So you want to improve the quality of your home recordings?

Awesome!

I've been recording at home for well over a decade. Here are my top three tips for you (spoiler: none of them involve buying better microphones). We'll start with the most obvious, then get a little more abstract:

TIP 1: Minimize the extraneous noise in your room.

Obvious, right? Background noise might seem minimal going in, but after compression, high-end EQ boosts, and limiting, it will become more apparent – especially if you’re tracking multiple layers of sound. There is powerful software for noise reduction, but it’s easy to accidentally over-do it (ask me how I know). In my opinion, that kind of processing is best left as a last resort. You’re better off minimizing how much background noise is captured to begin with rather than trying to deal with it after the fact.

Here’s a quick checklist:

• Is your ceiling fan on?

• Is your fridge running?

• How about your A/C?

• Is the maintenance crew outside with leafblowers?

Some of these environmental factors are under your control, but some clearly are not. Be patient and wait it out if you have to.

TIP 2: Learn about room acoustics and how to treat your space.

There are a ton of free resources on the internet to help you on this quest, so we won’t dwell on it too long here. I will say that if you’re in a smaller room like me, focus on absorption. If you’re a DIYer, acoustic panels are not difficult to build, and they make a huge difference. You can also use blankets draped over mic stands or chairs to help control early reflections around a mic.

Acoustic treatment isn’t flashy or glamorous, but please don’t underestimate its importance in your recording space. As a mixing engineer, I would rather receive recordings made with budget mics in a decently treated room than recordings made with a $10k mic in an uncontrolled room.

TIP 3: Focus on performance.

This one is mental/internal. Understand that while the sonic caliber of your home recordings is unlikely to match or exceed the sonic caliber of recordings made in a thousand-dollar-a-day commercial studio, your recordings still have huge potential to move people. This is because the power of a song lies in its performance. 

If you record a subpar performance on a $10k mic through a cumulative $30k worth of outboard gear and the best converters that money can buy, what you’re ultimately left with is an immaculate recording of… a subpar performance. 

If you use a hundred dollar mic and a budget interface at home to capture an honest, evocative performance, you have a better recording. Not a higher quality, better-sounding recording, but a more powerful one.

Now, I’m not here to poo-poo on awesome gear. I love awesome gear. I obsess over it. I’ve spent years of my life and many of my dollars upgrading my studio a little at a time with the goal of capturing higher-quality sonics. By all means, upgrade what you can when you can.

But my advice to you is to get the most out of what you have by focusing on the quality of the SONG and the PERFORMANCE rather than trying to make an SM57 sound like a vintage U47 and then getting frustrated because you can’t. Because you can’t! But you CAN still make recordings worth sharing with a 57 that sounds like a 57. It’s in the song and the performance of the song. Embrace your setup for what it is, understand its limitations, and capture the best performance that you can give.