1. Get your bedroom working as a studio

 

Okay, so it might not actually be your bedroom, but whatever space in your house you’ve chosen to use as a home studio, it’s obviously important that it feels like a genuinely creative environment and is set up to sound as ‘good’ as possible. This can be particularly tricky if the room in question is serving double duty alongside its primary domestic assignation, but you’ve just got to make the most of what you have.

 

 

So, your MIDI keyboard, microphone(s) and other frequently deployed hardware should be immediately accessible on or near your desk; and your monitors need to be positioned so that the speakers and your head each sit at one apex of an equilateral triangle, with the tweeters at ear level. And in more general terms, your working space should be kept tidy and free of clutter, so as to maintain that artful vibe. Room acoustics are always problematic in the home studio, but our handy guide that can help in that department.

 

 

2. Keep your DAW and computer in good shape

 

With your physical space in good order, it’s important that the software environment in which you’ll be spending the vast majority of your music making time is equally fit for purpose. Keep your operating system and DAW up to date, your system drive protected against viruses and malware, and your sample library organised and easy to get to from within your DAW and file browser. And make sure your entire system is backed up regularly, using an automatic backup system such as Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner on Mac or R-Drive Image on Windows.

 

One trap that many bedroom producers fall into is overloading their plugins folder with free effects and instruments that serve no great purpose and just make selecting the right synth, EQ or compressor for any particular job (and learning how to use them all in the first place) more confusing than it needs to be. Really, your DAW comes with all the virtual instruments and effects you need to get started and then some, so don’t be in a hurry to expand your library beyond that and a few carefully chosen third-party additions. After all, it’s not what you’ve got but how you use it that counts.

 

 

3. Start with the basics

 

Taking those first tentative steps into the world of music production can be a frustrating experience, as you quickly come to realise just how much more there is to composition, recording, mixing and all the rest of it than you might have expected. But that’s fine – there’s no rush, and we’ve all been there, so don’t stress about it. Keep things simple for your first tracks as you learn the ropes, bone up on the manuals for your DAW and plugins, and don’t expect chart-busting results overnight. Consider, too, the possibility of signing up for a beginner’s course online, as these can really kickstart your development as a producer. And as you progress beyond the fundamentals, whenever you run into a concept you don’t understand or a technique that you can’t get to work, you’ll find endless tutorials and a vast community of music makers on the internet to help you solve the issue, so don’t hesitate to take advantage of them. In time, your skills will develop to the point where you’ll be able to look back at those early projects with a mixture of fondness and embarrassment.

 

4. Optimise your recording signal path

 

It stands to reason that if you want to capture the best audio recordings you can, you need the signal path down which they travel to your Mac or PC to be as clean and accurate in its reproduction of the source material as possible. Your Evo audio interface is the most important stage of this path, and with its super clean mic preamps and analog-to-digital converters, you can be sure that what you sing or play into it will be captured faithfully. The Smart Gain feature built into every Evo interface is also a win for the bedroom producer, enabling optimum input gain levels to be set at the press of a button, across multiple channels.

 

 

At the very start of the recording chain, microphones are a subject into themselves, steeped in technical myth and jargon. Ultimately, though, while some research is definitely called for on the differences between condenser and dynamic types, small and large diaphragms, and the various polar patterns available, you don’t need to spend a fortune to get your hands on a high quality mic: for vocals, for example, the Shure SM58 or Audio Technica AT2020 are both solid picks.

 

The cables running from the microphone to your interface need to be of decent quality, too, but don’t be tempted by the supposed benefits of silver wiring or other needlessly expensive material options – plain old copper will do just fine.

 

 

5. Don’t scrimp on monitoring

 

As well as playing a major role in determining the quality of the recordings you make, your audio interface also dictates the clarity and integrity of the signals arriving at your monitoring system – but if the speakers at the end of that particular chain aren’t also up to scratch, even the best interface won’t be able to compensate for their inadequacies. It’s well worth, therefore, investing as much money as you can into this most mission-critical component of your studio, and checking out as many reviews and expert opinions on viable contenders for your budget as you can find online. As noted, the acoustics of your bedroom will likely be somewhat less than ideal for perfectly accurate monitoring, so if you can afford a set of monitors with onboard DSP for room correction, or supplement a non-DSP set with a software room correction system such as IK Multiimedia’s ARC System 3 or SonarWorks’ SoundID Reference, so much the better.