11. Build Your Home Studio in 5 Steps w/Patrick Arthur

In this episode of 'The Music Executive,' host Cinnamon Denise welcomes guest Patrick Arthur, a seasoned guitarist, mixing engineer, and producer, to discuss the essentials of starting a home recording studio. 

The episode covers the importance of having a digital audio workstation (DAW), audio interface, and microphones. Patrick shares his journey from college student to music professional and provides practical advice on selecting equipment, understanding DAW options, and the role of plugins. 

He emphasizes the value of experimenting with recording techniques and learning from online resources and industry peers. Patrick also highlights how having a home studio setup can be a game-changer for artists, allowing them to create professional-quality demos and productions from their own space. The episode concludes with a listen to 'Stairwells,' a track mixed, produced, and performed by Patrick Arthur.

Chapters

• 2:30 Patrick's Musical Journey
• 5:52 Essential Steps to Home Studio Setup
• 7:08 Choosing the Right DAW & Interface
• 10:00 Microphones and Micing Techniques
• 14:08 Investing in Plugins + the Basics

Transcript

Don't be afraid to, to get into this, like this world of things because especially now, the way the world works. Being an artist, even if you don't want to produce your own music, to have like a radio ready single from your room, having an interface and a do to create demos and to compose and actually hear your music maybe before you send it to a band to record it.

Is a huge, huge thing to have.

This is The Music Executive, a show where we talk about gig tips, music, business strategies, songwriting experiences, collabs, and even more with industry professionals. Let's get into it.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the show. My name is Cinnamon Denise. That's Cinnamon like the spice. And Denise, like Denise. And today we have a real amazing guest. His name is Patrick Arthur, and he is a guitarist that has made a swift transition from college student to literally seasoned creative. He is a mixing engineer and a producer.

He and I have some projects that we're working on as well. But Patrick, welcome to the show. How's it going? Good. Good, good, good. So I always do a surprise question for my guests. You ready for this one? Let's do it. What is the strangest thing in your refrigerator? Strangest thing? Oh, post.

I don't know what strange things are in my refrigerator. Lemme think. It's normally just regular food. I haven't been to the grocery store in a minute. It's a lot of takeout lately. Okay. That's That's not a good sign. A lot of takeout. That's a bachelor sign. That's what that is, right? There's not a lot of cooking going on lately.

That's funny. Okay. I do have some, I have some Vegemite, actually that's kind of a weird, weird thing. It's an Australian like spread you put over like toast. Oh, okay. What kind spread? Is it like a jelly? Is it like a cream cheese? It's really tart, like a little bit of it will go a long way. Like if you put too much, you're gonna kind of ruin your, your whatever you're eating.

But if you put the right amount, it's really good. And it's like supposed to be packed with a bunch of vitamins and stuff. Oh, so that's kind of, and you said it's Australian, right? Yeah. Okay, well cool there. Well, you heard it live and the first time here. What is the strange thing in Patrick Arthur's fridge?

So Patrick, tell us a little bit about your background. I know that you are from Augusta and you moved to Atlanta and you moved to New York and you've been traveling the East coast quite a bit and playing with some amazing musicians. So tell us a little bit about your background. Yeah, I started playing music when I went high Augusta.

And that's where I started playing music. I really didn't have any interest in playing music, but I needed to pick an elective when I was there. And I ended up actually starting with percussion because I had friends that were playing percussion. I didn't have that cool story where I like heard a record and was like, man, I wanna do that for a living.

But I started doing it and like from day one I was like, this is awesome. I wanna learn more about this. And then there was a spot opening up in the jazz ensemble at that school to play guitar. So I jumped in on that, started playing guitar. Did that all through. High school. So I started that in I guess ninth grade.

So freshman year. And then by senior year, I like knew for sure I wanted to go to to college for music and that's how I ended up in Atlanta. I went to Kennesaw State to major in jazz guitar performance. Mm-hmm. Got my degree there and that's kind of where I started doing the engineering as well. So I was, I was playing a bunch in Atlanta, you know, started some groups, was doing a lot of freelance stuff as a side man.

Started doing some small tours and. I guess the year after I graduated from college was when I, I moved into this house with two other roommates that were musicians and we had this basement and me and my other roommate, we were like, we could turn that into a studio if we wanted to. That was pretty cool.

We got a lot of space down there that we're not using and so that was kind of what sparked the interest in like kind of start, we started a studio at our house and we got to record and track a lot of, a lot of bands. And that's what like kind of grew my interest in recording. Before that, I had kind of started getting into it through a course I took at school, just like a film scoring class.

And that was when I opened up like logic for the first time and I was like, what, this is on my computer? I can, and I had like bought a mini controller. I was like, how did I not know I could do this? It was just complete like ignorance. I had no idea that my computer, I thought I had to have like a $2 million studio to like make a, at all.

You need probably what's, how much does logic cost? About 200 bucks. Yeah. And like when I was in school, you could get it as a student discount and I was like, exactly. So what is it? A hundred for you? So yeah, I mean it was definitely under 200. Okay. So then you get a hundred dollars D for logic, and then you can get a meet keyboard for under 50 bucks.

Yeah, for sure. So for less than $200, you can get a Grammy.

Yeah. And logic has everything you need in it, but, uh, and like I saw, I had some friends that, like, when I would do some studio work, like one of my other friends before I moved into this house had a little studio basement at his house. And that was the first time I did like a tracking session. When we were like, you know, first year of college, he was still in high school.

We started a band and we were gonna record a album. And he was like, man, I have a like, basement set up. Just come do it here. And that was the first time I saw like, audio get recorded. Wow. And then, you know, he would go through and be like, you know, how do you feel about your guitar sound? And I was like, well, I guess I'd have to re-record it if I didn't like it.

And he was like, no. And he pulled a plugin on. I was like, what? You can just, I mean, I had no idea how it worked. Right. And that was, yeah, that was what kind of started the train for me. So talk to me about, you mentioned with, you were talking to your roommate with, when you moved in with two musicians and you had a basement and you were talking to one of your roommates and they said, you know, we can put a studio here.

Yeah. What, talk about the home studio segue, 'cause we're gonna talk to the audience a little bit about five steps that you can take for starting your home recording studio. Sure, for sure. So, yeah, we kinda already touched on, so the first thing I guess you would need is some sort of a doll, like a digital audio workstation.

So for me, I had logic because I had a a Mac and you actually, if you have a Mac, you already have GarageBand for free and it does a lot of this stuff so you don't have to spend much money on that. But before I moved into that house, I already had a small two channel interface, so I had that and I had a doll.

So I actually already kind of had like an apartment version of a home studio, which is what a lot of people use, a lot of film score. The person that actually got me into that particular interface was doing film score work, and he was like, this is all I use. I have this controller, and I like write music for films.

And what interface did you get? I had the Apollo twin. Okay. Got it. Which I'm a big Apollo fan because I like their plugins and the, just the way their console integrates with, with the doll. But there's, and they're a little pricier, but you can definitely, you know, there's a million options for anything now, so you can find budget items that are still amazing.

It's not like you're right. Buying bad stuff for if you're spending under a certain amount of money, it's, if it records music, it records music. Especially if you're just getting So talk. So talk to me about the dog Digital audio workstation. You mentioned before this call, there are some free options.

Yeah. So what are those, and tell me the different, as far as the dogs that you've worked with, what purpose do does each one serve? The common question is which dog is the best, right? Sure. Yeah. I personally don't feel that there's a i the lawyer answer to that is, it depends. Right? Right. So what are you trying to do?

So talk to us a little bit more about dos and then we'll move forward. Yeah, so I kind of agree with the lawyer answer to that. But yeah, each one has its own kind of, I think the biggest difference is workflow with all of them. So at the end of the day, they can all record audio, but with something like Logic, it's really good with MIDI information.

So it's really good MIDI editor. It's really easy and fast. So if you're doing a lot of stuff with MIDI controller, it might be the way to go. But like I said, so GarageBand is free. So if you wanna see how Logic works, you can use GarageBand for free and try it out. It looks the same. There's just not as many features.

And then same thing with Ableton. There's like, so Ableton, a lot of producers, almost all my friends have switched to Ableton. I'm kind of like the, the last guy still on Logic from my friend group in college. And they like to give me, uh, gimme crap about that all the time that I'm still on logic. But Ableton is great for producing because it's got the famous like Ableton Live, where you can have kind of like sales where you can have a track that you trigger really great for live performance.

Most, most live people that are triggering tracks are gonna be in Ableton and Pro Tools seems to be the studio standard. So that's really great for editing and comping like multiple takes and all of that. So, but again, it all comes down to workflow. There's even a new one now that Apollo and users can get for free called Luna, that I've kind of been messing around with lately.

Oh wow. You have to have an Apollo interface. And if you have an Apollo interface, it's, it's free. And I think it sounds great and it's really easy to work around because they just pretty much built a DAW that integrates perfectly with your interface. The console. Yeah, with your interface. So it all comes down to workflow.

I switched to Ableton for a little while. I actually, and, and realized that I just had learned too many keyboard shortcuts and things in logic. That didn't work in Ableton, and so I just felt kind of lost and I didn't feel like relearning that program. But if I had, I would probably be telling you that Ableton was my favorite.

You know, so it's, it's right, they, they all record audio ongoing. It's an ongoing lawyer answer. It depends. What are you trying to do? Yeah. What're whatcha trying do it with? How fast are you trying to do it? You know, so many questions and, uh, they, they all have a free option, so I feel like you should just try them all.

Yeah, just try 'em all. See which one you like to look up honestly, too, like that you're gonna spend a lot of time staring at the screen looking at this dawn. And if, if it visually, like, if you're like confused by the screen, Ableton know was the thing for me. I was just like, there's a lot going on on the screen and it's like, ah, I can't focus.

Right. So the next step in the home recording studio is what? So the interface, so that's, that's how you're gonna get the audio right? The interface audio, yeah. Into the, the doc. And then after that, what are we looking at? You're gonna need a microphone if you're recording any sort of acoustic instrument or your voice or whatever.

If you just play electric guitar and you wanna plug straight in, you might could get away with not having a mic at first. You're gonna wanna mic you. There's lots of different types of microphones. It's, you can search Google search like Best Microphone, and there's gonna be 400 different articles that claim that they've got the best three.

If you're starting your home studio, it's just the first time and you're kind of just recording yourself, which is how I started. So I think I bought two microphones for my guitar. I wanted one that I thought would sound good for my acoustic and one that I thought would sound good. Micd up on my amp.

Right. So I just talked to some engineer friends and I was like, Hey, you know, this is the amp I have. Do you have a good recommendation on some electric mics or if you're still doing studio sessions? I was definitely that guy at the session. Once I started getting into this, that was just like pestering the engineer the whole session.

I. And just asking questions. Like when the guys would go on a lunch break, I would be at the like knock on the guy's door and be like, Hey man, what are you doing in there? Can I ask you some questions about stuff? Right. And most of those people love to talk about it, so Exactly. That's another good piece of advice is if you know someone that's into this stuff, it's a big world to jump into, especially now.

'cause there's so many options. Talk to people that have been doing it for a while, 'cause. Everyone loves to talk about audio gear. It's kind of, I'm not even a gearhead at all, but when I started getting into this I was like, ah, this is actually really cool. So some sort of, some sort of microphone. So tell me, so you started out, you asked questions from the, your engineer friends or people you were setting under their tutelage.

What is something that you know now to consider? Like for me, I am a bassoon player, but my bassoon can plug directly into my interface. You know, straight into it with a direct line, but I sing, right? And so I want my voice to sound a certain way. What is something you need to consider? For me it's frequency response, right?

The frequency spectrum that the mic picks up. What is something that you consider as a guitarist or as just a engineer in general? What to start to have in your toolbox? Yeah, and a lot of it is the micing technique, like so you don't have to spend a bunch on a microphone. Like the SM 57 is probably the most standard microphone.

A lot of people will act like it's, you know, it's like, oh, that's a beginner mic. You know, you don't need that. I use it all the time still. It was, it was one of the first mics I bought. I think I got it used from Guitar Center for like $50. If you know how to mic something properly with it, then you can get an amazing sound so you don't have to spend, you know, $5,000 on a vintage knowing an 87 to get a good record.

The company's gonna try to make you believe that, and there's definitely something to those microphones. They're amazing. Really, I feel like in the audio world, experimenting is just as good as as doing research and, and learning things. So obviously if when you get a mic you should look that microphone up, see different people's micing techniques, but also just experiment.

'cause your room is gonna be different than that person's room that you watch on YouTube that's doing the review. Right, so just do like a scratch track and mess around with where the microphone is. Like for guitar, for me, I mess around kind of with, if I'm pointing it directly at the sound hole, if I'm recording acoustic or if I'm, you know, I like to actually have it.

I found closer to like the 12th threat. That's a warmer sound for me, and there's not as much low end resonance. And then the, the distance. My biggest thing that I did when I first started was I was just close micing everything, so I was just sticking everything like right into the speaker almost of the amp.

And I would listen back to my recordings. I'm like, man, that sounds so like flat. There's no air in it, you know, there's no room. Right. It's, well, because you literally taking up all the space with air would be Right. Exactly. Sounds really common sense saying it now, but like when I first started, I was like, oh, you supposed to put the microphone as close as you can to make it sound good.

Right. But that wasn't it at all, especially as a guitar player. 'cause I had no, I wasn't a vocalist at all. So I had no experience with, you know, like Micing Mic control. Yeah, mic. You know, you see vocalists do it. But I was on the ignorant guitar player, so I was just like, just stick it in there. Right. And then play.

And it's supposed to sound good. It's like, why is this not sound good? That's funny. You know, we need to have another episode about going deeper in depth about. Each one of these topics that we're going on. Yeah. So we're, we're gonna, we're gonna schedule that Patrick. Cool. I just told you. Okay. Right. So the next step, let's, let's move on to the next step here.

What do we got next? So after that, for me, I started investing in plugins. So, and, and the plugin world has really grown. Pretty crazily. Like it's kind of scary good how, how good these plugins are. And I, I don't have a huge background in the analog version of these things. So like the actual, you know, if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about at all, it's if you go into a studio, you see these just racks of gear, right?

All these cool lights and knobs and stuff. You can turn all those things, just manipulate the audio in some way. It's usually like EQ compressors, limiters and, and things like that that just change how your audio sounds or interacts. And there's plugin versions of pretty much every piece of hardware gear you can have.

And then there's just standalone version of plugins. So that's actually why I went the Apollo interface was because I really liked their plugins that they offer because of the way that they use DSP instead of CPU. So my computer, I'm still actually running a 2012 MacBook Pro that I, I hot rotted. I had a friend, like a computer friend, like put a new hard drive and upgraded the ram.

So it's somehow still running like a champ. So for those in the audience that dunno what a DSP is, can you share with them what that is? It's actually don't remember what it stands for. It's digital. Uh, I'm pretty sure. Digital signal processing. Satellite signal processing. Yeah. Yeah, it's just kind of a way of using, I guess, external processing instead of the processing on your computer.

So, and that's pretty important if you really get into mixing larger sessions. And you, you have a computer that maybe isn't like pro-grade, you put like five plugins on and all of a sudden your computers like hits it CPU limit, and now you can't do anything in your track anymore. And that's the most frustrating thing in the world.

It used to happen to me 'cause I wasn't good at plugin management, so I was just throwing too many plugins on things and just not knowing what I was doing. Right. So that's, yeah, and you don't have to invest a lot in plugins. Like for me, logic, I still go back to some of the stock logic plugins because they're actually really good.

I think a lot of my first plugin purchases were just because I didn't know how to use the logic plugins because I, like, I didn't understand how a compressor worked. I didn't understand how to properly eq, so I just thought, oh, well if I buy this plugin, my stuff will sound better. But it was, it was all just me not knowing how it worked.

Uh, the key is learning how to use what you got. First, learn how to use what you got before you go and buy something else. That's, I spent a lot of money before I realized that. Yeah, that'll save you thousands, I mean thousands of dollars. I'm in the same boat with you. Patrick spent a lot of money and I realized, again, as a singer, the first plugin I should have got was some sort of vocal tuning.

Um, everything else will be fine. 'cause everything else you can get stock, you can get a reverb, you can get a eq, you can get a compressor stock, but you need to get a vocal tuning plugin. For sure. Yeah. So let's talk about, and these are for the audience, for y'all. These are not, you know, the exact order.

These are just, we're just scratching the surface of home recording here. But Patrick, if you wanna tell me what the next step for you was as far as building your home studio? Yeah, it was just trying to learn like what we were just trying to learn what I had. 'cause I, I ended up with a lot of stuff between me and my other roommate that built this basement studio, which I'm no longer in.

So I've kind of downsized a little bit to my own home studio. But we, you know, we were looking around, I was like, man, we've got, between the two of us, we've got all these interfaces. We've got a bunch of microphones, like, when do we use this microphone versus that microphone? When do we use this plugin versus this plugin?

I just went to YouTube just and started looking stuff up. Like I was saying earlier, I would, I would ask my friends a bunch of questions 'cause I had a lot of friends that were getting into it at the same time. But there's a lot of really good YouTube channels out there that have quality content. And the thing with YouTube for me is that there's so much, sometimes it's overwhelming and you don't know, like, is this person they really know they're talking about?

Or they just buy a webcam and start talking into it. There's some paid subscriptions if you want to get, you know, 100% quality. Insight into the world of mixing and recording. The one that I used for a while was called Pure Mix. Mm-hmm. Dot com. Their subscription price has gone up a bit since I used it, but I remember when I was using it, I mean, that's how I learned a lot of my fundamental, like how do I actually eq?

Because it's easy to put a EQ on and once you kind of see the controls, you're like, okay, that's common sense. But there's more to it than just like, oh, I'm just gonna boost the low end. Right or boost the high. There's a lot of techniques you can apply. Same with compression. Compression is a really convoluted concept for a lot of people that they, I'm always watching actually still, like I'll just watch beginner videos just to pick up something new.

It's no different than learning your instrument. You know, you may have been playing your instrument for over a decade, but you still work on fundamental technique. You can always revisit your posture. You can always revisit just really standard like long tones or whatever it is. I feel like audio engineering and all of these things is no different.

Like you can always learn like the most basic thing again and get something out of it. So I would find a couple of people that you like on YouTube. Scribe to their channels that talk about like just the basic bare bones. You know, another thing I should haven't said yet that is really important is, is monitors.

You're gonna need monitors. That's a very big one. If you're gonna be doing this, monitors and monitor placement, that's that's important. Yeah, we're gonna have another talk. We're gonna have to have another talk because we, there's a lot here. Yeah, there's, there's so much here. And I've, man, I've really enjoyed this.

So, anything, is there anything else, aside from, you know, the monitor conversation, which is a whole nother segue that you want to share? Not, not particularly. The only thing I would say is like, don't be afraid to, to get into this, like this world of things because especially now, the way the world works with being an artist, even if you don't wanna produce your own music, to have like a radio ready single from your room, having an interface and a D to create demos and to compose and actually hear your music maybe before you send it to a band to record it.

Is a huge, huge thing to have. Like it's kind of a game changer to be able to hear your music immediately, like get a MIDI controller. Even if the string sounds on your MIDI controller are awful, you can still hear and be like, oh, maybe the base part isn't really what I wanted right there. Right. Something like that.

So even if you're not like wanting to be like professional audio engineer, I think getting an interface and a doll in some sort of mid controller. Is gonna help you in the long run because you can run just so many creative things you can do with it and discover. For me, I started listening to music differently when I started seeing how it was made.

So then I was listening more from like a production standpoint or a songwriting standpoint versus. That was a cool guitar solo, you know? Right. It opened my ears up and it's constantly doing that. It's really, really cool. Y'all have heard it here on the show. Where can the audience follow you, Patrick? I'm on Instagram, Patrick underscore Arthur Patrick arthur music.com.

If there's any other questions, like specific questions you guys have about any of this stuff, feel free to to reach out and I'm on Facebook and all those things. Well, Patrick, thank you so much for being on the show, for the audience. What you're about to hear now is a tune called Stairwells that was mixed produced, and Patrick is performing on this track as well, so enjoy this track.

Thank you so much for listening and see you next time.

Don't forget to leave a rating of the show. Helps to make us better. Thanks so much y'all. Take care.