Home Recording Studio: The Complete Guide

A home recording studio is a computer running recording software, an audio interface, a mic, and headphones or monitors, in a room quiet and dry enough to record in. A working XLR home studio runs about $450 at list prices: a Focusrite Scarlett Solo ($169.99), an Audio-Technica AT2020 ($119), and a pair of ATH-M50x headphones ($159).

That's the whole rig. The real question is where the next dollar goes, and the answer is often the room.

What a home studio needs

Every home studio runs the same signal chain. The mic turns sound into signal, the interface powers the mic and converts that signal to digital, and the computer records it while you listen on headphones or monitors.

The room is in the chain too, whether you like it or not. Your mic hears every reflection off your walls, and it has no way to leave them out.

The Ableton computer guide sets 8 GB of RAM as the minimum and recommends 16 GB for typical music production, so if you're buying a computer for this, aim for 16. The AT2020 is a cardioid condenser that needs 48V phantom power. Yamaha's HS5 uses a 5-inch woofer that reaches 54 Hz.

Want a plain checklist by genre instead? See what you need to record music at home.

Home studio budget tiers

You can start recording for about $330. Most home studios land between $450 and $1,500 once monitors and a few panels show up.

Remember that chart the next time GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) says a fancier mic will fix your vocals.

Line-item costs live on how much a home recording studio costs. If you'd rather spend less, read building a home studio on a budget, and if you want everything in one box, see the best home recording studio kits.

Pick the room, then treat it

Use the quietest, least echoey room you have. Neumann's home studio vocal guide says to pick a room with as little noise and reverb as possible. It also says bathrooms are usually too ambient (sorry, shower singers) and tells you to stay out of corners and away from reflective surfaces when you sing.

Auralex calls a rectangular room the most predictable. Its treatment order: bass traps in the corners, panels at the first reflection points, then the ceiling above your seat.

Auralex's home studio guide splits these into "absorb sound" and "block sound" for that reason. Mixing them up is a classic: a wall of foam, and a neighbor who still hears every take.

Treatment gets its own acoustic treatment guide, and isolation is in how to soundproof a home studio. For layout ideas, see home studio design and layout, bedroom studio setup, and these home studio ideas.

Set it up in this order

Go room, computer and DAW, interface, mic and headphones, monitors, then treatment. Each step works without the ones after it, so you can start tracking before you own a pair of monitors.

1. Pick the room and the wall your desk will face.
2. Install the DAW plus the interface's driver or control software.
3. Connect the interface to the computer, then plug the mic into input 1 and your headphones into the headphone jack.
4. Place the monitors so they and your head form an equilateral triangle with the tweeters at ear height, as the Yamaha HS manual specifies.
5. Treat the room once you can hear what it's doing to playback.

The full walkthrough, with a wiring diagram and a room plan to scale, is in how to set up a home recording studio. Monitor placement in detail is on how to set up studio monitors.

Recording software

Recording software (a DAW) is free or cheap to start. Audacity is free and open source on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and REAPER gives you 60 days of full use before a $60 personal license.

Your interface may already cover it. The Scarlett Solo and 2i2 come with Ableton Live Lite, Pro Tools Intro+, and Cubase LE, per Focusrite. Compare options in the best DAW for beginners, then learn the workflow in how to record music at home. Neumann's guide recommends recording at 24-bit, which gives you plenty of resolution.

Every home recording guide

Every topic on the site has a hub page that links to every guide in it.