Setting Up a Home Studio (Start Here)

hey this is Joe from the recording Revolution this video is for you if you are at the very beginning of your journey and you're just curious about this whole home recording studio thing you're probably a musician you probably have friends that are doing some recording at home or maybe you've seen it on social media and you wonder I mean that looks really fun is it fun is it achievable for somebody like me and if I wanted to get into it where would I start as you can imagine I can't teach you everything you need to know about this wonderful world of music production in a single YouTube video but my goal for this video is to give you a good idea of what to expect and to give you some very specific concrete steps to take next so help you figure out what pieces of gear you need and what you don't need and some ways to think about the process of recording and what that will look like for you to help you better make a decision if you want to get into home recording or maybe go get into woodworking instead all right let's dive in the first piece

of the puzzle is of course equipment what gear do you need to get started there's lots of gear out there you could spend the rest of your life researching equipment I don't want you to do that I want you to get rolling and start making some music because you're going to discover that it's amazing and fun and I want you to get there as soon as possible so there are really only five pieces of equipment that you need five Necessities to get started making music in a home studio and then you can add to that as much as you want down the road but you need these five in place to get started the first is a computer obviously you need a computer you probably have a computer it's plenty good enough to get rolling with recording the second thing you need is something called an audio interface so an audio interface is a little box usually that has USB connection so it connects to your computer via USB Thunderbolt something like that and then this is the interface that allows you to plug things like microphones and headphones and speakers in to your computer yes your computer probably has a headphone jack that's not meant for what we're talking about here and if your computer has a built-in microphone that's not what you want to use for recording you want to be able to plug in something like this into your system to record so you need an audio interface to do that the good news is you can get one of those for 100 200 bucks like there are inexpensive versions that sound great and you can get started right away third thing you need is recording software there needs to be some piece of software that you're recording into there are lots of options if you choose the right interface it'll come with software so you don't have to buy anything else I'll tell you more about that in a second the fourth thing you need is a microphone now perhaps you're only making instrumental music and you never plan to record with a microphone most people it would behoove you to have at least one microphone in Your Arsenal the good news is microphones are cheap and they can sound great this one right here I think is 129 bucks and it sounds fantastic are there 5 that sounds super great sure but you're just getting into this you can get that five thousand dollar mic later and the fifth thing that you need is a set of headphones um something like your Apple earbuds aren't quite what you need a proper set of headphones that goes over the ears can block out the sound of the world around you so you can hear what's happening but the good news is there those aren't terribly expensive either now I could go on and on about those and give you specific recommendations but I've actually already done that inside of this so this is a guide that I created it's 100 free called five home studio necessities and it walks you through these five necessities and it gives you specific examples of specific pieces of equipment that I would recommend for example here's some of the interfaces that I think you should get you can download this for free there's links in there to everything that I talk about and you can literally like put together your list of your starter home studio from this guide but then there's also in addition to the five Necessities there's also five nice to haves right so once you get the Necessities in place you might want things like speakers some sort of a keyboard controller to play keyboard we don't have to dive into that I dive into that all inside of this guide which you can have for free just go to recordingrevolution. com gear g-e-a-r enter your email address and I'll send you a free copy of this so you can know exactly what you need so

now you've got your gear in place so what exactly goes into recording a song well there are two this is an oversimplification but there are two ways to record a song one is to record it live meaning you play your instrument and sing or maybe there's a band and everyone's playing and singing and Performing the whole thing in one take live and the other way is to multi-track or to overdub the parts let's talk about the live one first now when I say live I don't necessarily mean a live concert right like a live recording at a concert venue I just mean if it's you and your band you're all playing and singing and doing everything at the same time it's all happening live or if it's just you it's you and your guitar but you're playing and singing at the same time and capturing that performance It's a Wonderful way to work because it's very fast if you perform it well you you're done in five minutes right the song is now recorded the downsides of it are you don't have a lot of control after the fact so if you made a mistake on the guitar there's not really an easy way to fix that or punch that in you just kind of have to live with it or you have to keep recording the whole thing over and over again until you get it right that might be the perfect way to go and you might say that's the one I want to do or you might opt for something that gives you a little more flexibility and take some of the pressure off of that live performance thing which is the multi-track or overdub approach the overdub approach is the more common of the two some folks like myself if I'm doing a full band thing I might do live recording of me on guitar my drummer and my bass player there we might all play at the same time so that all gets recorded at once and then I will overdub over those tracks meaning I'll add more guitars and vocals and percussion and other stuff because we're talking about multi-track recording which means I'm not just recording everything down to a single audio file I'm recording this microphone goes on its own track my guitar the different microphones on the drum kit they each go on their own track the bass player his goes on a track by itself so I can hear all of them individually but that also means I can add more tracks after the fact and I can sing into my microphone while listening to the stuff that I recorded before that's what an overdub is so this overdub approach to recording is really handy because it takes a lot of the pressure off of the musicians to have to do everything at once and to do it perfectly with an overdub session I could play the guitar part and only think about guitar without having to think about singing and if I make a mistake I can go back in what we call do a punch in where I record over that mistake spot and I only have to record that spot not the entire song again because the software lets me blend between those two different takes and it sounds like one full performance it's kind of magical and it's amazing and it's a wonderful piece of technology to have but aside from all of the cool wow factor it means that I as a musician can relax a little bit I can record my guitar part a few times I can piece together the bits from each take if I want to make the perfect take and there's not all that pressure for me to play it perfectly from downbeat to final chord another big benefit of the overdub approach is I end up getting a vocal track that only has my vocal on it since I'm not playing my guitar and singing the microphone isn't picking up my voice and also the guitar this gives me more control down the road to really make that vocal sound as good as possible without bleed from the guitar getting picked up by the microphone there are downsides to the overdub approach the first being it just takes longer right we're having to record each musician individually versus everyone together so that's necessarily going to take a longer time the second thing is with great technology comes the temptation to just record as much as possible in an attempt to make everything perfect I'll spare you the heartache you'll never get it perfect and if anything the more you try to make it perfect the worse the final outcome is sometimes it's great to just capture a performance even if it's got some problems here and there you get a better overall performance than if you were to surgically go in and record everything as perfectly as possible so with a live recording you don't have the ability to do that to waste all that time with an overdub recording you do so it's important just to remember to stay the course and try to just record it have it sound good and then move on to the next thing try not to be obsessed about making one little piece of the pie perfect because a it'll never be perfect and B perfect doesn't sound that good anyway and finally if this is the only video you ever watch from me if I could give you one piece of advice about getting into the world of learning to record your own music and then eventually learning to mix your own music which is the next step of the process I would tell you this there is a single rule of this entire process that will make your life so much better if you follow it and that rule is this get it right at the source so there's this pesky thing that comes up when you get into recording you'll record something and you'll listen back to it and say it sounds okay I can probably fix it later with software that's the Temptation because software is amazing and there are a lot of things software can do but you will never get as good a result with fixing a bad thing in software than if you fixed it on the front end by recording it again or practicing and then moving the microphone to a better position that sounds better and recording it again it's more work on the front end but a lot of people like to skip straight to the software part and think if I only become a software ninja I will solve all my problems no here's the game that I would play if I were you a challenge that you give yourself with each recording session the game is how great can I make this sound with just the raw tracks themselves before I add any plugins any extra software bits and pieces and cool stuff can I make it sound incredible just with the tracks that I record on recording day if you Faithfully stick to that you'll be more frustrated in the beginning because you'll have to do things over until they sound good not perfect just good but then the rest of the process will be so much more fun and you'll get a much better result because you're starting from a good place it's kind of like if you want to cook a really good meal you got to start with really good ingredients you can't start with crappy ingredients and then expect all the seasoning to make up for it ideally you have great ingredients with great seasoning gives you a great meal in the recording studio great tracks plus learning what to do with those tracks in the software as far as editing mixing mastering all of that then you get a great result but if any one of those pieces is subpar you're going to have subpar results and you'll be frustrated so this is something that I intuitively got when I was a 15 year old first learning how to record because I didn't even know you could fix anything with software so my entire existence was to record this guitar part until it sounded right versus record a crappy version and then try to fix it later down the road as I became more sophisticated got an audio degree I thought well shoot I'll just slap something together in the recording session and then I can go fix it with all my fancy plugins later doesn't work well and it's not nearly as fun as getting a great sounding recording that moves you emotionally when it's just in its rawest purest form thanks for watching this far I have been making videos like this since 2009 so here on the recording Revolution more recently and then also on home studio Corner which is my other YouTube channel be sure to subscribe to both there is so much free training there that will start to fill in the gaps that you'll find as you start your journey towards making music but let me just say this it is worth it as anything worth doing is going to take some effort we'll have a learning curve I promise you if you can power through and get to the point where you're starting to record and make music it is one of the most fun and satisfying things that you can do stick with it I'll be here to help you along the way thanks for watching be sure to subscribe I'll see you in the next one