How to build an analog recording studio WITHOUT computer or DAW

OK so solutions of using your own computer or laptop as a recording studio are now very common. What about building a home recording studio without the use of computer or DAW (Digital audio workstation)?

In fact, this is the method used before DAW and computer audio recording become very popular starting in the late 90’s. This has some great advantage by itself:

1.) Without using a computer, the recording, mixing and mastering sessions are less prone to crash and corrupted files associated with computers.

2.) Without a computer, most signals are in analog domain. You will take advantage of the warmth and natural sound associated with analog recordings.

So how are you going to create an “almost” analog home recording studio? I put “almost” in quotes because today, having and possessing all-analog equipment and gears are rare. If you do a quick search in EBay, etc. for those that are selling analog multi-track recorders such as reel to reel, then you cannot easily find a seller. Thus you might opt to find the digital equivalent.

Analog consoles are still common and you can easily find them anywhere so as the outboard gears that process analog audio such as compressors, EQ and reverb.

For most home recording studio purposes, an 8-track recording is sufficient to cover all bases such as drums, guitars, etc. In this way you can record a band to 8 tracks inputs like this way:

a.) One mono channel for vocals
b.) One mono channel for guitars
c.) One mono channel for bass
d.) 5 mono –channels for drums

Then a total of 8-channel inputs to the mixer are required.

An analog mixing console

One of the most important pieces of equipment in your analog home recording studio is the mixing console. Most professional and big recording studios are using many inputs and outputs such as a 24 input console. However for home recording purposes, you might want at most 16-channel mixing console so that you can still track drums properly. This will also let do other important things such as recording and playing the live band at the same time.

However, buying a mixing console to be used for recording can be tricky and needs and lot of research. The following are the desirable specifications on what to check when buying one:

1.) Each of the input channels should have a direct out. Since the goal is to create an 8-track recording studio, then you need a mixer with at least 8 direct outputs. This is very important for connecting to multi-track recorders which I will be discussing later on.

2.) Make sure it has INSERTS on its channel. INSERTS are important for connecting compressors and other effects on the track in series.

3.) Also make sure that each channel has some AUX return EFX adjustments. These are used to apply the amount of reverbs, etc. on each channel.

4.) Microphone preamps are also important.

5.) Having an aux send and returns on the mixer is very important for adding effects in parallel.

With this, one of the recommended mixers is Soundcraft FX16ii:

Multi-track recorders (outboard/hardware)

Now that you are recording without a computer, then you are not anymore saving digital audio to your computer hard drive. What you need is a multi-track recorder that can accept 8-channel inputs at once.

Back in the old days, multi-track recorders are all analog, so they are using tapes and reels. Nowadays, these are vintage equipment’s. I would suggest going out for an ADAT recorder such as Alesis Black Face or other equivalents:

Outboard effects

You cannot use digital effects such as plugins. So you will be using outboard effects such as compressors, limiters, and reverb during your mixing. There are so many brands of outboard effects, some are very pricy such as Focusrite red compressors and Lexicon reverb.

To connect them, you will connect compressors mostly in series and reverb in parallel. You can read the following tutorials:

How to Connect Compressor-EQ in Mixer Inserts and Reverb in Aux Sends

How to use Reverb unit with Mixing Console using Aux Sends and Returns

Connecting Mixing console to Multi-track Recorder

Connecting them is relatively simple. First, you need to connect each direct out of each channel to corresponding input of the multi-track recorder. Supposing you will start at mono channel 1; connect Direct out 1 to Input 1 of Multi-track recorder. Do this until you completely connect the 8 direct outs from the mixing console to the 8 inputs of the multi-track recorder.

For details, I have found some great schematic guide regarding connecting the multi-track recorder to your mixing console:

Then for the output of the multi-track recorder connect it to either the tape return input of the mixer or line input 9 to 16 of the mixer. So if you are recording 8 tracks at a time, connect the microphones to the XLR preamp input of the mixer. Then this will be recorded to the inputs 1 to 8 of your multi-track recorder.

Content last updated on July 21, 2012