Home Studio Setup, Pt. 2
In this series, we’re covering the basics of getting your home music studio set up correctly. Today, we’re getting into the importance of quality monitoring. Monitoring, i.e. speakers, headphones, and whatever tools you use to listen back to your recordings in the studio, is one of the vital organs of your space. Monitoring equipment forms the lens that you see your music through.
It’s also an area where you might not want to go with the cheapest possible option.
Why?
Why monitoring quality is important
If your monitoring isn’t accurate, you won’t hear your music accurately when you’re making it. The worst part? You won’t be able to tell anything’s wrong until you play back that track you spent hours on in the car, and it sounds completely different than you remember. Most musicians new to recording at home have experienced how frusterating this can be.
So, how do we find good quality speakers?
More questions to ask, and trusted brands to research
First off, what exactly do you realistically need? The level of speaker needed for a simple writing setup can be very basic. The type needed as a reference in a professional situation is quite different, and a lot more expensive. It might not make much sense to purchase the most expensive professional gear, if you’re not planning on working professionally.
But, for a demoing studio, and for getting rough mixes at home that are reasonably accurate and certainly satisfying, there’s many midrange pro audio options in the $500-800/pair range.
Trusted brands like Yamaha, Genelec, Adam, PMC, or JBL are all good places to start researching. The Yamaha HS-10s have proven very popular, I’m a fan of Genelec personally, and the Adam T7Vs could be one of the best deals out there, if they work for you.
More detailed information on all the gear needed in a home studio (headphones, speakers, interfaces, and more) can all be found in my Home Studio Gear Guide.
If you don’t really care about mixing and the technical side of production at all, you can get by with using even less in your demoing studio.
Do you even need speakers at all for recording music at home?
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with writing your music on a good pair of headphones. Just manage expectations-we get into trouble when expectations don’t match reality.
Don’t expect to get to a fully professional end result working only on headphones-you’ll get to about 70% max. But that’s certainly good enough, if you’re re-recording your work at a real studio before releasing it anyway! It’s often a very cost-effective approach to write your music on your informal studio at home, and then save the pro studio stuff for the professional studio facilities.
I don’t recommend making your music entirely on cheap headphones or speakers, and then releasing it directly onto the internet. It’s very hard to stand out in a crowded field if you do this.
Next in this series: even more on how to find the best quality speakers for your individual situation.
