Do you have a home studio? Would you like one?
During these crazy pandemic days, working from home is getting more and more important. It is also becoming normal (again). While traveling the countryside of France and England a while back, it was interesting to see how many village shops still had the owners home above it.
For many shop owners, having a home above the store is a huge time savings. I commuted as far as four hours each way to some jobs, getting a hotel room many nights. It was a crazy way to live. I have since become the worst kind of commuter. Reformed.
Thanks to my friends at Acoustiblok, we have a great home studio for my wife and I do to voice recordings, audio books and other types of Voiceover work. It is a little small for big vocals, but for an acoustic session it is pretty cool too. It is nothing more than a spare bedroom that has been soundproofed. You can see the soundproofing video on COOLTOYS.TV.
Home Studio – Keep it Simple!
You don’t need a studio like the one we built. In fact you can just hang some acoustic blankets on the wall or even record in a walk in closet. Clothes make an amazing acoustic damper. Fans don’t go to shows because the view is perfect, they go for the performer, they go for you!
If you don’t have a home studio, find a space and build one. If you have a garage with open walls it can make a great studio. Just fill the walls with a mineral wool insulation like Acoustiblok or RockWool. You will be amazed and how quiet it gets. Adding sheetrock just adds echo you have to deal with later. We shoot most of the COOLTOYS® episodes in my garage.
Acoustically, some blankets hanging on the wall, acoustic panels, or as I did in my screening room, acoustic tiles work great. A little glue and stick and there you go. There really isn’t a reason not to have a home studio if you are in the creative business.
It Doesn’t Take A Lot of Gear.
Worried about home studio gear? Any laptop that can run Twisted Wave is good enough. If you watch COOLTOYS.TV, all of those episodes are recorded live with my MacBook Pro running either OBS, LiveStream Studio or Black Magic and in another window, I run Fan2Stage. One of the coolest toys we have is a Stream Deck. It only works with OSB unfortunately, but it lets you do a lot of cool things very easily.
If you are a musician or a comedian, working from home can sometimes be tough. That is just an excuse to procrastinate. I get it though, when you are in a venue, and you know people are coming. It is easy to get motivated. The anticipation gets your energy going and when the fans arrive you get even more amped up. But what do you do when you are at home with a microphone, how do you keep that energy up?
That is a big part of why I created Fan2Stage. A virtual audience isn’t the same as a live show for sure. There is no build up traveling to the venue, setting up and looking at the empty seats before the curtain goes up. The energy works the same with a virtual audience. You see the numbers, you hear the applause, you put on a better show.
So why don’t you have F2S.Live yet?
