Equipping a small recording studio comes with a list of things you simply must have in order to set everything ready for work. But although you may think that this move is somehow complex and requires a lot of thinking, planning and a significant amount of money spent on equipment, relax: it’s a lot easier and not as expensive as you may have heard. However, what you do need to have in advance, is a dose of knowledge in the area, a desire to create music and to actually be devoted to that job. Otherwise, your equipment will turn out to be quite expensive. So, in a nutshell, you’ll need to buy sound equipment elements and a few cables to connect everything and start working.
The Headphones
The first thing to get when you buy sound equipment is a pair of quality headphones. You don’t need more than a pair simply because at the beginning, you’ll be recording by yourself. But, you do need one pair of quality headphones, and specifically, one of the 2 very specific designs:
- closed headphones for tracking – which offer optimal isolation but the quality of the sound is significantly lower;
- open back headphones – which offer the reverse combination: better sound quality, but less isolation.
Professional suggestion would be to go for the closed back headphones as these are considered necessary for every first-time recording studio.
Studio Monitors
You probably know these as speakers, as they were commonly known before they became studio monitors and nearfield monitors. As it seems, these are a lot more sophisticated in their design, and feature a number of tonal enhancements, which allows the sound to be of a better quality, which wasn’t a case with the previous devices. The flatter frequency response, which results in a totally uncoloured sound, is what makes these speakers such a necessary piece of sound equipment for a basic recording studio.
A Computer
I don’t need to mention how important it is to have a computer and a special software that will allow you to record, mix and alter sounds in order to create music. Ideally, you’ll want to have the fastest one for your work, but all of today’s computers offer a pretty satisfying speed of work which makes them perfect for starting small. With the fast computer comes the DAW, or Digital Audio Workstation, which is a software for mixing, editing and recording music on a PC. This comes with an interface, which is the hardware with which you connect your gear to the computer. For a first-time studio, it would be best to get the combo: the interface and the software as a package instead buying them separately.
To sum up, these would be the basic elements for starting to record music. Of course, you’d need a few basic cables to connect all the elements, but basically this is what the equipment comes down to. Once you rule this constellation of elements, you’ll know what you need to get next so you can climb the ladder in the recording area.
