 This video is sponsored by DistroKid. Follow the VIP link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. We are bang spank in the middle of a home recording studio revolution. The barrier to entry for recording and distributing your music has never been so low. The list of pros is enormous, but I think there's something we just don't talk about enough. The home recording studio con. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Compared to our counterparts from the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s, we should have a massive advantage and be producing incredible amounts of wonderful music. Let me know in the comments down below if you like me suspect that perhaps that isn't quite the case. Now I think there is one particular reason for this which doesn't often get discussed and it's got nothing to do with the technology. But before we get on to that one massive con, let's run through the list of pros. My bedroom is just behind you on the other side of that wall and to my left behind that wall is my kitchen. My point being that my home studio is incredibly convenient to me. I don't have to travel to it. I don't have to make a booking and I can use it for 10 minutes or 10 hours if I wish. Now it is true I do have to put up with some noise from my neighbors and some low-flying military jets, but that convenience is a massive advantage. I want you to try and forget about the equipment you can see behind me in this studio. Most of it is just nice to have. You don't actually need it. Now for contemporary recordings, I would suggest the only things you really need are a recording device like a laptop or maybe even a mobile device, an audio interface of some kind. Probably a semi-decent microphone is useful, a condenser microphone. Some way of monitoring it now controversially, I would suggest that you can get by for a long time with just headphones, but I would probably suggest that home studio monitors are a big advantage, but they're not really a must-have. Now everything else is really a nice to have, which will give you some small advantages here and there. Now the amount you will spend on that absolutely needed equipment is probably still less than you would spend in your first day or two of a professional recording studio, except that you have it at your disposal all the time. You can learn it. You can learn about its limitations and its advantages and experiment with it as well. With that convenience and low cost comes flexibility. Flexibility to make as many mistakes as you need to make. Flexibility to mess with that mix, with that arrangement. You can experiment until your heart is content and with the high quality, but low cost of plugins these days, you can happily swap out that LA2A for that 1176 without batting an eyelid. And that extends to virtual instruments as well. You no longer need to bring in that string section because the plugin will do a very, very good job. And there's another class of plugins, which I think has got so good in the last three or four years, it opens up other avenues for you as well. Mastering. One of the dark arts of audio production. It's something you're going to need to do before you release your music. And up until recently is something I would have advised you not to try yourself. However, in the last few years, I think the introduction of AI alongside mastering has made it so that with a lowish skill level and low cost, I think a lot of the time you can master things yourself and get a reasonable result. Now, would you be better off to go to a mastering engineer and have it done by them? I'd still say yes, that would be the ideal. But with some of these mastering plugins now, you get pretty damn close or close enough for most of us anyway. So once you've mastered your music, then you'll want to distribute it. Now let's not forget that not so long ago, the thing that you were distributing was a physical product, either a vinyl record or a cassette or a CD. And along with that product came printing costs, transportation costs, and logistics. And let's face it, most of the time, unless you were assigned artists, you probably didn't either have the budget or the know how to do this. Nothing could be further from the truth these days. If you use a company like our sponsor DistroKid, it's a very simple and cost effective process. And that's mainly because people are consuming their music through streaming services, the vast majority of the time, places like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Google Play, etc. DistroKid makes it super easy and they only charge $22.99 per year for an unlimited number of original songs. And you'll get it even cheaper than that if you follow my VIP link in the description down below. Everything we've talked about so far really adds up to one enticing thing about home studio recording. And that is independence. Pan everything to the left if you want to. There won't be any stuffy old recording engineer to tell you otherwise. You are indeed the king if not the dictator of your own little recording empire. And best of all, the one thing you don't have to put up with is arguments with band members. Actually it's that last point which brings us to the con. If you can exist completely independently in your own little bubble, then it's highly unlikely that you're ever going to be challenged. And we need to be challenged. We need that band member there to tell us, hey man, that lyric actually sucks a bit. We should change it. Or that guitar solo is actually going on four bars too long. Let's trim it. Without sometimes brutal advice of what we're working on, we will not be able to perfect it to its best version or live outside of our regular comfort zone. And if you're like me, if you can write, if you can sing, if you can play a primary instrument like guitar or piano, play a little bit of bass, program some drums, then you are in big trouble because you can virtually do it all yourself. But you're not going to be challenged. You may think, for example, that Paul McCartney is one of the best songwriters of all time. He undoubtedly is. But thank goodness from time to time, John Lennon would say to him, nah, no good. You need to change that. One of my favorite documentaries is Sounds City. And in that movie, Mick Fleetwood says, yes, you can do all this on your own, but you'll be a much happier human being to do it with other human beings. I'll leave you with that thought. And I'll invite you in the comments down below to make a New Year's resolution with me to collaborate with other musicians in 2024.