With a home recording studio setup is hard to find a starting point. It can save you thousands of dollars of your money before you ever catch on. Make your first demo and touch the installation again.
When you register on this project, you need to ask some questions. Faust I'm really liking? Meaning you want your basement well and build a complete recording studio? This can be fun and rewarding monetarily if done correctly. Meaning, if you create a greatstudio in your basement with sound proof walls, control room, a monster board and so on you can rent out studio time to local bands. Not to long ago a friend tried this will some success. However the out of pocket cash was pretty large and I am not 100% sure there has been a full recoup.
The other method is the slow and steady approach to building a home recording studio setup. What I mean by this is do not put yourself into financial peril by creating this places. What do I mean by this? Well start out slow. Ask yourself why am I considering making this? What am I going to do with this once setup? Do I really need this? These are important things you need to ask yourself.
When I started doing home recording I went through the same sort of thoughts you are going through. Do I really want to clean out my saving account to do this? You may be shocked much you don't have to spend to get a good setup. Do not rush into anything.
Number one thing scout out a location for you stuff. If you can a place where you will not have to keep building and tearing down your equipment. I am not talking about gutting a room or basement just a decent location to setup and have some relative quite. Before I go to much further this is going to be a setup where you can make some basic recording of you and or your band so we are not going to be doing an over the top setup.
Ok so you have your place now comes the fun part the equipment. What will you need? Where do you start? And how do you get it? For your let's call it an entry level studio we are going to go with the basics. This is what I would recommend you have.
Digital recorder
Mics (at least 2)
Drum machine
Digital effects processor (such as digitech, line6, boss something like that)
The really great thing is digital products have come down so much over the past few years we can set this up under 0.00 if not less. There are great digital records on the market now for 0.00 and up. Products like fostex, tascam, boss and zoom these are just to name a few. Here is the kicker many of these digital records come with a dc burner and drum machine build in. this explains why I say to not rush. Now the mics I would not spend a lot of money on a mic to start out. Yes it can make a difference on the recording but to start go cheap you can always find a min on sale for very cheap online or at your local music story.
Ok to wrap this up I am going to tell you how I setup my studio with mics digital 8 track with drum machine and cd burner build in and guitar effects and I added a drum machine just for good measure for just under 0.00. EBAY! I am not knocking online music stores and online stores they have great stuff and good deals. But I was not sure how much I wanted to do and how much I was going to use this studio. As it turns out a lot and still don't need an upgrade. Basically all I did was put this small list together and just kept adding on. I would keep looking and looking and when I saw what I wanted for the price I wanted it for I would use the buy it now for the price they were asking on eBay. Making bids never works out for me somehow I always loose. The one exception being the mic I got them on clearance. My recommendation is to go with this method first. Build your studio slowly and make sure it is really something you are going to use rather than spending a lot of time and money only to find out you don't want to do this.
