I guess there's two ways to make your own recording studio. There's your dream studio, it's the one where if you're laying in bed at night and you're like I want a recording studio and maybe you can't sleep and you're trying to visualize what you would have. You'd have an old two inch machine in the corner and you'd have the newest computer software over here, you'd have a great old console in the middle, you'd have a nice recording space, everything would be soundblocked off. Isolation, noise diffusion everywhere, you'd be sitting in a nice pristine flat room where there are no reflections from walls and audio wouldn't be bouncing off and what you would hear would be absolutely true. You could spend thousands if not tens of thousands if not more trying to accomplish that. And I wouldn't dissuade anybody from trying to do that. There's always a market for a good room, people always find you. I think starting off at your house - I think it's important that you start off with monitors, obviously, the end product of music is what you're hearing so it's a good place to start. Evenly spaced monitors, kind of set out away from the wall to give it a good amount of free air space so you're not getting a lot reverberated sounds, false impressions of what's really coming from the speakers. You can buy self powered reference monitors, you can buy them separately and get you know some really good monitors and have a separate amplifier. You'll probably need some kind of mixer at home if you were going to start out maybe start off with a little Mackie VLZ, very low noise, sixteen channel, you'd bring all your channels into that. If you're obviously starting off with a computer, Macintosh laptops are fine, you can do the M audio box which is basically two inputs, two outputs for really small stuff but it will get you started. You can do vocals and guitars at the same time and maybe kind of create things around that. For a good project studio there is a Digi 02 where you have eight inputs, eight outputs, get good frequency range, good bit depth, I think it's also important that you recognize the situation where you're putting this thing, that - they're aren't a lot of other noises around, if you need to you can get loud without offending the neighbors. If you live in an apartment this is kind of one of the tougher things to do is kind of put up a little studio, you'll be in headphones a lot and I think the first rule of headphones is try not to use them. A lot of people lose their hearing just directly injecting sound into the ears and it's not necessarily the best way to listen to things. You will hear certain things you won't hear otherwise but try and stay out of it. So say you have your monitor system, your play back system that's good, you have your speakers out, amplified or not, you have a little mixing board, you have your computer set up. You can probably get away with all of that for under twenty-five hundred dollars to get you started. I think another important part of recording at home is the representation back to you of what you recorded. I think that's probably the cornerstone basically of all recording and making music is that the reference that you get back of what you recorded is accurate. Accuracy and the reproduction allows you to make decisions in terms of mixes and levels that allow you to make those changes effective where you're not compensating for speakers that have too much low end on them or a room where there's reflections coming from the back of the room, of audio hitting them and coming back and reflecting into your ears so you get these artifacts of things that aren't truly in the audio that might affect the clarity of what you're doing. And it might not actually give you the best representation. I think the cornerstone really is what you're hearing back to you.
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