Music recording, especially at studio-quality, has been dramatically democratized over the past ten years. Gone are the days when you would have to rent studio time at exuberant rates, and what took thousands in equipment and studio time can now be done at home in your home studio at a fraction of the cost.
Let’s go over some of the necessary equipment you are going to need to get things started. The most important is going to be some kind of computer, be it a laptop or desktop it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need to be a supercomputer, but something basic with a lot of RAM ( Random Access Memory), which we are going to talk about that little bit later.
You’re also going to need one of the most important things for your recording at-home system, and that’s something called a DAW or Digital Audio Workstation. Now that’s just a fancy word for a program that basically will record digitally everything that you put on the computer and allows you to edit your music.
All those sounds need to be organized for your tracks to be cohesive and to complete your songs.
Some examples of good DAW's are Apples Logic Pro X that's only for OSX i.e., Mac, but you also have Ableton Live, which is an excellent DAW designed for Windows.
Your also going to need a microphone if you plan to do any vocals this is a crucial ingredient and you’re going to have to probably get something a little bit more upscale than the regular mic that you might do with say karaoke for example
A RODE mic is an excellent example of a whats known as a condenser mic which is essential for good vocals on a track due to the way they record the sound of your voice. This is because condenser mics can capture a more extended frequency and tend to be more flat than say a dynamic mic like the one we use at karaoke bars.
Also, you're going to need an audio interface which is a DAC (Digital Audio Converter) e.g., being the Scarlett 2in1 but and well talk more about that in the next blog
You're also going to probably need a keyboard to be able to play notes, but it's not a must-have to start with. As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the things you can do musically now you can do on your laptop, but to get ideas flowing, you're going to want to get your hands on a keyboard or a drum pad. We'll discuss more on those in the next blog.
Now when people think of keyboards, they might be thinking of organs that will generate sounds like the old ones we used to have when we were playing music at church.
However, that’s not what you’re going to be doing with this keyboard; all it needs to do is connect itself to the computer via USB or Midi as in most cases, it is the computer with all the sounds on it. We will then trigger the computer on the keyboard, and that’s why they call it a keyboard controller because what they generally do, is just control the sound coming out of your computer.
Finally, you're going to need some way to hear your music that can either be through your headphones and any headphones would do to start, but preferably you'll end up with a good pair of studio headphones that are known for their flat response. A good example of this is the Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro pictured.
The other option is a good pair of speakers. Now the speakers we're talking about here are not your regular speakers. The type of speakers we need is what's commonly referred to in the business as studio monitors, and the reason that is is that what you want to get from these speakers/monitors is the most accurate sound possible, so they tend to have a very flat response, unlike other regular stereo speakers which enhance the sound. This is so what we get to hear while recording/creating our music is the most honest reproduction of the music so we can analyze what we need to change and improve upon.
Remember earlier, I talked about RAM for the reason RAM is crucial in terms of playback of your tracks on your computer other than a reasonably up to date processor RAM is critical. When you put a lot of music on your DAW, it takes a lot of what's called random access memory.
So how much RAM do you need? Well, that all depends if you plan to do lots and lots of tracks, something like say 30 track or less, then you want to have at least 16 GB of RAM. If you're going to make more than 30 tracks like a full production of up to maybe 50 or even 100 records, then ideally you’d probably want to get up to 32 GB of RAM; remember, RAM is our friend when it comes to playback and mixing so remember more the channels we need the more RAM.
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