There is so much misinformation going around the music industry. It’s sad when hopeful singers/songwriters and musicians fall into these traps: they believe the hype they have been told and end up spending valuable money on equipment they probably don’t need.

You Don’t Need High End Studio Equipment

Your end product (whether you are a singer, songwriter, producer or rapper) should be a polished, radio-ready recording. This is what you should be striving for. So what do you need when you are producing, recording and mixing your own material?

DAW

At the most basic level, you will need a DAW (you do not need to spend $699 on Pro Tools. Any DAW that you can afford and are comfortable with, will do. Even Reaper that retails for $60. See what works for you. If you need something with many virtual instruments included, look into Cubase, Logic, Reason, Sonar or Presonus Studio One. Anyone will be great. If you take 10 tracks of audio, put them in any daw, set the faders to the same levels, and export your mix, guess what? They will all sound exactly the same. This is why you don’t need to use Pro Tools, regardless of what Digidesign has been telling you for years.

Plugins

You don’t need to spend $2500 on a Waves bundle. Seriously, who’s got that kind of money to blow on plugins nowadays? In most cases, the stock plugins that come included in your DAW (eq’s, compressors, reverbs, etc) are more than adequate to get a punchy, professional mix. If you don’t have extra money, stick with the stock plugins. If you do have extra money to spend, yes, you can get some pretty cool plugins. (Ik Multimedia Amplitube is great for guitars, Waves does have nice modelled compressors and their L2 Limiter is very popular among many studios). The bottom line is just get what you need and more importantly what you can afford.

Microphone

You don’t need a super expensive microphone like an $8000 Sony C800. You don’t need a Neuman mic like a U87 or a Vintage U47. Go to your local music store and AB a few nice microphones, side by side. You can get great results on many vocalists with an inexpensive Shure SM57, SM58, SM7B like a Rode NT1a if you want a large condenser microphone. Michael Jackson used an inexpensive Shure SM7b microphone on the Thriller album. He could have used a mic made out of moon rock if he wanted, but he chose this particular mic, that in many cases, sounds great on a variety of vocalists.

(I highly recommend the Shure Sm7b)

Preamp

You do not need to purchase a vintage Neve 1073 pre, an Api or a new Avalon VT-737. Actually, you don’t need an external preamp at all. Just get a decent sound card and you’ll be fine. If you do want an external preamp for a little bit more character on instruments and vocals, you can look into the Golden Age Pre-73. It’s a fantastic, compact preamp with a lot of gain and character.

Sound Interface

You do not need to spend upwards of $2000 on a sound card. Most new sound cards today have really well designed, built in AD and DA converters and very useable preamps. Find out how many inputs you need, and get what you can afford. I would recommend anything from the new Presonus Audiobox series (they have different models with various inputs). If you are looking for a super high quality compact interface, the RME Babyface is an outstanding unit. If you are on a Mac, you probably cannot get any better than an Apogee Duet 2.

Analog Mixer

Now why would you want an analog mixer? Don’t get me wrong. If you take 24 channels out of your computer and feed it into an SSL 9000k console, it will sound nice. You’ll hear more definition and clarity without having to do as much to your tracks as you probably would mixing inside the box. Many up and coming producers want that analog sound so they may opt for a small mixer such as a Mackie or an Allen and Heath board thinking that running their tracks through the board will help their mix. Don’t bother going this route. You won’t get any noticeable improvement going that route unless you had high end, AD and DA converters. And in that case, why would you be running it through a cheap mixer? See my point. Stick with mixing “Inside The Box”. Get a clean signal into your DAW software and really learn all the techniques you can to optimize your mix. Trust me. Once you become an expert mixing engineer, no one would be able to tell if it was mixed on an analog console or inside your computer.

Recording Resolution

You want to record all your tracks at 24 bit, 96k? Or even 192k. I guess you really like to waste disk space and spend extra time backing up your projects. Just stick with 24 bit, 44.1k. Unless you are recording stacks of live violins, you probably can’t tell the difference. Also, your system would be more stable, you can get more tracks and virtual instruments to run at the same time with less headaches and stability issues.

Studio Monitors

Many high end studios are outfitted with various sets of expensive monitors (they can easily be over $10,000 for a pair and much more). I would say, get what you can afford. More important than any studio monitor setup, is the actual room treatment. As I’ve mentioned before, you really should treat your room if you are serious about your mixes. If you don’t, you are better using mixing headphones (refer to this article for more information). As for monitors, you can get great results with a set of Yamaha HS-50m or HS80m. If you got a higher budget to work with, look into practically anything from Adams (F5, A3X, A7X) or Focal Professional (CMS40, CMS50). Get what you can afford. If you are working with bass-heavy music such as Hip Hop or Dance, you may want a studio monitor with an 8 inch woofer. But really, you can get a great mix on a small set of monitors, just practice your craft.

Mac Vs. Pc

PC or Mac is fine. It’s what every you are happy with. Get what you can afford. I myself, am partial towards the Mac. Having run software on both (both with a fast processor, SSD drives), the Mac is just more stable and you don’t have to worry about optimizing anything for audio performance. You just turn it on and it works. Yes, it does cost a lot more, but chances are it will give you a better user experience. I had an HP, i7 core laptop with an SSD drive and 16 gigs of ram. I spent so much time optimizing it, and it seemed like every few weeks, I had to do something to it to get back the performance. Now I have been using a Macbook Pro retina for months, and it has never crashed and it is just as fast as the day I bought it (on a few rare occasions, software froze, but you can force quit the application and get back to work).