Home Studio Recording: The Complete Guide

I made my first recording in 1984. As that trend continued to present day I filled a shelf with books from the recording world. This book in particular pulls from Warren's experience in the industry and it's jam packed with EVERYTHING you need to know about home recording.Great Table of Contents to quick find what you are looking for right away. Everything is very well laid out, not just with the how, but the why things are being done. Clear accompanying pictures and diagrams. An excellent Bibliography and a much finer search ability in the hefty index.Add to that the foreword, the quotes form other people, it's just a great little package. I bought the paperback and it's well bound. Crystal clear print, pics & diagrams.Highly recommended for any studio, home or otherwise.Big thumbs up from me.

Absolutely over the moon with this purchase. It literally guides you through every single part of what it takes to make music at home & more! It’s well structured and everything is broken down into little simple to understand segments that is very handy for going back to for referencing. I struggle sometimes with books/guides as they’re worded a bit more complicated and I have to read over and over to make sense of what it’s telling me, this book doesn’t do that it’s very clear & easy to read. An absolute must have for any producer, mixer, engineer who is just starting out or even more advanced you will 100% take so much away from this book.

I may be old fashioned but much more convenient having this book to hand to dip into confident in Warren’s experience the info can be trusted instead of trawling you tube for “answers”. Already adding value by dipping in to understand such as cone filtering, phase alignment issues and finally cracked an issue of why my mix downs sounded more distorted than in the session after reading the section on 32 bit floating point and potential consequences of bouncing down to 24 bit. Excellent resource, thanks Warren for all you give to the music production community. Superb book

The Book has been put together in a Clear and concise layout so it is easy to find your way to a specific section that you want to focus on, giving a brilliant reference book you will read time and time again.It gives an amazing insite to the music industry, Mixing & Production, with great advice spread across the 439 pages,12 chapters and Appendix. This is one BIG Book and a 'Must Buy'.Trevor, from Trevor Nokes Music Ltd and Life Time member of Produce Like A Pro.

A detailed and comprehensive guide for all budding recordists and engineers.. Having followed Warren for a few years now, he has become one of the most engaging and open educators in his field. There are no tricks or short cuts, you have to put in the work, but this book will help you know where to put your efforts to good use. Wish Id read this 20 years ago, it reaffirms a lot of things that I’ve had to learn the hard way!

I have enjoyed reading this book and will be using it as I record in the future

This is one of those books that will end up being your go-to reference guide when you are in your studio.Full of helpful and easy to understand information.

Since writing this review I have plodded through the rest of the book and have some further thoughts, which I've added at the bottom.Here's the original review:To start with, I need to point out that I am only 150 pages into the 400pp+ book, so this review is a work in progress and will be updated at a later time. I'm writing my initial review at this stage, though, because up to now I have been (mildly) disappointed.I bought the book on the basis that it would be a single encyclopaedic source of knowledge ('The Complete Guide') about setting up a modest studio at home for me to record my songs, and those of the writing and recording partnership I have been involved in for the past forty years. I wanted to be able to dip in and find technical information about microphones, acoustic treatment and pre-amps, as well as informed advice on compression, eqing, mixing and recording techniques. Having been very active in home recording since the early 1990s, I already have a fair idea of what's what, but I'm not too proud to learn more or to seek a refresher on areas that I might be misinformed, outdated or rusty in. In short, I was hoping for that complete, consolidated, up to date, encyclopaedic guide to home studio recording.I decided to read the book from start to finish. This was a mistake.So far, a very significant amount of the content assumes I am wanting to set up a home studio as a commercial venture, and to attract and work with other artistes. There's nothing wrong with that, but I wonder how many people who set up HOME based studios are actually seeking to commercially record music beyond their own compositions. Yes, of course, I have no doubt there are plenty out there, but as a percentage of the people who are likely to buy this book I'd imagine the majority are bedroom/basement producers doing it as a hobby, or people like me who are doing it commercially but for our own material.Of course there's some very useful advice here on things like patchbays, mic types, polar patterns, but it's muddled with lots of (to me) less useful topics like recording a live gig (in a home studio book, lol?), the history of recording studios and the different roles in a studio, as well as a load of guff about hiring interns, how to treat artistes, their health and welfare, how to attract clients, and why you should consider buying decent gear, not just because it sounds better, but because a visiting artiste will be more impressed that you own a high end mic, rather than a Rode condenser. Aside from that being a bit shallow, how many of us have the tens of thousands spare to equip our studios in the manner suggested.If the book had been titled 'Setting Up and Running a Home Recording Business' I expect I would still have bought it, or at least put it on my wish list. (Remember, I'm still talking about the first 150 pages here). If this had been a TV series, I would have changed channels a couple of episodes in - and I may well have missed out on a great story. Luckily, I can flick ahead in the book and see that there is some good stuff to come. I hope.Now, it looks like from here on in there may well be a ton of very valuable information, and I'm really hoping that the book becomes the encyclopaedia I was hoping it would be, and not just a collection of articles from the author's website.Concerns going forward are that Protools and Waves will be the example software of choice. That and the repeated misspelling of the word meter as 'metre'. Aaargh!UPDATE 21 October 2023.I've tried hard to like this book, but I'm afraid I can't rate it any higher than so many other 'complete guide' style books. Overall, I was disappointed with the content, which wasn't as in depth as it could (should) have been, and felt to me like transcripts of so many YouTube videos and one off articles. Of course, having Warren's knowledge easily accessible in one place is not a bad thing - but the book didn't bring anything new to the party, and it certainly wasn't comprehensive enough to be used as an encyclopaedia.I was also very much put off by the apparent assumption that because we want to produce music at home, we want to turn it into a commercial enterprise, or that we have bottomless pockets to fund it all.Let me illustrate my concerns with a couple of sections as examples: Recording electric bass on page 226 gets 5 small paragraphs. That's it. And one of the paragraphs talks about a technique where you use a 15" speaker wired to mic a 15" cabinet (it's not explained how to achieve that - we are referred to 'a number of online forums' for instructions) and then parallel record with a DI. A second paragraph suggests we try another technique involving wiring an 18" speaker as a microphone, on an 18" cabinet in tandem with a Neumann U67 and a DI through an ARTSGX Nightbass effects processor. Sounds great, but in terms of number of words, these esoteric techniques account for more than half the section on recording electric bass guitar. And let's be honest - it's not something you'll want to do frequently.Recording acoustic guitars has more detail in its 2 1/2 pages, but the suggested workflow involves a U47, a patchbay, 1073 and 1176 before we hit the audio interface! Let's assume we buy a Neumann U47 at £3k rather than a £10k Telefunken. Patchbay, say £150, 1073 EQ for £3k, and let's assume a UA 1176 at £2.5k rather than an original UREI at around £6k. So, to record my acoustic guitar, the advice is to spend in the region of £8.6k. I have little doubt the results would be wonderful, and of course I would expect to use that gear on just about everything else I ever record, but seriously? This is supposed to be a home studio! It brings me back to my point in the original review, which is that this book is aimed at people who want to build a commercial studio at home - or amateurs who have deep pockets (deep enough to pay nearly £50 for this book! Shockingly overpriced!).More strangeness ensues when we are shown in some detail, over six pages, how to record an orchestra. I don't know about you, but I'd really struggle to get an orchestra in my home studio, or indeed any part of my home. Odd that orchestras get six pages, but recording vocals only gets four. Now, the pages on vocals are useful, but they are woefully light on details or options. One short paragraph on recording ensembles? And the 'preferred' signal chain involves (wait for it) a U47, a 1073, TWO DBX160s and TWO 1176s, oh and a patchbay . . .There is lots of good stuff in this book, but it just doesn't know who it's aimed at. Or, more to the point, it's aimed at the wrong audience, given the title. There's no doubt that Warren knows his stuff, and knows very well indeed how to capture the attention of a wide audience. But I prefer him in small doses on YouTube (a far broader and deeper encyclopaedia than any book can ever be).I'm not going to downgrade the three stars I gave originally, but I'm disappointed not to be able to increase them.No, for the £49.75 I paid for this book in March 2023, or the £46.95 you'll pay at time of writing, I would steer you towards much better written, significantly more comprehensive books from Mike Senior or Bobby Owsinski, as well as the slightly out of date Studio SOS Book from the Sound on Sound team.