Some things just don’t make no sense.
I interact regularly with lots home studio owners.
And the more I hear from them, the more “don’t make no sense” things I hear.
For example…
If you’re like me, your family hates shopping for you. You’re into all this weird music stuff, and they wouldn’t know where to begin. So your presents consist of envelopes with cash and gift certificates. Your grandmother apologizes for such an “impersonal” gift, but you love it. Now you can get exactly what you want.
Are you unsure what to get? The problem with Christmas cash is that it’s usually not enough to get a $2,000 preamp or guitar, but it’s still enough to get some REALLY handy items for your studio.
Here are some ideas to help you burn a whole in your pocket. 
I’ve talked about acoustic treatment a lot here on Home Studio Corner. Why? Because it’s one of the most important components of your home studio (if not the most important).
Everything you do in a studio is centered around audio waves, right? We’re in the business of capturing, manipulating, and reproducing audio waves.
While we audio cowboys are in the process of wrangling in these unruly audio waves, they’re bouncing all around our room. The more reflective surfaces your studio has, the more unwieldy the audio becomes.
Acoustic treatment is like Ritalin™ for your studio. Audio waves have ADD. They bounce around the room like crazy until they finally run out of energy…then they do it again.
Okay. Enough analogies. 
Regardless of your involvement in audio, whether your a casual hobbyist or a full-time professional, your music has a slim chance of sounding decent if you don’t have acoustic treatment.
Photo by yimmy149
A while back I had the pleasure of attending a seminar given by Gavin Haverstick
of Haverstick Designs. The topic of the seminar was how to measure the acoustic issues of your room. He talked about various measurement techniques and devices.
All of this was very interesting, but the most fascinating part for me was during the question-and-answer section at the end. Someone in the audience asked Gavin to give his opinion on digital room correction.
Let me take a step back and explain what I mean by “digital room correction.” There are several products on the market now that can tune studio monitors to the room they are in. For example, if the room is causing a boost at 200 Hz, these products will use a digital EQ to attenuate 200 Hz. The end result is (ideally) a flat frequency response.
I just got back from a family vacation to the beach. As with any event involving babies, there were a LOT of pictures taken.
My wife and I have a decent little point-and-shoot camera. I think it’s called a DSLR. You can’t change out lenses or anything, but it’s got a lot of the features of the nicer, more expensive cameras.
My sister-in-law, however, has a nice SLR camera. On top of that, she recently bought a really nice $500 lens for it.
Our camera takes nice pictures.
Her camera takes GREAT pictures.
Okay, Joe, this is a recording blog…where are you going with this?
Home studios aren’t perfect.
In a perfect world, your home studio would be designed by a professional. You’d have a great-sounding control room, a couple of tracking rooms, and a nice, quiet vocal booth.
Raise your hand if your control room, tracking room, and vocal booth are all the same room. (Joe quickly…and sheepishly…raises his hand.)
That’s the reality we face. We’re weekend warriors, home studio recordists. Hobbyists. We’ve got to make the best of what we’ve got.
You heard me talk about gear acquisition syndrome or GAS before. It’s not a new term, and it’s not something we don’t all deal with.
You’ve also heard me say that it’s much more important to use the gear that you currently own to its fullest extent before going out and buying more equipment. At some point though we all inevitably ask the question, Is expensive gear worth the money?
It’s a valid question. There are lots of really cool expensive pieces of gear out there. And they wouldn’t exist if someone wasn’t buying them. So the real question is are they necessary?
I’ve got a recording session coming up soon with a fairly well-known bass player around Nashville.
As far as I know, he’ll want to record direct. What I’m planning to do is something I’ve not done before, but I’m fairly excited about.
I recently bought a Presonus FireStudio Project for my studio. It’s a simple, one-rack space interface with eight microphone inputs. One of the unique features of FSP is that the first two channels can be either microphone or instrument inputs.
