Home recording is great. We love it! Firstly it means you can get a tunes recorded and start listening back straight away, working on arrangements and seeing what might need tweaking. Secondly, when you do come to record at a pro studio, it’s great for us to hear your home recordings so that we can get to know the songs before you set foot in the studio. But home recordings have their drawbacks… Most home studios don’t have a purpose built live room which has been acoustically treated to give you a perfect recording environment. You can get away with some things and computers can fix others but you really can’t beat recording in a big room with a hard wood floor!

There is a difference between lo-fi and low quality…Home studios usually have a decent computer and some software and a few fairly basic all round mics. To get pro quality you need pro equipment. For example, 1 Neumann U87 will set you back about £2,000…Then you need a Pre-amp to plug it in to, maybe a compressor depending on what its being used for. Then a mixing desk, then a sound card… You see where we’re going with this one. We have a building built specifically for recording and stocked with pro audio equipment. If you can get a home set up of this quality, you’re going to have a lot of jealous friends.

Noise is another factor for most home recording set ups. Not just annoying the locals with drums but your neighbor’s cars, lawn mowers, dogs can all add a lot of ambient noise. It’s not noticeable until you have multi-tracked a whole song at which point you’ll find 20 layers of ambient noise and there will be a wall of white sound.

Having said all of the above, there is no reason why you can’t use the studio to your advantage to do the bits you can’t do at home. It is becoming more popular to come to a bigger studio to track drums (in particular) bass and screaming guitars and then do final overdubs in a small home recording set up which has some acoustic treatment. People will then often send the files back to be mixed by an engineer in the studio. Oh, that’s another thing I forgot, our control room have been build to give a perfect stereo image though our high end studio monitors… When it comes to mixing you need to be able to play it loud and clear in a room which has been acoustically treated otherwise you will end up mixing it so it sounds good in your room through your speakers rather than for everyone.