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To make a living, voice over talents used to have to physically go to gigs recorded in commercial production facilities. Now, gigs can come to them-in home studios and through the Internet. But for many voice over talents, newbie and old pro alike, outfitting a home studio is technically baffling. So, how do you make that spare bedroom or corner of your studio apartment (no pun intended) into a functional voice over facility, with decent acoustics and the appropriate equipment? Let’s take a look at the basics involved in setting up a home voiceover studio.

Selecting your studio space

A studio of any size or recording purpose starts with the space in which it will be located. Isolation from outside sounds is important. If you live in a studio or one-bedroom apartment, then try to locate your “studio” in a corner as far from the door to the hallway and away from windows. Also, a closet can work well as a recording booth. Set up your recording equipment just outside the closet and your microphone inside the closet.

If you live in a two-plus bedroom unit or a single-family home and can dedicate an entire room to your studio, then you’ll have more options available for controlling the acoustics of the space. You’ll want to make sure the room doesn’t sound too “echoey” or “hollow.” Treating these problems can be as simple as putting some overstuffed furniture in the room, along with a rug and some drapes over the windows. Have a lot of old clothes sitting in an attic or basement? You can use them to create a recording “booth” around your mic. Fill three or four rolling clothes racks with clothes and then position them on the sides and back of your mic position.

Of course, you can use professional acoustic materials to control sound reflections. You’ll find an excellent primer on acoustical treatment-in plain English-at Auralex. Check out these acoustical treatment production companies, too: HSF Acoustics; Silent Source; Vocalbooth; Whisper Room.

Selecting your equipment

Once you have your studio space selected, you’ll need to properly equip it in order to deliver pro quality voiceovers to clients. With the latest in digital recording technology and reasonably priced pro microphones, you could spend as little as $1000 for a very basic, yet serviceable, home voiceover studio. That’s assuming you have a decent computer sound card and speakers. The list is quite short: $200-$250 for a microphone. $40 for a mic pop filter to prevent “popping” your Ps, Bs, and Ts. $45 for a mic stand. $200-$250 for a USB or Firewire digital recording interface. $65 for shareware recording software. $45 for headphones. $40 for cables. $100 for sundries. Bare bones, but it will work.

Plug your microphone cable into the digital recording interface, which is a little box that amplifies and processes the signal from the mic. Plug the interface into your computer’s sound card. Plug your headphones into the interface. Load the recording/editing software. A couple of adjustments to volume in and out and you’re ready to record. Voice the copy. Clean it up with an edit or two. Then convert it the voiceover sound file to an.mp3 file, attach it to an email, and send it off to the client via the Internet. To learn more about the equipment listed above, search the web or visit online pro audio dealers. A few good ones are: Full Compass; Sweetwater; B&H Pro Audio; Boynton Pro Audio; BSW.

This simple studio set up is serviceable, but it has its limits. If a client wants to direct you via the phone, then you’ll have to either hold the phone to your ear while you record, or get a hands-free headset. You could also buy a gizmo call a phone hybrid that allows you to speak through your mic down the phone line to your client as you listen to the client’s direction through your headphones.

Learning more

As with any investment, you’ll need to research the equipment you’ll need for your studio, and how to install and use it. See if you can locate a voice talent in your area that may let you visit his or her studio. Visit Mix Magzine or EQ Magazine and check their archives for articles on home studios. Local production houses may be willing to make suggestions, but, remember, by setting up your own studio, you’re indicating to clients that they can cut out the production house by working directly with you. That may not sit well with some production house owners, because the home voiceover explosion has had a detrimental impact on many commercial recording facilities.

That’s a basic home voiceover studio in a nutshell. If you can operate a home stereo and have experience in front of a computer screen, then you can put together and operate a home voiceover studio. With a little practice recording and editing, and some promotion of your home studio, you can quickly recover the cost of your studio and add to begin to add to your bottom line. Happy voicing!

©Peter Drew

Everyday some new artist or musician wakes up and have this great epiphany; last night while they were sleeping they had a dream about having their own Home Recording Studio. So they wake up and run to their computer and start searching the web for articles on how to build a home recording studio. They take about 4 hours of unfocused search time and run to their nearest guitar store with a list of items to buy only to realize that equipment they wanted was way out of their budget.

So they run back home and hop on the internet and find the gear they want online for about a fraction o retail cost. They’ve searched Google up and down for the lowest price and final made a couple of purchases and now their gear is on the way. So in the mean time they start planning where they’re going to record and how they want to set their room or garage up… sound treatment here, a wall there, and maybe a sofa here.

A week has gone by and now they have all the gear that they’ve ordered online, now the big question is how the heck do you wire up all this stuff? They read every direction on and manual and nothing seems to make logical sense, so they work on it for about a week and then give up. They take the gear put it on ebay.com and sell it to another unsuspecting musician or artist. The cycle just continues.

Now this whole process could have been avoided had this person had the proper tools and knowledge at their disposal. See in the major commercial studios, there are recording engineers that do the entire wiring and microphone placement for you. When you have a home recording studio it is entirely up to you to figure things out. Once you have figured out how to setup all the equipment you bought you then have to learn to use the new recording software you bought.

Once you finally figure out how to setup a track and learn how to bus audio to another track, you decide to use a plug in that came with Protools only to realize that getting the sound you were looking for is becoming even more difficult to achieve. Once you do decide that you have recorded a decent enough song then you send the song off to the mixing engineer.

The mixing engineer will then go and level the song volumes, layer effects and make things sound almost radio ready. That engineer has spent several years developing this craft, but wait! This is your home studio so you will most likely have to do the mixing yourself. So now you need to go buy a book on how to mix sound recordings. Only to get even more frustrated cause you don’t understand anything about frequency or stereo spacing. But you tweak around for a while and get things to sound pretty decent.

Now it’s time to get the track mastered. God knows you defiantly need at least a decade to get to this level. The sound of word dither just sends your heart racing. So what do you do next? Read more of our articles for quick tips on Building a Home Recording Studio.

Anybody can throw together a home recording studio these days. But how do you build one that will fit your needs and work well? That’s what I want to cover in this quick article. You will find that building a better studio is all about planning. So get into “planning” mode right now, and start reading.

If you happen to be starting from scratch, that’s a very good thing. You have a clean slate. That means you can build your studio from the bottom up, and everything will be as you planned it. But usually, you have some equipment lying around or pieced together. That stuff needs to be integrated into your studio somehow, right? Not always. Beware that temptation – building your studio around gear you already have can be frustrating and pointless. Sometimes it’s best to just ditch the old stuff and start over. For instance, if you have a 4-track recorder… it’s probably time to move on. Sorry!

These days, there really is no excuse for not recording to a computer. Even the big time studios are doing it. So we can start there. Get a newer computer – brand new if possible. Try to make this a dedicated “studio computer.” You don’t want your girlfriend surfing the web or checking her Facebook on this computer. And you shouldn’t be doing your homework on it either. Having a single purpose computer means it will last longer, get fewer viruses, and work better when you are recording. In fact, just get a Mac. Apple makes the perfect computer for running a studio. But if you must stick with Windows, that’s okay too. Plenty of studios use Windows for their software. One more tip – it really doesn’t matter how fast your computer is. If it was built in the last year, it’s fast enough. Recording software and equipment isn’t keeping up with the computer manufacturers. You can get a $300 computer that will be plenty fast enough for your studio. But you should get a lot of hard drive space. Audio files can be huge, so make sure you have a big hard drive and a big backup hard drive.

Moving on, you need an interface of some sort. This gets the audio into the computer. Go for a USB 2.0 interface (most new interfaces will use USB 2.0 or Firewire – either is okay). You can get them cheap with minimal features, or you can buy the farm and get all the knobs and lights. Start with at least 2 channels, so you can record in stereo. But break the bank and get 8 channels if you can. You’ll thank me when you have to mic up the drums. An 8 channel interface can be bought for under $500 these days. Oh yeah, and your software will come with the interface.

For microphones, you need a condenser mic and a dynamic mic to start with. That’s the bare minimum. Later, you need to have a variety of mics so you can experiment with different sounds and combinations. Spend your money wisely. Sometimes 2 cheap mics is better than 1 expensive mic. Having backup equipment will save you a lot of headaches later on. Trust me – I’ve seen it all!

What’s left? How about speakers or headphones? I suggest headphones at first if you’re on a tight budget. Spend $50 and get something decent. Then later get a good pair of active monitors. These can be had for about $150 for a cheap pair. Add some cables to your setup, and you’re done! Now you have a simple, easy recording studio that can be a lot of fun – or a lot of money, if you want to charge bands for your services. Enjoy!

Deciding on the best home recording studio equipment will take some thought. Before you’re actually at the check out line in your favorite music store, it’s important that you do your homework. Take into consideration what you can afford and what kind of equipment you are looking for. Check out the web, trade magazines, or your local audio store to find the different pieces. If the equipment is on display, it would be wise to play with it and see if the feel suits you. Also, it is a good idea to talk to other people who already have the equipment and see what they think.

DAW -The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) is piece of equipment that has greatly improved the recording industry. The DAW is a computer based hardware system that offers many production features such as multi-track recording, editing, midi and audio interfaces, support for plug in virtual instruments, mixdown capabilities, and much more.

The DAW is affordable and that’s what makes it so great! There are different options when choosing a DAW. Start out by deciding if you will work on a PC or MAC. Some programs only work for Mac and some only for PC. You can also find a program that will work with both. Additionally, consider the needs of your particular project and your personal preferences. Additionally, ensure that you have sufficient ram and that your computer is fast and powerful enough for the tasks that you are going to take on.

SIAB – One piece of equipment you might want to consider getting is called a “Studio in a Box” or SIAB. The SIAB is affordable and simple to use. Fortunately, there’s no need to be a computer whiz to use this system, just turn it on, get the basics down, and begin playing. This system is also portable; your not limited to your bedroom.

The units use little power and work on a battery, or you can hook them up to a solar panel. There are many choices of brands to choose from with the SIAB that are very affordable. SIABs can be purchased for under $1,000. A SIAB has 4, 8, or 16 tracks for you to choose from, depending on the unit. Manufacturers of SIAB systems include; Roland, Boss, Yamaha, Tascam, and Fostex.

Stand-alone -Some people prefer the stand-alone recorder which can range from about 1,000 to 2,000 dollars. If you go with the stand-alone option, you also need to buy a mixer and signal processor. Modern stand-alone recorders have helped to transform home studios. Beginning in the early 1990′s, an increasing amount of hits came from these devices. Due to the additional equipment required with them, stand-alone models are becoming less utilized with home recordists. Be sure to check out the demos of each brand before you buy this product, as the output can vary slightly from model to model.

After deciding on a recorder, a great way to make your recording experience more exciting is to create a midi-intensive studio. Your midi-intensive studio can include a keyboard, synthesizer, sound module, or sampler. These are awesome to have because you can get drum sounds without having a live drummer.

After you get the basic equipment you need to start recording, all you have left to setup is a microphone, guitar, and any other instruments that you would like to record. Remember that there are endless possibilities in the types of equipment you can have. Start with the basics and let your studio grow to fit your needs.

How to set up a home recording studio can depend on the location, the walls, even what’s under and above the room. These are 4 tips I personally utilize in my own home studio, as well as my studio away from home. You’ve came to the perfect place to find more helpful information for your home recording studio whether you’re a rookie or a rookie veteran.

1. Save Your Money!

Do not spend your rent money on studio equipment like many people do. This is a very common problem because people feel the need to go after their dreams by risking all of their expenses. They do this with the hopes of getting all their money back in a short period of time. Very seldom does this situation turn out the way people want it to. Start small and finish big.

2. Where to Begin?

Keep it simple when you’re just beginning. Purchase a good computer if you don’t already have one. You need good music production software, a condenser microphone, and a mixer. This is all I needed to get started. More information on this below.

3. Food

A great way to attract people to your studio is a refrigerator. Yes, a mini or large refrigerator will keep your musicians and artists coming back to pay you. People will choose your studio over many others because of this great product that keeps people alive, food. Moreover, you don’t want to have everyone walking around your house, going into the kitchen, and waking people up in the middle of the night to get bottled water. Keep your refrigerator conveniently right next to your sitting area.

4. Water

Many public speakers drink room temperature water before they get up to speak. This same method can be used for your artists. To prevent the redundant throat clearing and overly excessive recording of tracks, drinking warm water is essential.

Bonus Tip

A bonus tip on how to set up a home recording studio is installing carpet in the room. This helps with eating up the sound waves so they don’t bounce all around the room back into your microphone.