Equipping Your Home Studio
How do you choose a recording interface to record yourself at home? What other gear is required? Let’s talk about that very subject!
Lots of music is today produced outside the traditional recording studio. I am not suggesting in any way that those great studios are irrelevant, what I am suggesting is that you have alternatives for demos, rehearsal recordings and learning to record and do some self-production. It’s a learning process, like anything else, but is a great deal of fun and a great complement to being your own musician.
Recording at home is not a new idea. Keith Richards was using a portable cassette deck back in the sixties to record his ideas and to flesh them out. The Edge is widely known for having cabinets of tapes for trying out songs, effect chaining and demos to share with the band. Today lots of musicians who don’t have the cash to book time in a big studio or are really solo artists having fun are recording at home, producing at home, and then releasing their music on their own websites, on YouTube and on other social media.
Doing this requires some basic kit and that’s our topic today.
In no particular order here’s what you will NEED, followed later by what is nice or good to have;
Musical Instrument - for our purposes let’s call that a guitar
Quality guitar cable as short as possible for practical use, but no shorter
Recording interface
Microphone(s) for vocals, for recording acoustic guitars and for miking up amplifiers where necessary
Personal computer with available ports to connect the recording interface
Digital Audio Workstation - recording software
Studio Headphones or Powered Monitors
I’m going to move ahead assuming that you have a musical instrument and a very good cable. If you don’t have a very good cable, you are going to want to get one. Consider the information in this article as suitable guidance.
Recording Interface
The recording interface that you choose may change over time based on needs and your computer technology. As I am writing this in 2021, I would recommend that so long as your computer has the appropriate ports available, to select an interface that supports at least Thunderbolt 3 or USB 3. As communication from the interface to the computer is bi-directional, with some interfaces taking on a chunk of the processing load, you want the fastest and highest bandwidth connectivity possible.
The most important question to ask up front is how many tracks you will be recording simultaneously. If for example, you will only be recording one instrument at a time, and adding tracks for additional instruments and or vocals over time, you do not require a lot of ports on your recording interface. Most “solo” interfaces have two ports, one microphone input with preamp that can be switched to line level and a high impedance instrument interface where you can plug the cable of your guitar in directly. There are a number of different manufacturers in the space, however I will only speak to the ones that I have or do still own.
At the lower end of the price scale is the Focusrite Scarlet Solo. I own the 3rd generation unit which is USB3 connected. It has a microphone input with a Focusrite preamp, can deliver Phantom Power (condenser and ribbon microphones typically need this) and incorporates the ability to activate Focusrite’s AIR technology which creates some sense of space in the signal. There is also a line input capable of being switched to instrument level. On the back are outputs for powered monitors and there is a headphone jack on the front. You can configure the outputs to be direct monitoring or use the signal back from the DAW to your listening mode. Here in Canada, the unit retails for about $169 CAD. I cannot recall if it came with the USB3 cable or not, so be sure to get one that goes from the interface to whatever type USB3 port is on your computer.
My interfaces of choice come from Universal Audio. I own two Apollo Twin X Thunderbolt 3 systems connected to Macintosh computers and one Apollo Solo Thunderbolt 3 interface connected to a Windows 11 machine. UA Apollo devices have superb UA preamps and when used with Universal Audio plugins offload all the CPU load for plugin processing to the interface itself. This means that if you use plugins (and at some point you will) and you choose the higher performing UA plugins, they have a place to run. The one downside to UA plugins is that they require an Apollo interface to be active and connected to run. More on plugins later. I find these units to be extremely low latency. The Solo has two microphone inputs, switchable to line level capable of accepting both XLR and 1/4” balanced inputs as will as a high impedance instrument input. Like the Scarlett, only two channels can be enable simultaneously. The Apollo Solo also has direct outputs for powered monitors. The Apollo Twin X adds L and R line level outputs, and also offers a fibre optic input. I use this input with a cable from my Universal Audio OX amplifier device which not only offers load balancing but can feed your amplifier signal direct to the Twin X and includes both amp and speaker cabinet simulations. That’s a different conversation..
The Apollo Solo Heritage Edition which includes a starter pack of UA plugins (worth it, trust me) sells for $879 CAD and the Apollo Twin X Heritage Edition (same starter pack of UA plugins) sells for $1399 CAD. Note that Thunderbolt cables are NOT included in the box, so you will have to buy them separately and I find that quite annoying. But I did it because the interfaces are so darn good.
If I needed more simultaneous microphone or line inputs, I would choose a larger device. For example, the Apollo X8p offers eight simultaneous microphone inputs plus eight line level inputs.
Microphones
Guitarists often fall into, or like me, leap into, the concept that the correct number of guitars to own is one more than whatever you have now. Microphone enthusiasts fall into the same kind of trap. If you go that way, it’s not my fault as I am going to try to keep things simple based on my experience.
I have many microphones acquired over decades. In this space, I am going to stick to microphones used for recording. Let’s start with the defacto choice microphone for recording speaker cabinets.
You cannot go wrong in this scenario with a Shure SM57. These microphones have been used to record speaker cabinets for decades and are still popular today because they excel at this task. An SM57 is a dynamic microphone that requires no phantom power and is connected via an XLR cable to your microphone input on your recording interface. They sell for about $129 CAD and are super tough. You can use condenser and ribbon microphones to record speaker cabinets, but you will be into more money and you will not know the difference until you develop skills as a producer. As a place to start, you need an SM57 in your kit. Get a cable that is long enough to go from where the cabinet is to the recording interface and don’t skimp on the quality of the microphone cable. XLR cables are balanced, so there is less line loss, but an internally crap cable is not going to help your sound, and the $6 you may have saved will not help at all.
So my solution to piezos follows two possible routes.
The first is give up on them and use microphones to record the acoustic guitar.
The second is to have them removed by a professional and replaced with a K&K Pure Mini pickup.
The third route is to run the signal from the piezo equipped guitar to the only acoustic amplifier line that I can stand (AER) and use their DI out to my interface. Hate is a strong word, so let me say that the AER Compact 60 (I own the Tommy Emmanuel signature version) is the only acoustic amp that I have tried that does not make my teeth hurt. I have tried Fishman, Marshall, Mesa/Boogie and the endless variants of Fender Acoustasonic amps and disliked them all.
Your mileage may of course vary.
You may also need to record acoustic guitars that do not have an instrument out. Those that do, you would run straight to the instrument input on your recording interface using a high quality guitar cable. But many older acoustics and higher end acoustics do not come with pickups and preamps so you are going to need/want to use a microphone to record the guitar. There are multiple schools of thought on microphones and how many microphones to use for acoustic guitars so we will come back to that in a minute.
When starting out, you will want to keep expenses down without sacrificing quality, so my opinion on the best microphone that can record vocals OR acoustic guitars is from Aston. I own other microphones, as well as performance vocal microphones, but for recording with one mic, the Aston Origin is the way to go. There is a higher end model called the spirit which offers selectable patterns, but I’ve never needed that, so didn’t go that route. If you are going to use this for vocals as well as guitar, order the Aston Swift Shield Combo which includes an isolation mount and pop filter that works a charm and also looks like you are a serious professional. Superior to buying a separate shockmount and pop filter thing separately as far as I am concerned. You may not be as aware of Aston as other microphone makers, yet I encourage you to go this route. You will not be disappointed. The Aston Origin sells for $379 CAD and the Swift Shield Combo sells for $119 CAD.
If you want to go the two microphone route for acoustic guitars, you are going to be buying two microphones as a matched pair. Remember as well that to use these, your recording interface will need to provide two microphone preamps at the same time, so the Focusrite Solo is out as your choice there. In this recording scenario, the global studio standard is to use a Neumann matched pair, but that is what I call a bucket of money, and I have found that a matched pair of RODE NT5 microphones that sell in a kit for $569 CAD cannot be beat for the investment. I did try the RODE M5 pair and did not like them except for the low price. The NT5 pair definitely sounds better. As these are condenser microphones, they each require phantom power (+48v) on your recording interface. Use high quality microphone cables as always.
Microphones should also be fixed mount for recording. No Roger Daltrey theatrics in the studio. You want to avoid having the guitar move around while recording and vocalists should come to the microphone, not bring the microphone to themselves. Many starter vocalists have no microphone training to change their position as they alter the strength or spread of their vocals so prepare to ride the input levels as you record, or be ready to normalize the tracks in the DAW during production.
Consequently, microphones should be mounted on STURDY microphone stands and I would argue that every microphone stand should have a boom arm so the stand itself is not leaning up against the vocalist or in the player’s way. I’ve bought into the Hercules line of microphone stands as I have for guitar stands. Have never had an issue.
As with the instrument, I am going to assume that you have a personal computer with enough memory and free disk space for this project. Either Windows or Macintosh will get the job done. Pick your platform and it will be fine, just be aware that some DAW software is Mac only (GarageBand, Logic Pro and UA LUNA).
Digital Audio Workstation Software (DAW)
There are a great many DAW packages out in the world. The one used most often by producers is AVID Protools which is very powerful but has a somewhat steep learning curve. Protools First is free and is a good tool for the home recordist and can be learned reasonably quickly by following tutorials. It runs on Windows and Mac. I am not a big fan myself, because a) I have not invested the time to learn its interface and b) although free, it uses the most annoying iLok copy protection model which I personally find to be a pain in the ass. A very popular DAW is Ableton. The UI is pretty simple, although being a Mac person first, I find it ugly. For most home recordists Ableton Live Lite is a great place to start and it is free. It runs on Windows and Mac. While I have it installed on the Windows box, I do not use it myself because I have not invested the time to learn its UI. The Windows based DAW that I use most (it does run on Macs as well) is Adobe Audition. Audition is part of the greater Adobe Creative Suite which is a monthly subscription or available as a single product monthly subscription. Since I subscribe to the full suite for other reasons, Audition is available to me. Audition was first designed as the audio complementary tool to the Premiere Pro video editing tool and to some extent still feels like a filmmaker’s audio engineering space. It is however, quite easy to use and the names of tools and processes are quite consistent with other more music specific DAWs. Another free recording app is Audacity, but I would not call it a full DAW. Great little recording app though.
Coming from the Mac space, I started out with GarageBand that is included with macOS at no cost. It has a beautiful simple interface and while not nearly as powerful as Logic Pro X, has most everything the home recordist / producer is likely to need. There’s also a huge user community that tends to be pretty darn helpful. If you are a Mac owner, start here. If you need more professional features including clocking, sidechains and the like, you can move up to Logic Pro. This is professional studio grade software, not dissimilar in power to Protools (studio edition) but with, to me, because I know it, a really superlative user interface. The learning curve is longer than for GarageBand, but anything you learn in GarageBand is nicely portable to Logic Pro X. It has better control surface support in my experience than GarageBand, but if you get to the point where you are spending money on a control surface, you are way past starting out.
UA’s LUNA is a special case. It is Mac only and requires the presence of a UA interface to run. It also uses that annoying iLok thing, even though it is a no cost product. The interface is very simple and you can be going quite quickly which is fine if your home studio is a UA shop. I’ve been using it off and on for about six months and like it but am not yet ready to dump Logic Pro.
Studio Headphones and or Monitors
To get a good idea of what your recording sounds like, you need a pair of good headphones. I have tried many. When recording, I prefer over ear headphones that exclude other noise passively and after much trial and error have standardized on Focal Listen Professionals. They sell for $399 CAD and deliver sounds that you have missed in other headphones. They are the best that I have found under $1000.
When playing back recorded tracks, you may also want to hear them as folks might on their home stereo or in their car. For this purpose, powered monitors connected to your interface make a lot of sense. These are not “computer speakers”, a euphemism for often overpriced offerings of dubious audio quality. Studio monitors are a different game entirely. I own studio monitors from Focal, KRK and M-Audio. I like them in that order too. The Focal monitors are superb, there really is nothing that comes close. I am using the Alpha 50 monitors connected to an Apollo Twin X to a Mac in the studio and like them very much. Mine are one version old, the replacements are the Alpha 50 EVO units. They sell for $490 CAD per unit. I have a pair of KRK G4 Rokit 5 speakers connected to a Mac via an Apollo Twin X. They are quite good, a bit less expensive than the Focals. Not as fine a sound as the Focals in my opinion, but still quite good. They sell for $239 CAD per unit. KRK is part of Gibson brands now and I have to confess that makes me a bit nervous given what has happened to other products that have become part of Gibson (Mesa/Boogie). The M-Audio monitors are older AV40 units and have been repaired for a failed power unit. They are connected to a Windows 11 machine via an Apollo Solo. They’re not as good sounding as the KRKs. I also have a pair of AV32s on my office windows machine for Teams and Zoom calls and they are good for that. If I were buying new, I would stay away from M-Audio because of poor support experiences with the company in the past, but that’s merely my opinion.
I hope that this lengthy article proves helpful to you. If you have questions, click here to submit one. Otherwise, thanks for reading and until next time, peace.
