How To Build A Professional and Affordable Home Studio
The number one piece of advice that we can offer you for your home studio is to treat it as an investment.
The more you invest in your home studio, the more you will get out of it, too.
The days of reading and writing are over. They’ve been replaced by audio and video and that’s not going to change anytime soon.
Therefore, it’s essential to present anything from a 1:1 consult to a webinar with 1,000 guests in a way that conveys professionalism and quality.
There’s good news and bad news as people and businesses shift into home studios.
The bad news is that to have a great home studio, you will need to invest some money upfront.
The good news is that setting up a home studio with great audio and video tools is not nearly as expensive as it used to be.
To make matters even better, you may be able to write off your expenses as an investment.
How Much Does A Great Home Studio Cost?
Don’t let the internet fool you.
We did a quick Google search and saw plenty of folks saying that it will take five, ten, or sometimes even twenty thousand dollars to create a great home studio.
If someone is telling you that you need to spend thousands to have a professional home studio, they’re either making money from the sale of equipment or they themselves are grossly overspending.
In reality, you can build an impressive home studio for $300 - $400.
The four items we recommend in this guide will cut through all of the nonsense you might find elsewhere and give you the perfect and affordable set of microphone, lighting, presentation, and background items.
4 Items That Will Take Your Home Studio To The Next Level
These are the 4 items that will take your home studio to the next level.
We have tried and tested each product and many of our team personally use these items in their home studios.
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, we will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. We never recommend a product we don’t use or have tested ourselves.
Best Home Studio Microphone
Logitech Blue Yeti
The Blue Yeti microphone features outstanding audio quality and some of the best “nice to have” features we see on the market.
Equipped with a mute button and volume adjuster on the microphone itself, this tool gives you the ultimate control over your audio presentation.
Some statistics speak for themselves and with 35,000 positive reviews, you don’t just need to take our word for it.
Thousands of podcast hosts, streamers and fellow home studio owners like yourself have tested out the Blue Yeti and it passed with flying colors every time.
This microphone has significantly better audio than any other portable microphone we’ve tried.
And, unlike other portable microphones, the Blue Yeti features a fantastic adjustable stand so you can position it any way you prefer.
Best Home Studio Lighting Kit
Neewer Video Conference Light Kit
Neewer manufactures the best lighting equipment imaginable.
While they have so many options, this affordable light kit will do the trick.
No need to overdo it with a $300 or $400 lighting kit.
The most important pieces of a lighting kit are to have multiple lights in different areas of your home studio and to have the ability to adjust the lights from a wide range of heights.
Both of these essential criteria are settled with this kit.
As always, some of the little features of this kit stuck out compared to competing kits.
The color filters included are a wonderful touch depending on your use case.
In addition, the dimmer feature is spectacular and allows you to adjust brightness all the way down to 10% from the default 100%.
Best Computer Stand
Suturun Laptop Stand
This item might not seem mandatory, but we feel strongly that it makes a world of difference.
Yes, you could use a stack of books or boxes to get your desired eye-level laptop height, but that grows old and inconvenient after a while.
Suturun’s laptop stand makes things easy with a lot of room for customization.
For starters, the stand fits just about any laptop size you might have.
For such an affordable and simple product, the Suturun goes above and beyond.
The quality of its materials is high, which prevents laptops from slipping off the stand and allows for adjustability when raising or lowering your laptop.
Best Background Support
Neewer Collapsible Chromakey Backdrop
If the microphone, lighting, and computer stand are how you appear professional and capture people’s attention, the Neewer backdrop is how you stand out and further impress your guests.
Setup is always a challenge with backdrops but not with Neewer.
We timed the whole setup process and it took under 15 minutes on the first try.
You can use it vertically, horizontally, or you can even mount it on a wall.
Your background says a lot about you.
It can set the mood that you want to create from the start of your presentation or even be used as a transition setting.
Again, small features matter a lot, so we were impressed with how lightweight the entire set was for us to carry and what a nice, neat carrying case it was delivered in.
How-To Home Studio Bottom Line
Those are the only 4 items you truly need to have an incredible home studio.
At the time of writing this article, the grand total of those products tallied less than $280.
Not bad, right?
Surely you can customize your home studio in plenty of other ways.
However, for the best audio and video experience, these are the best and only items you actually require.