Just interested, has anyone built a full on studio at home, i'm seriously thinking about doing this down the road sometime. And if you have are there any pitfalls to avoid?

What do you mean by a full studio? Pretty loose term...

Sorry , i mean't a complete studio ,ie sound proofing, multi track mixer, amps etc.

well we have a box room we use that we share with my husbands home gym that is great for drying washing on & wet washing seems to make great sound deadening  
we use reaper on the pc which is awesome & if we can manage it anyone can.. to record & mix
& a tiny 4 channell mixer & some good headphones + hubbies old hifi amp & speakers
i sold my amps after having kids...when the kids are asleep believe me you dont want to wake them up... instead i got a got a couple of amp modelers... so evrthing goes straight in the mixer... guitar & bass... & we have 1 mic an old shure mic i inherited from an old band i was in.. so put that on a boom stand with a pop filter & get a load of free plug ins from the internet & some midi drums &thats it... thats all we have!

Type "build studio at home" into google.  

There are as many way of doing it as there are people. It just depends how much money you have to spend.

Mostly though with emulators or software, everything can go directly into your workstation / recorder..... except vocal. That's the point that I'm at at the moment. I'm trying to figure out a way of building a soundproof vocal booth out of an old wardrobe. I'll let you know how I get on.

Studios come in many shapes and forms - home studio/project studio, 'pro' studios, local studios, teaching/college studios. Set up a computer with an audio interface and a mic and you have a studio.
Now we are working a bit at a large studio, and in that context, then I dont have one at home. It's a dream to build a studio. Having said that, I reckon I'm pretty well on the way to having a great home studio setup, but a commercial/'real' studio is a different beast. To get there (to what I reckon a good studio would be) I reckon I need a dedicated room, (actually, 2 rooms), properly treated. At least 10 more mic's and preamps, a bigger monitoring system and a great console. Also, very importantly, a load more instruments. Some outboard equipment such as the Manley Massive Passive would really elevate it to something I could be proud of. This is all years away at the moment.
I'd always be wary of 'local' studios that offer cheap rates. You often find they are little more than someones project studio.

Pitfalls to avoid?
 - Be clear to yourself, are you heading towards just a home setup for yourself, or do you want a fully fledged working studio?
 - To realistically have a proper studio, the room has to come paramount. You should have a dedicated room ad preferably 2 (1 live, 1 control room). If the room doesnt sound great to begin with, you need to have the permissions/facilities to apply acoustic treatment as necessary.
- Dont fall into the trap of getting a cheap mixer/console because 'pro' studios have them. You may see all these fancy consoles in a pro studio and then go hey, I can get a big behringer mixer or phonic etc for not much. What are you going to use it for? Now everything is on computers, not tapes, consoles are not necessary for recording. The reason that pro studios have these huge desks is - to have access to a lot of good preamps when recording a big setup (Are you going to be doing that?). A cheap mixing desk is going to have uninteresting, basic pre's. And also to get the classic 'analogue' sound of a nice console, from the tubes, circuitry. It also impresses clients.

- What is your studio for? If you want to record stuff with microphones, you really need to think about your room and analogue equipment (preamps, mic's etc). Also your instruments.
If you are making electronic music - or orchestral mockups for film, then take a look at Hans Zimmer's project studio. It is a computer, a few keyboards and an excellent monitoring system. His computer packs serious power to run all the VST's and custom sound libraries he's made. He writes his music there and when the time comes to record it with a real orchestra, he goes into a real studio (paid for by the film company I suppose )

Cheers for the feedback , i'm just a home recorder at the minute but i'm slowly finding a few people i'd like to work with a bit more seriously. I think i'll do my homework first.

My setup's pretty minimal, currently GarageBand and iMic input for guitars (and possibly mics in the future) and I'd rather keep it minimal. If i'm going to have any synthesisers and amps it's all going to be software (or small hardware). I've been put off having a massive studio rig when my mate (who's a better musician than I ever was) took me on this little course and it scared the crap out of me, although that's just me. Since it's a kinda "hobby", I'd rather keep it simple and easy (and at home) I mean, it's great for the professionals that know what they're doing, but I'd hate to work with that much stuff, and I just wouldn't be patient enough for the time and effort (and money of course).

Unless you have a big cellar or something (thinking of people in the US who build home studios), it'll be hard to build a studio inside a house, unless you use one bedroom as a control room and feed the cables through to another one to be a "live" room.

Hi Jim

Here's my setup... well so far :p

I have EZ Drummer to do most of the drums.
I use Ableton Live 8 because a friend gave it to me for free
I have a Line 6 Pod Farm to run my guitar/bass/vocals through
I Have a Samson C03 Mic ( Which I have to say was a great buy.)
And have recently aquired a Nocturn49 Keyboard.
I have a bass
And a guitar

The reason I have gone down this root is because I have to do it all myself.
So like someone said earlier. I didn't see the point in building a "studio" as such, with
all the huge mixing desks and other studio paraphernalia.
I spend a lot of time learning to use these tools as I go along. I'm only just beginning to get mixes loud
enough and sounding something like. Rather than dull or muffled like they were at first.

Next on my list are some good monitor speakers instead of these cheap headphones I have to use.

I have only just worked out that I can use my Nocturn with sounds that exist inside Ableton Live 8.
So I might write something with Keyboards in it, as soon as I learn how to play it lol

I must say that compared to the cost of a proper home studio, this was definately the right way to go for me at least.

This is almost the setup I'm aiming for, except I'm hoping to upgrade to Logic. I'm having trouble getting good distorted tones from GarageBand amps, but cleans are fine.

I've heard lots about line 6 pods, are they good?

I like this tech stuff about setups - what are other peoples setups?
What are you hoping to get/wishing for? Are you stuck with what to get/what to work towards?

well i more or less said what we had somewhere above but ive rummaged around & written down some model nos
we use reaper
a little berringer 4 track mixer eurorack 802
a shure dynamic 545d mic
beyr dynamic dt990 headphones
a vamp2 modeller
a cheap casio keyboard
1 jackson & 2 ibanez electrics
esp electric bass

now thats what we use but.....we also have
a huge digiteck gnx4 effects board i cant work out how to use
a boss dr670 drum machine i cant work out how to use
addictive drums  we couldnt work out how to use it sat on my pc for 18 months till september this year when a very kind guy from NZ took a lot of trouble to explain it to us so we now have it sort of working

so you see yes we would like better gear but theres not much point cos we probably couldnt get it to work so were sort of stuck

Lol, how about the manual?
Addictive drums seems popular....Anymore setups?

The line 6 podfarm is great I must say. Compact, durable and with many sounds to choose from.

The good thing is that there are many different effects Distortion,chorus, phaser and so on and many

different cabs and amps and so on within it so you can have pretty much any setup you want. Everything can be

edited to get the sound you want. plus there are add ons you can purchase to give you even more choice.

I don't have any add ons myself and make do with creating the sound I want with everything that is available.

It also has a mic input which is great because I can do the same for vocals too.

I'm not that knowledgeable when it comes to tchnology, so it's ease of use is great for me.