We explore a range of gear that makes home studios look more professional. A selection of key items that can change your space with form and function.
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There’s more to the look of a professional studio than creating a backdrop for YouTube and social media content. A visually appealing creative space puts your clients at ease, so instead of just improving your workflow, certain gear becomes part of the environment that immediately lets them know they are in good hands.
Building a professional studio space requires thinking not just from a technical perspective, but also in terms of the aesthetics of the room. Luckily, you don’t have to buy the most expensive equipment to do this. Instead, you just need to keep your particular focus in mind, whether that be film score or mixing, and give your studio a personality to match.
Gear That Makes Home Studios Look More Professional: Studio Monitor Stands
Speaker placement is extremely important in terms of how your clients and collaborators experience the sound of your studio. While not all of us can afford to have a pair of Auspurgers installed into the wall, there are other ways to give your setup a professional edge that don’t have immediate structural ramifications. When you’ve invested considerably in your room acoustics and your studio monitors, it’s time to turn your attention to your monitor stands.
Now, a monitor stand can do more than just place the speakers at ear height. In fact, some stands have built-in acoustic decoupling and absorption, which minimizes vibration and allows you to get a more accurate nearfield monitoring experience. The look of your stands matters too, of course, so you need to get something stately that matches the aesthetic of your room.
Recording is about so much more than just capturing signals; this is a relationships business. So, how your client feels when listening back to their takes or mixes can affect their overall confidence. The right studio monitor stands can complete your studio space, and justify all the time you spend there. Get it at Thomann.*
Gear That Makes Home Studios Look More Professional: Acoustic Treatment That Looks Good
The basic function of acoustic treatment is to deaden your room, making it a more focused environment for recording and mixing. However, acoustic absorbers and diffusers don’t come in only one colour, so you can coordinate each panel and bass trap to suit the colour scheme of your walls, ceiling and skirting.
Whether your speciality is recording and producing voiceovers for advertising agencies or tracking and mixing metal bands, it will help you to think about the people you work with when making your choices. If you plan on performing a function sustainably within the industry, it helps that clients leave with a lasting impression after visiting your studio.
This goes beyond being personable and delivering on your professional promises; it’s about providing an environment that is conducive to creative thinking in your particular area. Depending on what your focus is and what you stand for, you might go with a wildly contrasting colour theme, or a more muted one to match your ambient lighting. Get it at Thomann.*
Gear That Makes Home Studios Look More Professional: A Studio Desk
Even if you don’t have a console, a pro studio desk brings all the elements of your studio together as nothing else can. Depending on its design and layout, a studio desk can house your primary display, master MIDI keyboard, key pieces of outboard rack gear, and even a pair of studio monitors in some cases.
Provided you have the workflow, a studio desk can transform a collection of equipment into a cohesive workstation. With all your most frequently used tools within reach, you can take command of your projects with an unmatched ferocity. Because of the requirements of different applications, there are studio desks with specific designs.
A mastering desk, for instance, might have three columns of 19-inch racks to give you access to your favourite pieces of gear. Alternatively, there are desks for specific pieces of equipment like the Slate Audio Raven touchscreen controller that enhance the user experience with optimized tilt and snug housing. Get it at Thomann.*
Gear That Makes Home Studios Look More Professional: Cable Management
Whether you have truckloads of gear or not, cable management immediately makes your studio look clean and uncluttered. There are different ways to do this, and the trick is to always consider that you may rearrange your setup or add new pieces of equipment in the not-too-distant future. So, before you grab a bunch of plastic cable ties and start stapling them to the underside of your desk, you might want to try the less permanent option.
With Velcro cable ties, for example, you can keep your power and audio cables organized and untangled, and it allows you to add and remove cables quickly and easily when required. To navigate your routing, it also helps to colour-code your cables, which also makes troubleshooting a breeze. Meanwhile, to keep things neat and tidy, you can use an under-desk cable tray and a cable organizer inside your rack for 19-inch rack units.
To protect your cables, you can use cable sleeves, but always ensure you’re using the correct length cables or even a multichannel snake where applicable. In addition, having a dedicated hanger for patch leads, mic cables, and guitar leads will save you plenty of time in recording sessions. Get it at Thomann.*
Gear That Makes Home Studios Look More Professional: Equipment Racks
19-inch rackmount equipment has been a professional standard in recording studios for nearly a century now, and it’s still going strong. Even if you use Neve 80-Series or API 500-Series modules, you can easily find a chassis that fits the 19-inch format. Besides, audio interfaces, preamps, EQs and compressors, essentials like your power conditioner/distributor and patch bay also live here.
Even though you might do all your mixing in the box, having a rack or two filled with tasty analogue outboard gear impresses clients, and it could well be the difference between them choosing your studio over another. A studio rack does more than just house equipment; it becomes a platform for your workhorse hardware pieces.
Depending on your needs, you might want a rack with tilt, so you can operate the gear easily from your chair, or wheels for mobility, allowing you to easily reconfigure your studio. Depending on its capacity, a rack could potentially hold your favourite tracking chain, or a collection of your favourite bus processing tools for mixing. Get it at Thomann.*
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