Getting started
Start your home studio: three decisions that matter
The cheapest decisions come first. What you are making, what room you have and what you already own decide most of your budget.
Recording music at home
Recording music at home looks complicated from the outside and turns out to be three decisions plus a lot of patience. The good news is that a usable studio costs less than a few nights out, and most of the "must have" gear lists are marketing rather than engineering.
This site is the shortcut we wish we had: what to buy, in what order, what to leave alone, and how to get a good recording out of a room that was never designed for music.
Start here in three steps
- Decide what you are making. A podcast, a solo song, a full band demo. The answer changes what you need to spend, and it is the cheapest decision you will ever make. A voice-over setup and a five-piece band are not the same project, and the second one costs several times as much.
- Get one signal path working end to end. Microphone, preamp, interface, computer, monitors. Every extra box in the chain is another place for noise, latency and confusion. One good chain that you fully understand beats five that you assembled from a shopping cart.
- Treat the room before you buy another cable. A treated room with a cheap microphone beats an untreated room with an expensive one, every single time.
The order matters more than the amount. Almost everyone spends too early and in the wrong place: a nicer microphone before a workable room, a better interface before they know what their DAW is doing.
What you will find here
- Tutorials — the short version of everything: signal flow, choosing an interface, microphones, room treatment, monitoring, recording, mixing, and the problems that show up on day one.
- Hardware — buying guides arranged by budget and by what you are actually trying to do, including what you can safely ignore for now.
- Downloads — cheat sheets you can print, plus genuinely free software that does not come with malware attached.
- Forum — the communities worth reading and how to ask a question that gets a real answer.
A note on prices
Hardware prices move constantly, and every recommendation here comes with a caveat. Treat the figures as the rough shape of a market at a moment in time, and check current reviews before you spend. Where a price matters to the advice, we say why.
Start where it makes sense
If you have never recorded anything before, read Start your home studio first, then Signal flow. If you already have a setup and something sounds wrong, go straight to Fixing common problems. Either way, the Hardware page is worth a look before you buy anything at all.
Read these first
Getting started
Signal flow: from microphone to mixdown
What happens to your sound between the microphone and the speakers, and why understanding the chain solves most home studio problems.
Getting started
Choosing a DAW without losing a month
A DAW is the tool you will touch every day for years. Here is how to compare them and why switching later costs more than choosing carefully now.
Where to go next
About Studio Junkies
Studio Junkies started in 2007 as a place to share home recording tricks. It is now a plain, fast site with no adverts, no tracking and no nonsense — just the things that actually helped us record music at home.