Home audio recording studio setup: what to buy in what order

A thousand-pound microphone in a bare room sounds worse than a cheap one in a good room. Reflections off hard flat surfaces are what make home recordings sound like home recordings, and no amount of processing removes them afterwards.

Walk around your home clapping once in each room and listen to what happens after the clap. The room where the sound dies fastest is your studio. It is usually a bedroom with a carpet, curtains and a full wardrobe.

Avoid kitchens, bathrooms, and any room with a hard floor and bare walls. Avoid the middle of a room, and avoid facing a bare wall from close range.

Also listen for what is constant: a fridge, a boiler, a computer fan, a road. Those get recorded too, and they are easier to move away from than to remove later.

Soft, thick and irregular is what absorbs sound. Duvets, coats, cushions, rugs, bookshelves with books at varying depths. Foam tiles from the internet are thin, mostly decorative, and do very little at the frequencies that matter for a voice.

Put the absorption behind the microphone and behind you, because those are the reflections that arrive back at the capsule. A duvet on a clothes rail behind the microphone is a standard improvised solution and it genuinely works.

Recording inside a wardrobe full of hanging clothes is the classic free answer. It looks ridiculous and sounds better than most spare rooms.

If you want to buy something, a few thick mineral wool panels placed at first reflection points do more than a wall of foam and cost about the same.

For an untreated room, a dynamic microphone is the safer choice. It is less sensitive, picks up less of the space, and needs you close to it, all of which help. Broadcast studios use dynamics for exactly these reasons.

A condenser is more detailed and more sensitive, which is an advantage in a treated room and a liability in a bare one. It will faithfully capture your neighbour's lawnmower.

USB or XLR is the other decision. USB is simpler and enough for one voice. XLR needs an interface and makes sense if you will ever record two people at once.

The difference between a decent microphone and an expensive one is much smaller than the difference between a bad room and a good one, or between eighteen inches away and six.

Six to nine inches from your mouth, slightly off to one side rather than directly in front. Speaking straight into the capsule is what produces the popping on p and b sounds.

Closer means more of you and less of the room, which is almost always the right trade at home. It also means more bass from the proximity effect, which most voices benefit from.

Keep the distance consistent. Moving between six inches and two feet during a take produces level changes no compressor fixes convincingly.

Check which side of the microphone is the front. Side-address microphones are spoken into from the side, not the top, and recording into the wrong face of one is a surprisingly common mistake.

Closed-back headphones matter, because open ones leak sound into the microphone. They do not need to be expensive; they need to seal.

Studio monitors are for mixing music, and for spoken audio you can skip them entirely. Check your work on cheap earbuds and a phone speaker instead, because that is what your listeners will use.

Skip the mixer unless you are recording live with several sources. Skip outboard processing entirely. Skip acoustic foam. Skip anything promising a broadcast sound in a box.

A usable setup is a room you chose deliberately, a duvet, a dynamic USB microphone on a stand with a pop filter, and closed-back headphones. Everything after that is a small improvement on a good recording rather than a fix for a bad one.