How much does it cost to build a recording studio?

Inside the Building a Home Music Studio series, I design home music studio setups at a wide variety of budget levels. We cover everything from the most basic cheap and portable music recorders, all the way up to a professional quality 16-channel recording setup used for recording full bands, that could be set up as an income generating business. The article covers the gear needed to get started with professional level recording. Home music studio setups are referenced in this article.

For even more info on gear, the Home Studio Gear Guide is my comprehensive resource with all of my recommended studio gear, regularly updated.

How much does it really cost to get into recording at the professional level?

Building a mixing-focused professional music studio for under $4,750

This studio build shows the minimum gear considerations necessary for building out a pro quality studio that’s focused on mixing and postproduction. Our focus here is primarily on acoustics and monitoring quality: this build features only two recording channels, so it’s not appropriate for heavy duty recording. But, as the beginnings of a high quality musical postproduction space, this is a great set of gear to get started.

Building a drums-focused professional recording studio for under $14,500

This studio build focuses on heavier duty recording, with a setup that’s optimized for recording drums. It’s a drum room, and all of the gear is focused on recording your drum kits at amazing fidelity.

This is a lot of money to be spending on a studio, so you’ll want to make sure you have a plan for achieving return on this investment, and paying for all of this gear.

While this is a cheaper build than the more fully featured recording studio listed below, I would be cautious about attempting to start out your recording studio career by building “only” a drum room, and then hoping to expand into recording full bands later on.

That’s because of your competition: when you build out any recording space, you’re not just competing against other dedicated drum rooms, you’re competing against other more fully featured recording studios, as well as artists recording themselves at home.

The question to ask when considering the drum room business model is this:

Why would an artist choose to record only their drums inside of your drum room, when they could choose to record their entire band all at once in a more fully featured space that gets them similar quality drum sounds, at a similar price?

Building a fully featured professional recording studio for $25,000

This is the big kahuna: a fully featured, professional level recording setup that’s optimized for recording bands of up to 5 people all at once in a live performance setting. This is the minimum infrastructure needed to get started with this type of studio.

Don’t be too intimidated by the cost: all the way down at the bottom of the article I go over alternative gear choices that could help reduce the cost of this investment by several thousand dollars. These could be appropriate choices to make, depending on the specific styles of music that you’re interested in recording.

This is also a lot of money to spend on a studio, and I wouldn’t advise spending this kind of money without also considering how to run your studio as a business that can fund this level of investment. To that end, I go over several recording studio business models worth considering, in the later sections of the article.