This is the second part of a this mini-series, if you haven’t yet read the first post you’ll want to read Setting up a Home Studio.

The Studio Chair

This leads us into our next key piece of equipment to rig up a comfortable and efficient home/project recording studio, the studio chair.

This can be an overlooked, yet vital piece of equipment for any producer or home recordist. The chair will also effect the level and height, and sometimes, in my opinion, it always, better to be able to adjust. Get an adjustable chair. Preferably not something that squeeks alot, but invest a little time and money into getting at least a decent chair. One of the staple line of chairs for music producers are the Aeron Chairs by Herman Miller, but not everyone can afford that.

How to Setup Your Home Studio

You’ve just purchased your home studio gear and are eager to set everything up, you look around and without hesitation you set your speakers on your computer, plop your audio interface down on top of them, set your keyboard on the floor, you furiously start plugging cords in to the closest matching corresponding shapes and before you know it, you’ve hooked everything together.

The problem is that in your haste to finally be able to produce sound and lay down your musical ideas, you didn’t take into consideration the fact that their is a much more optimal way to setup your home studio, and this requires a little bit of thought and consideration to the room, environment, and configuration of your equipment.

Building and Maintaining a state of the art music computer for your home recording studio

Your computer doesn’t have to be used solely for music production, but you’ll want to understand how you can rig it up intelligently to optimize your computer for home recording. Obviously you want the most powerful machine you can afford, and where it really counts is in the RAM (memory) and processor. I’ll try not to geek out on you too much, and just keep it as simple and straightforward as possible.

Optimize Your DAW Computer for Home Recording

Now that you have your home recording goals identified, your budget figured out, and notes written down.

Hopefully you have selected your platform and and may even have the computer and DAW software.

Lets go through the rundown of what recording equipment you’ll need to outfit yourself with a very capable home recording studio, and modern music production environment. I’ll give you a price range, that unless you are going into this as a purely professional endeavor, wouldn’t venture to far over, if this is your first recording rig.

So, given you have a capable computer and recording software also known as DAW software, you’ll want the following:

So what you need, given you have a computer and your DAW software.

First Considerations For Your Home Recording Studio

The first considerations you need to make before building your home studio is what your goals are, what you are trying to achieve, and what you would like your rig to expand into in the future. This is the first stop on this tour, and let’s start to address your home recording goals by answering the following questions:

Who are you going to be recording?

What are you going to be recording?

How many inputs and outputs do you need?

How big would like your studio to grow?

What are your aspirations?

How much money have you budgeted?

From large commercial recording facilities where an outboard mixing console may cost more than the house surrounding a budget conscious bedroom home recording studio, the signal chain is STILL the channel, or pathway that an audio signal travels from its original sound source into an electrical signal and reproduced through the monitoring system or speakers that send the sound to your ears.

Signal chain, signal flow, signal path, recording chain… They are all terms for the process of sound production. A signal chain takes audio from one place, state, format, into another, and ends at a destination.

Different signal chains have different purposes, such as producing music for live sound and for recording.

Now that we understand and have identified our Home Recording Goals, it is time to start with the first fundamental gear selection consideration, your home recording platform.

Your platform is the center of your studio, it is like choosing the kind of house you are going to build. It is the foundation. You can build a different foundation, and always add on the foundation you have, but the idea is to choose the right foundation so you don’t waste any time or money and can just build additions ONTO and upgrade your foundation for the rest of your life.

Its obviously not anywhere near the cash or time investment as building a house, of course, and their are workarounds… So although this is a big decision, keep it in context.

DAW Software is really the brains of your home studio system. Now a primarily a computer based recording system, there are several major players across the Mac and PC platform. The features and functions, layout and underlying logic are going to either work for you, or not. It’s best to find the one that works WITH you, fits your style, workflow and taste. It stands to reason, then, that the DAW software could be the primary basis on your platform decisions. It may be worth poking around and seeing who you know or who you can contact, or where you can go to test out the different DAW platforms to see which one clicks with you too.

What is a DAW?