It seems that with the advances in technology, the days of going to a professional recording studio are gone. More and more people are starting to believe that they can reproduce professional quality in their home, and that recording studios are too expensive. Well, this is erroneous information on both fronts, and this article will show you why.

A home studio can only achieve so much, and this is far below the standard required if you hope that your record will be received favourably by a recording company. While you may have raw talent, unfortunately, that’s all that will be shown by recording outside of a professional studio. A recording company will instantly know if you have created the record in a home studio. The quality will be deficient, and your tracks will not sound nearly as good as they should.

While there is an enormous amount of equipment that can be purchased for a home studio, particularly in the digital department, it is a different matter actually learning how to use it. It doesn’t matter how good the equipment you buy is, if you have no experience with using it, then it is an epic waste of money. Buying a Digital Audio Workstation does not make you an engineer. You may have some basic idea how to use the gear, but the intricacies of recording such as distortions and tonal imbalances will escape your ear, whilst an experienced sound engineer would pick up on it straight away.

If you record at home and lose the master tape, then all could be lost. Also, it is not unusual for a band to send the wrong tape to a recording company. With professional recording, comes professional record keeping. The studio will always have copies of your final cut available, correctly labelled for you to pick up. They will also archive your work for several years after you were there.

Recording at home is actually far more expensive than you think. If you wish to equip your own studio with gear that closely resembles that contained in a professional studio, you will be forced to pay many thousands of euros. When you consider that most recording studios’ daily fee is usually in the region of €200, it is daft to even consider spending crazy amounts of money trying to emulate a professional studio when you will not be able to make the best use of the equipment anyway.

There is only so much that can be achieved at home. If you are serious about being a success, then you need to think like a professional musician and go to a real recording studio where you can sound like a proper musician.