Basic Equipment For Home Audio Recording
If you're just starting out, or if you don't have a lot of space or money, here are some essential equipment to get you started on your home audio setup.
Computer: Your single most important piece of equipment in your home studio will be your computer. It really doesn't matter whether or not you use a mac or a pc to record. What matters most is the amount of memory it has. Make sure you are getting something with at least 8 GB of on board memory. Anything less and you run the risk of having your computer freeze multiple times in the middle of a session and losing work.
Microphone: What you record with is extremely important. It will dictate the quality of what gets put on your computer. You can EQ many things out of a recording, but some things just need a good clean recording from a good quality microphone. The Blue brand is my personal favorite. They sound good and as a bonus they are stylish. If you do not have a midi interface try the Blue Snowball. This was my first home microphone and it has done wonders.
If you do have a midi interface, I would go with the Blue Spark microphone. I use it in the studio on all of my acoustic covers.
Headphones: For a basic home audio setup, you can get away with not having monitors, as long as you have quality headphones. The best has been and still is Bose. After Bose, I would recommend either, Sennheiser or Beats By Dre. Then I would recommend Sony MDR-V150
External Harddrive: The best advice anyone could give about recording is to always backup your work. The best product to backup your large files would be with an external harddrive that is at least 500GB, although now you can get a 1TB on sale for close to the price of the 500GB. Western Digital is widely used, followed by Seagate.
Software: You do not need Pro Tools to start with. If you have a mac, master GarageBand first, then move onto Logic and Logic Pro. A good piece of software to use on a PC is Adobe Audition and then move onto Reason.
Once you have these items, you can begin to really expand your recording setup.
