Find a location for your studio. If you are renting or building in a public location, avoid locating near neighboring businesses that may generate a lot of noise and try to locate your work areas away from frequently-used exits, kitchens or bathroom areas. If you are building a home studio, an upstairs office, basement or garage or barn may be your best bet to avoid common household distractions and noise.
Soundproof an area of the studio for recording instruments and vocals. Again deciding how to do this will depend on your personal needs. If you are an owner of a small project or home studio it would be best keep it simple. Refer to www.soundproofing101.com for some good tips on how to do this. If you are commissioning a professional studio, however, you will want to contact and hire an experienced builder to get the architecture and soundproofing done for your recording rooms.
Choose the devices you wish to use within your recording studio. Thanks to modern technology, the expensive gear that professional studios use has been successfully recreated digitally and are available to the public at minimal cost. Recording artist Tweak at Tweakheadz Lab notes that,"big studios downtown have compressors, limiters, vocal processors, delays, reverbs, equalization, multi-track recorders, computer automation and massive consoles that hook it all together. If you have a modern software package or hardware digital multi-track, you have all these tools, too." Of course, if you do wish to have the expensive outboard gear, it sounds just as great and still gets the job done.
Create a workstation within the studio. This will vary from studio to studio, but the general principle of the workstation being the "captain's chair" applies to every one of them. This is where you will place your computer, mixing board, instrument inserts, effect racks and any other tools you may wish to have at your disposal. If you've gone the software route, this may just be a PC, a few instrument inserts and some monitoring speakers. Above all else, make sure this is a comfortable area for you to work in, as you will be spending a great amount of time at the workstation.