The first time I built a home recording studio, I was making mad cash at my job and I went a little crazy. I bought top notch name brand products and I wasn’t afraid to pay top dollar for all of it. This included a Motu 2408 MKII which cost me $1000, and I did really stupid things like purchasing a KSM32 studio mic for $500. I’m certainly not trying to impugn those products, they are great products, however, they are arguably over the top for a small home recording studio that’s going to be used to record demos and/or do writing.

It usually takes real world experience to understand just how powerful the “talent is more important than gear” concept is. I’m going to attempt to prove it here by providing samples of music that I recorded with my expensive gear and samples of music that I’m recording now with my cheap gear. But before I get into that, I’d like to explain more about my current setup and how I’m building/buying gear.

The essential pieces of gear that you need to have a good home recording studio are as follows:

1. Computer
2. 24 bit sound card (although you could probably live with 16 bit)
3. Recording software (I recommend Sonar)
4. Studio Microphones and stands
5. A decent mic pre and direct box
6. Keyboard (for triggering midi)
7. Studio monitors
8. Line6 POD2.0 or PODxt (or you could go out and buy 100 different amps and effects - the choice is yours)
9. It’s always nice to have some instruments handy, so I would recommend at least one guitar and one bass
10. Headphones and a small mixing board for monitoring purposes

Now the fun part — buying the gear! Once I made the decision to build another studio, I knew in my heart that I could get great sounds without paying top dollar for all of my gear. So I turned to the best music store in the world…. eBay! Using eBay, I was able to get the following products at the following prices.

Tapco S5 Nearfield Studio Monitors
$200.00
$45.00 shipping/handling

Midiman(M-Audio) AUDIO BUDDY Dual Mic PreAmp/Direct Box
$74.00
$9.50 shipping/handling

Marshall MXL 990 Cardiod Condenser Microphone
$46.00
$10.20 shipping/handling

Marshall MXL 990 Cardiod Condenser Microphone
$57.05
$6.00 shipping/handling

Total price for the products above: $447.75

I already had access to the other products that I needed like a computer, soundcard, Sonar, Pod 2.0, guitar, etc… I also had to spend another $150 on misc cables and mic stands to get things working.

Even though I had access to the rest of the stuff, here is what you can expect to pay for the remaining items:

Pod XT on eBay, $200 (new $300)
Sonar 5 Producer Addition (I’ve seen it for as low as $399 on eBay and as high as $799 retail)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit Sound Card ($27.00 - $50.00)

If you can spare the extra cash, you might want to get a little better of a sound card, but this is the one I have and it works fine for me. Putting it another way, the best recording studio in the world isn’t going to be able to record your music any higher than 24-bit and using a couple of CMP 159 cables you can easily plug your mic pre/direct box into your sound card and send the output to a little Behringer Eurorack UB502 ($34.99 retail) which you can then use to send the output to your studio monitors and headphones, etc.

So how does equipment this cheap sound? I’m currently in the middle of my first recordings with my new gear, so you’ll have to come back in about a week and read part 2 of this post to hear the results of my new setup and see pictures.