Setups!

Setting up a personal “studio” can be hard, especially in a home with other people and animals and such, but it can be done under the right circumstances, and thankfully those circumstances aren’t too specific.

Here’s some basic things that you may already have to get started.

• Workspace: a folding table and a chair works if you’re on a budget, but a lot of people already have desks that they can transform into a personal studio fairly easily.
• Headphones: don’t know a single person who has none at all. Most headphones are of excellent quality and while it’s always preferential to upgrade to studio headphones, you can hold on to that for now.
• Laptop: most students and workers have a laptop accessible to them, and thankfully, a laptop doesn’t have to be exceedingly powerful for most beginner work in Pro Tools. 4GB of ram should still be the minimum memory, however.

Now for the buying part (sadly things aren’t free). Some things you’ll need to buy are:

• Audio Interface: this will hook up to your PC and allow you to input any instrument through mics or cables and then also allow for output on speakers of your choice.
• Speakers: Pro Tools is often finicky with built-in audio on PC systems, I eventually just caved in and bought my Presonus Eris speakers and my ears thanked me later.
• Instrument and Mic cables: needed for whatever instrument or mic you’re going to plug in, thankfully Amazon carries an array of these cables and sells them for way cheaper than other outlets. You don’t really have to go premium on cables.
• Microphone: PC (and Mac) built-in mics are pretty lackluster. I would recommend purchasing a decent XLR microphone to make sure your recordings are clear.
• Pro Tools: Most excruciating purchase you’ll have to make. Avid dominates the music industry with a digital workstation that can quite literally do anything musically. Only problem is that the cheapest you can get it is 300 dollars as a student or subscribing to the program.

That’s the beginning of our little studio setup, I should be on track next week bringing my own together and I can definitely share my progress and setup then.

See ya!