Home Studio - Beginner

We have had many requests for a basic tutorial on setting up a home studio, so, here it is.

Pricing is correct at the time of writing (August 1st, 2022) from Thomann https://www.thomann.de

This is what we would consider a very basic setup that will give you a professional sound without the need to spend hundreds or even thousands of euros.

The job of the mixer is to mix all the input signals and send them to your PC or laptop via a single USB cable.

You can have 2 microphones and 2 other devices plugged into the mixer, 1 could be a CD player and a tape player, MP3 player, cell phone or any other device that can output audio / music.

You then adjust the levels to ensure nothing is going to be too low, or too loud.

Once you have your mixer connected to your PC / laptop and your microphone hooked up you are almost ready to broadcast or record your very own podcasts. You will also need a pair of headphones.

If you want to go Live then you will need some software to broadcast your stream to the world. We recommend SAM Broadcaster https://spacial.com/sam-broadcaster-pro/ however this is a serious piece of software and does require a small learning curve, alternatively you can always use BUTT Broadcaster https://danielnoethen.de/butt/, which is simply an encoder to send your audio out to the world using settings for CCR which we will give you when setting up your DJ account. butt (broadcast using this tool) is an easy to use, multi OS streaming tool. It supports SHOUTcast and Icecast and runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows (64 Bit only since version 0.1.20).
The main purpose of butt is to stream live audio data from your computers Mic or Line input to a Shoutcast
or Icecast server. If you want you can also record your session.

If you are going to use SAM Broadcaster this is a one stop shop which contains everything you will ever need for live broadcasting, including adding songs, pre-recorded interviews, jingles and much much more, BUTT is just the encoder so aswell as having your microphone connected you would also need a cd player, MP3 player of your phone connected through the mixer for playing your jingles or music. For a pretty great tutorial on BUTT have a look here https://youtu.be/8-_KiYLgYHM

See the images below for our recommendations etc.