also did a lot of recording at our rehearsal space, an old barn at a friend’s farm house. We’d get the drums down there, maybe the bass and sometimes a guitar and guide vocal.

I the early days we used 4 track tape recorders before moving on to an 8 track digital machine. I paid the bills an AV technician at the time so was able to borrow equipment too. I’d borrow headphone amps, mics and cables for our barn sessions. I also got a long term loan of an old 24 track mixing desk for the flat. We swapped Mo’s old Roland Keyboard for a Korg x3 sequencer (which we still have) and added an ancient Atari sequencer and Akai s2000 sampler.

The Live In Studio

This all lived in the living room of our little pad and did us proud for a few years. One of our drummers back then was a dab hand at programming drums on his Alesis SR16. That was a vast improvement on the first live drum recordings we were able to do. I bought one of the first Line 6 Pod’s when they came out so aside from vocals we were well set up for home recording on a shoestring budget. By being resourceful and picking up bargain basement kit and borrowing what we could  we got a lot done in that little place.

It was however getting a bit cramped in there. A promotion at work brought a chunky pay rise so we decided to move to a bigger flat. That gave us a pretty large spare room which could be devoted to studio duties. A bed settee accommodated guests and helped a little with acoustics. 

More money made it possible at this point to make a couple of bigger investments. We sold off the Yamaha 8 track and bought a Roland 24 track digital workstation. It was an awesome piece of kit. It did cost around £2500 at the time but did everything we needed and more. Next we added a Roland electronic drum kit, and a couple of rack mounted FX units. Now we could practice and record live at low volume at home. We could also take the workstation to a rehearsal room if we wanted to record loud drums and guitars. 

Home Studio Mark II

So depending on what your idea of a shoestring budget is our studio probably cost in total around £3500. In those days (2000-2005) you’d pay around £350 to record and mix 3 songs in a bargain basement pro studio. You’d be in  too much of a hurry and would inevitably be disappointed in the results. You’d also pay around £8 per hour to rehearse. We recorded several albums worth of material in there, practiced for free whenever we wanted and eventually resold all the kit. I think that definitely qualifies as home recording on a shoestring budget.

To cut a long story short Mo and I took a break from music for a while before putting together our current set up. We got back into writing and recording after moving out to the coast. We got friendly with a local band who I did some recoding for on the Roland. They ended up buying it and I bought a little audio interface and started messing around with Garageband on my Macbook. 

I pretty quickly saw what I’d been missing in the computer recording revolution. During our break I’d sold off all of the rack stuff, my guitar pedals, POD and some other bits n bobs. We basically had our instruments, a pair of monitors, headphones, some mics, the Focusrite interface and Garageband. These days that’s pretty much all you actually need. But I was spending a lot of time on Youtube learning about DAW’s production and acoustic treatments. So…..

Home Studio Mark III – Small Is Beautiful In The Digital Domain

I upgraded to Logic Pro X during Lockdown. Although I quite liked a few of the amp models available within both Garageband and Logic I still had my old Marshall Valve amp. I wanted to at least be able to use it again. I bought a used Boss GT100 which contains a load of effects as well as some really good digital amp models. 

As befits the ever diminishing size of recording equipment in the digital arena, our current recording space is our smallest ever. Since we record drums, electric guitars and synths completely “In the box”, a dedicated room is really only needed for recording acoustic guitars, Mo’s cello and vocals and for mixing. As I do lot of video work – including for our songs – the room also has a green wall for chroma key. 

I recently built some acoustic panels for it. In keeping with the home recording on a shoestring ethos, they were very inexpensive. I bought some cheap strip wood from the local DIY shop to make frames. Some memory foam and carpet underlay that we already had kicking around went inside and I covered them with jungle themed fabric from a duvet cover we weren’t using. I need to make one more “cloud” panel for the ceiling but it already sounds much better than it did. 

We quite often do a lot editing in our living room where I have an interface set up on our hifi. We work in the studio for final mixing as well as recording. The full cost, considering we already had most of the hardware – mics, instruments, cables, Macbook etc, is probably around £1000.