How to Setup a Home Studio | Everything You Need to Know

You're stingy, aren't you? You don't want to keep going to the

studio

paying all our licensing fees. You don't even like Pam's producers. You get all your beats from YouTube, uh, well, but you all are cheap, I am. I'll show you how you can go ahead and put your own

studio

in your crib. Hey, what's up, family? This is your boy, Wayne Wavy, welcome to my crib for a very special Wavy Weight Tip of the Day. Now I'm just saying The Cribs episode, but if 'Everyone go to the web, don't be calm and keep supporting them, jigs and stuff, maybe I've got some lamb bones and stuff out there, so now it might be a problem, oh yes, they feel good to me, so it's a wave, the wind calms down and no Forget that if you

need

professional mixer services, you can always email me or just visit the website.

I have all the information in the link below. Well, building a

home

studio is pretty easy. It seems like everyone does it, but not everyone. Okay, so I'm going to bring you here and show you how I'm going to set up my

home

studio. If you've been following me on Instagram, which you

know

you should, then you already

know

that I recently upgraded my computer in the studio, so I bought this iMac that I normally have in the studio and I'm going to take it home and be able to do some editing, some pre-production work and you know, I'm saying let Lydia and the kids learn Pro Tools and play with it and stuff in the crib, so, yeah, without further ado, let's talk about the items you'll

need

to start setting up the studio from your house.

You can do this in your living room, your bedroom, your bathroom, wherever. you find the space, but yeah, this is what you're going to need first, obviously you're going to need a computer, okay, it doesn't matter what kind of computer, I definitely prefer you get a Mac, no, because I'm a Mac, it doesn't matter. what kind of computer do you get, get yourself a computer that works well and yeah, let's start there, the next thing you're going to need is an audio interface. The audio interface will be the link between your microphone and your speakers and so on with the computer so It is a necessity now, without an audio interface, you can still use the built-in outputs and microphones on most computers, but definitely not is recommended, especially if you want to use these recordings in any type of professional environment, which is very possible.

I've recorded records everywhere, from home studios to hotel rooms. I've even recorded records in the car while driving down the highway, freezing water coughing up water bombs, what am I okay? The next item you will need is any software. which you're going to use to record now, of course, this is a Pro Tools channel, huh, but if you want to see me start doing some tutorials on logic and stuff like that, leave it in the comments below. I'm thinking about dabbling and being tragic, maybe Studio One or something, but whatever software you choose, make sure you have it and install it on your computer.

The next thing you will need is the necessary cables, so XLR. cables to connect your microphone to the interface, you will also need speaker cables to connect your speakers to connect your speakers to the interface, you will also need all the power cables necessary to power all of this right now. I definitely recommend it. you get a surge protector because this studio is expensive, we want to protect it, another thing you might need, you can choose to have our studio monitors, the studio monitors will definitely help you to have a better monitoring environment, but depending on your situation, you may or may not be able to have studio monitors if you live in an apartment or if you have neighbors or something like that that would prevent you from having those studio monitors, man, and I'm not sure if everyone heard that, but we have like a train in the background going down.

I'm going to show you some ways we can possibly minimize noise, especially when we're not in a professionally treated recording environment. Another thing you'll definitely need is headphones, okay? maybe one pair maybe two pairs if you're the artist the producer and the engineer then you only need that pair of headphones but if you're going to record someone else in your home studio maybe make it a little business inside your house, then you will definitely need multiple pairs of headphones because, again, without an isolation booth, you will find it impossible to play the audio out loud while someone is standing next to you with a microphone recording, okay?

I don't want that kind of feedback to happen, so make sure you get some good quality isolating headphones. You'll obviously need a microphone, so whichever microphone you choose will be up to you. I definitely recommend that you choose a microphone that is not too sensitive, don't go out and spend ten thousand dollars on a sony c 800 and put it in your home studio, you will hear

everything

, you will hear the neighbor baby cry if you get that microphone and put it on your house. okay, get a microphone, a decent microphone, don't just buy the cheapest one you can, but understand that the more sensitive the microphone is, it will pick up every nuance of your voice, it will also pick up every nuance of your surroundings. recording that could be the floor creaking, it could be the air conditioning, it could be a fan, it could be a truck driving honking, that's okay, so be aware of the type of microphone you choose when you are recording in an untreated environment. now unless you have a handheld mic like us sm57 or something, unless you're going to use one of these put your session on then you're definitely going to need a mic stand so having a good sturdy mic stand will help too to reduce some of that Rumble and yeah, and give You know what you need to hold your microphone, so I think that's all we really need.

Some things may be missing. If I missed anything that you think we definitely need in this home studio, be sure to leave a comment below. Let's go ahead and take a look at how we're going to start setting up this joint, so first things first. I have my computer. Now I'm going to go ahead and grab my audio interface from here. She has it on her side. I'm going to use the UAB up twin, ok, this is a super cool interface. I've had this for a few years, but it's perfect, okay, no matter what interface you have, maybe you have a scarlet or who knows you.

I have an inbox. I don't know what type of interface you have, but you will definitely need an interface and any cables that are needed. This interface connects via Firewire to my computer and has a power cable. Some interfaces are USB only. powered or bus powered where you can just plug and play they are great, this one actually requires some external power so I'll go ahead and plug this in first. I have the cable, so the first thing I'm going to do is plug the power cable back into the Apollo. Your interface may or may not require external power, but this one does, let's go ahead and connect the power first.

I'm going to plug the power cord into the Apollo, it just goes in and clicks great. I love the power cords that give you a nice little twist so they don't accidentally come out and pull. I hate the look of the cheap board. He said it just comes out easily. Pause, oh, but yeah, so I'll do that and then let me release. this next and plug it into my surge protector okay and then in the next step I'm going to take the lighting cable that's also needed to plug this into the computer and I'm just going to plug this lighting adapter into the cable.

First up to the interface and then to the back of this iMac, it's important to keep the cables tidy and place them behind the table that you don't want to trip over, especially since we're in the home environment. I don't want your kids to come in and trip over something and bring down the whole system, you have to swap them for the kids, that's fine, so I set up my audio interface, the next thing I'm going to do is set up my studio monitors and put them in place now this is a little mixed folding table that i just had in the house so this is what i'm going to use for now until i decide to upgrade the table i may be using a table and a desk. a dresser or whatever, you have to use what you have until you get what you want, so with that being said, yes I have my five KRK Rokit, yes I got them from my studio.

I have a bunch of old studio gear lying around, but on the back here we have the power cable, so I'm going to go ahead and plug those in first and then I'll plug in the inputs here from the audio interface output and we'll see what I will show you. the cables and

everything

you need to use for that, but as you can see, that's why we're here, although it uses a balanced TRS cable or an XLR cable, now I'm just going to use the TRS input because the outputs on the Apollo is a TRS of a quarter of an inch, so I'm going to keep it simple now.

I could have had a small cable that goes from TRS to XLR, but I have a TRS cable, so I'm using TRS cables again. Use what you have, so there we are. Come on, I also had these little dusty ones. I also had these little isoacoustic isopods placed around my studio because I used to use them there, but they're great for decoupling your studio monitors from the table you're on and in fact, I'm actually going to use them to mainly help lift the monitors up. because they are very low on the table in terms of width.

Yes, it will be correct. I'm pretty close to these monitors. You know, we want that equilateral triangle at an equal distance. from each monitor to you from the monitors, you already know, if you don't leave a comment and I will leave it, someday I will make a video on how to set it up correctly, but I'm just using these isopods and you'll see what I do with them here. I'm going to place one right there and I want them at an angle. I want my mind to be inclined towards me, towards my ears. You want two monitors pointing slightly towards your ears.

So there we go, that's my first monitor and then I'll set up my second one here and again. The first thing I'm going to do is go ahead and connect the power cables to each of these to the surge. protector and then I will connect the audio cable tool like I said before. Studio monitors are definitely optional. If you don't have studio monitors, headphones will be fine and at least maybe you can get some studio time. monitors that's great too, but headphones are good, you'll mostly. I work with headphones because I think it's a home studio, it's more like a pre-production phase, you can get some recordings as long as you know how to record. nice clean recordings and then take them to a professional mixing engineer to mix them properly for you so let's go ahead and plug in these power cables and I'm going honey okay I just need to double check this coat.

So the power cables are next, they will be the audio cables, so let's take a look at the back of the Apollo Lydia. I'm not sure if you could enlarge this a bit on the back of the Apollo, although you can. see my monitor outputs, left monitor and right monitor, those are the outputs I will use to connect to my studio monitors now, if I only use headphones, I have a headphone jack on the front again, each audio interface is different, so be sure to read your owner's manual to find out exactly how to connect your interface to your equipment.

Okay, so let's leave that there for now and I'm going to grab these cables. Okay, here are the cables. Let me show you exactly what working with um, in fact, I'll show you this one, oh, not that one. Okay, this is what balanced TRS cables look like. Okay, you see you have the tip, the ring on the case, okay, so this is what you need to connect your studio. monitors to your audio interfaces, which is recommended there, so go to Guitar Center or whatever, get a couple of these and yeah, that's how we're going to connect them, so here we go.

I'm going to go ahead and connect them. I'm going to start. first just going to the interface, okay, left, it's my left side, yeah, my left, then we're going to go from the left and I'm going to put that right there and then I'm going to put the one going to the right right there like Okay, okay and then I'm going to turn this around and run this cable behind the computer and everything again, the cables should be out of sight and as neat as possible, great so far, so good, next thing we're going to do is talk. about microphone placement now obviously I'm in an untreated room and you can probably hear some of the reflections here.

We have hardwood floors and it's a very spacious living room I'm in, but that being said, I have a reflection filter. oh, let me show you what that actually looks like, because this is another thing you could use. I'm going to use this reflection filter when I set up my microphone correctly. They sell them everywhere. This is one made by a company called Sterling. which aren't too expensive, but what this will help do, and you probably can't even hear it right now with the microphone I'm wearing on my shirt, iswhich will prevent reflections from the room from returning. on the microphone, so with that being said, a couple of things about microphone placement in this home studio: we don't want to place the microphone close to the wall.

Okay, if you put the microphone too close to the wall, you're going to get immediate reflections directly into that microphone that could cause some phase cancellation and it's going to be horrible and then and that kind of problem you just can't fix, there won't be any signal. Certain frequencies will simply be missing completely, so no, no, no, don't place your microphone. next to the wall, that's fine, and the best thing, actually, when you're in a raw environment is to try to place the microphone as far away from any wall or hard surface as possible for the sake of this video that I'm going to set up.

My microphone is practically here next to me. I'll put it here in this little corner again. I got them. I have this reflection filter. This will help stop these reflections here and that comes from the corner and then again. If I face it this way, any sound that hits that corner and bounces will be blocked by this filter and then my big head will block any sound that comes from around me from entering the microphone, so they will be like the other reflection filter . If you have one of these, they also have the chaotic ax eyeball, which is really cool.

If you're watching this, send me one of those joints. I would love to try it in this home studio. and see what kind of sound I can get if you're out, if you've already tried chaotic eyeball leave a comment let us know if it's cool we shouldn't understand what you think but for now I have this so I'm gonna be rockin' with this again use what you have here's my mic stand this one up there cool I'm going to get this going I'm just going to give it a little Shum Shum cool okay so that's my mic stand now I'm going to grab the impact stand that was included with the microphone I'm going to use today.

I'm just using a Shure KSM 27. It's one of the first microphones I bought when it was on sale, but it's really an amazing microphone and again I've also recorded some Jim Jones stuff with this microphone. I've recorded in hotels with this microphone in my apartment, yes, and things have been on the radio. They've been a lot of places, so a three hundred dollar microphone will do. trick here today, so I'm going to go ahead and set up a thing on how to set up a microphone, especially those that have a shock mount and especially microphones that are not yours or if it is yours, you want to take care of it. things you see, I'm going to put this shock mount on the microphone stand but without the microphone, okay, I don't want to rotate the microphone like that and you know, I'm saying I have someone doing internships or helping me.

I definitely don't want to see them twisting and turning my microphone, so I'm going to go ahead and attach the shock mount to the stand, make sure it's tight, and we can turn it to where it's hanging upside down. Now, the reason why many engineers like to hang condensers and two microphones upside down is because the capsule gets quite hot when it is on and having it upside down if the body gets quite hot, having it upside down allows the heat to escape. increase, you know, the heat increases, right, the heat increases and it won't go to the capsule, which could affect the sound or burn that capsule, right, but it's not a big deal, honestly, I promise, okay, but Also It looks great so I'm going to leave mine upside down as well and here's my microphone and this beautiful beautiful case that's just velvet that's right.

I like to take care of the microphone, so I put them in whatever type of case they come back in. when I'm not using it you don't want to leave it hanging, I mean unless you're using it all the time at least put something on top of it, there's a lot of dust if you find brands and things that you're getting. the smoke on you blowing joints for an hour, you don't want that stuff sitting on your capsule or your microphone, it will really damage the microphone, so just take care of the microphone, cover it or put it away when it's not in use.

So I'm going to go ahead and attach the mic to the mic stand, make sure it's hard and then I'm going to take this here, it's called a pop filter and I'm going to attach this pop filter to the mic stand, okay? Pop filters are good for capturing explosives, right? You don't want all the peas and bees and stuff like that, they cause really low interference which we really try to keep out of our recordings, that's why it's so cool and necessary to record - with the pop filter whenever you have voice, this is one of my old pop filters, but you know what will still work, just snap that thing back, act like that never happened, so I'll go ahead and snap your pop filter securely to the mic box now, to do it, A good rule of thumb is to just turn it whichever way you want to always make sure you have about a fist's length from your mic to the actual caps, from the pop filter to the mic.

Okay, you don't want to just have it sitting right in front of the mic, that pretty much defeats the purpose, so you want to keep a fist's distance between the mic and the pop filter at all times, and it's also good if you move down, Lydia, to make sure the weight of the microphone is on one of the stands. Well, you see how the front of the microphone is on the foot of the other microphone stand, so the microphone stand, can't you see it's supported? If it was in the space right here, it could easily tip over, but with the weight on the foot, I'll be fine, so next you'll definitely want to put the reflection filter in, and honestly, you'll probably want to do this before you put it in. the microphone itself, especially if you're not very careful because you don't want to do so many things around the microphone and accidentally hit it or something and knock it over, but I'm a professional and I can do whatever I want.

Do you feel Me? So here is my reflection filter. I'm going to tighten it as much as possible on the microphone stand to where the microphone is in the middle. It's okay, you don't want it to be too high or too low. and defeat the whole purpose of you having it up, okay, so boom boom boom, I have my own reflection filter, squeeze that, I have my pop fill, and the microphone, so we look good, the next step we go to have to do. is to go ahead and connect our XLR cable to our interface and then to our microphone and then to our interface and then we can load up Pro Tools or whatever you use and start recording baby, I have my XLR you want. to take the female end of the this mic stand or the shock mount or something like that, the cable wrapped around this stand a little bit will help catch it and maybe it can hang.

I learned all these precautions working with very expensive microphones that I just wouldn't buy for any reason I want to see them fall, yeah, especially the ones that weren't mine, um, so yeah, here we go, Oh, Coco Co, so now I'm going to run this cable, Let's see, we'll probably leave it. I move the mic around a little bit, that will be a decent home for it for now and this could be next to your bed if you're in a dorm or something, you'll probably be better off because you have so much absorption in there, with the bed as a nice trap base, you have a rug that also has a nice little absorbency.

I'm going to run this XLR cable back under and up to my Apollo, you can see, and I'm just going to plug the let's go ahead and turn on the Apollo once the Apollo charges and turns itself on, or your interface, whatever. is if you have a USB interface, so right now, if you don't have a power switch, this is when you're just going to plug it in and I'm going to walk over back here and turn on my studio monitors. Don't forget your headphones. I have those headphones just in case, when I'm ready to record, I have those headphones and I can click here if you're using Pro Tools, then you're definitely going to need an eye on it like I have to go. and find where mine is, so this is where your license for that software will actually be.

It's a small USB that I lock. You want to make sure you've updated your licenses or whatever and put it on the computer. and any open USB slot I'd really like to get out of it and then I'll go ahead and launch Pro Tools and confirm that everything is working now. This microphone is a condenser microphone, so while my Pro Tools is charging I'm going to press the 48 volt plus button on my audio interface to go ahead and send some power to this microphone, so I have Pro Tools charged. I'm going to go ahead and create a test session and I'll save this to the desktop again if you need more information on how to record in Pro Tools.

I have a complete tutorial. I'll leave the link in the description on how to record in Pro Tools, how to set up all those parameters and things that we just looked at in that panel. I'll leave that link in the description, but I'll go ahead and start with this and try everything for now, so when I'm recording our vocals let's use this single. microphone I'm just going to need a mono audio track, so I'm going to create that track and now I'm just going to make sure that the input is set to input one, saying that's why I plug my microphone into my audio interface now, let's go over a very quick little tip.

Quick, let's say that maybe for some reason, when you press record a neighbor on that track, you don't get the microphone signal again, double check and make sure that if your microphone is a condenser, you have enabled phantom power which most 48 volts you also want to go to the settings menu choose playback engine and make sure playback engine is set to your audio interface and if you see now playback engine is set to some flower. 64 channels I don't want it to go to my universal audio ray, so I need to click on that and produce will log me out and log me back in.

It's a good thing I even thought to tell you because honestly I didn't even know it was about to break down, but you need to check, check your parameters, check your settings, it's very important, make sure you take a good look at that camera, so now I have I have to go and I'll have to change some IO settings, hopefully. I won't have to do this. I have a more complicated

setup

than yours, so I just have to check a few more things, but I'm just defaulting to my I/O configuration preferences. Wow, come back again, go to my entries.

I'm going to select all of these, delete them if you ever have a problem just select all the paths that delete them and press the default button and they won't return it right so I'm going to go ahead and choose mic line 1. and choose my output for my main output again. I have a fourth video tutorial on how to record in Pro Tools if you need help with what I just did, so one more thing I need to do right now before I record and I'll be distracted from I have studio monitors. I need to make sure the studio monitor levels are low, otherwise I'll get some feedback with this mic so close and facing each other, so I'll just click on my interface.

Your interface may be different, but I'll just make sure my monitor level is all the way down and my headphone level is all the way up and then I enable my track to record and I hear myself, which is a good son. because You know, I'd like to hear myself, honey, and that sounds really good too, especially being in this room. I told you this reflection filter works miracles, so let's go ahead and record a little song. Samsung, I'll make sure of my entry level. It's good, make sure you have batteries in your smoke detectors, otherwise smart rays will come into your recording, so here we go, let's record, this is a test, a home studio test, this is how you record best in home and now. you don't need to go to the studio oh, I didn't, I didn't say that, I didn't say that and that's it, you just created your first home recording if you found this video even a little helpful.

Make sure you like, comment and subscribe, and if you've already subscribed, go ahead and hit the notification button so you can be the first to receive all my new videos. Well, I do this for people, go to wavy wane.com and cut. one of my professional recording templates so you can record your session the same way I record my sessions. Also feel free to contact me if you ever need professional mixing services. Thanks for watching this video. Now go home and get ready.