Home recording studios are the hot rods of the music nerd set. We spend hundreds of hours researching, soldering cables, cleaning and calibrating equipment, and gabbing about these things with our friends, all for something that we usually do in solitude. Our choice of equipment and how that equipment is assembled and arranged reflects on our personalities: after some time, the mixer becomes something like an altar and the home recording studio a shrine. It’s where we spend our most inspired moments, channeling whatever energy is flowing through us onto a recordable medium.

I sometimes find pictures of other peoples’ studios, and I especially like seeing people’s recording setups from the previous decades in films and archive photos. Here’s a highlight of some of my favorite pictures & stills:

Collage of stills taken from BBC 4's "Synth Brittania" program. I wonder what the battery is for. This is a great example of a basic home recording setup from the 1970s.

This is the home recording studio of HomeRecording.com member JedBlue.

See this thread for the source of the above image.

WOW.

Photo from the University of Washington

That looks like an Atari computer. Late 1980s, early 1990s? I can't find the source of this picture.

I think this is the first version of my home studio. 2009?

A very well equipped home studio from the early 1980s. A lot of great music must have been made here.

Follow this link for the image source.

My friend Alex posted this on Facebook. It was released on tape in 1987 by a German group called Cranioclast. I don’t have any other information on this group but I will definitely write more when I find some.

This piece is hauntingly beautiful. Let the video play and listen closely.

Edit: A Cranioclast album can be downloaded through this blog post.