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5 Things I wish I knew when I started my home recording studio

5 Things I wish I knew, when I started my home recording man-confused-cartoon-facestudio:

1 Buy gear with future expansion in mind.  This includes I/O needs.

2 Save money to buy better gear: Do not buy gear blindly because it is cheap, buy gear that will do what you need it to do.  If you buy cheap gear and it isn't up to the task, you just wasted money on the product, and now you have to save that much more to buy the proper equipment. Keep this in mind when buying, audio interfaces, computers, microphones etc.

 

3 Listening Environment: Before investing all of your money in monitors, evaluate your listening space.  It's safe to say that most home studio's are going to benefit from some Bass trapping. Take a few hours and research Bass traps, how and why they should be placed in the corners of your room.  Also learn proper speaker placement and listening position.

4 Subtractive and complimentary EQ:  Ever wonder why your mix sounds like a murky puddle of garbage and someone else can take the same tracks and made it sound crystal clear?  One giant step in the right direction is EQ.   High Pass Filter the low end out of all the instruments that are not assigned to be “the bottom”.  Instead of boosting the level or EQ of an instrument to make it stick out in a mix, try using subtractive EQ on a competing instrument in the same frequency range.  For instance, if the Bass is not cutting through clearly, try using an EQ to cut the lows out of the guitars, giving the Bass more room in the low end.

5 Distortion: Most guitars actually sound better with the distortion dialed back a bit, instead of cranked up all the way.  You can get a bigger and more open sound without the distortion knob on 10.  I played in live rock and pop bands for many years and somehow never learned this, until I started recording and couldn't figure out why my guitars sounded so....amateur. Also, Bass can really cut through a mix by adding a bit of distortion to it.  Feel free to get creative with distortion on drums, Kicks, vocals, BG vocals and anything else you can think of!

 

There are certainly a lot more things that I wish I knew when I got started, and 10 years from now there will be things I wish I knew today!  These 5 make my top 'general' list and hopefully can be of use to some of you.

 

-Mike Lizotte

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