Almost 50. A day job. A family. I still made a record.
The Home Studio Checklist is everything I learned doing it: the room, the gear, and the setup habits that make sure the little time you have goes to music. Free to download.
What's Inside
Six short sections you can print, tape to the wall, and actually use. No gear shopping list, no jargon for its own sake.
The Room
What to fix in the space before you spend a dime on gear.
Monitoring
Speaker placement, listening levels, and when to trust your headphones.
Signal Chain
Cables, gain staging, and interface levels, so noise never ruins a good take.
Guitars and Amps
Strings, intonation, and mic placement on the amp before the red light goes on.
Session Prep
Templates, click tracks, and labeled tracks, so the idea doesn't die while you set up.
Backup and Bounce
Saving versions, backing up, and the car test every mix has to pass.
Why I Made This
I'm almost 50, with a full-time job and a family, and for a long time music got pushed to "someday." Then I built a small studio at home and started recording. The album, 11 Days, was supposed to take eleven days. It took three years. Most of that time wasn't writing. It was learning, the hard way, what a home studio actually needs and what it doesn't.
I wrote, played, engineered, and produced most of the album myself, and I kept a running list of everything that tripped me up. This checklist is that list, cleaned up so you don't have to learn it the slow way.
Part of it was simpler than that. I missed making music with my friends. Building the studio gave us a place to get back in a room together, and a few times a year, we still do.
Whether you're finally clearing out the spare room or dusting off a guitar you haven't touched in years, it's a place to start.
Staying creative doesn't come with an expiration date.
Grab the checklist and start making something again.