Home Studio Question

[Hatefukk]

Hey there peeps.  I'm looking to get into recording some stuff at home and I am wondering what the best option is as far as a studio monitor goes.  Should I get a dedicated studio monitor speaker that hooks up to my desktop or is there a way to use a guitar amp in it's place?  What are the pro's and con's to either setup?  I want to do it rather cheaply but not sacrifice quality.  Any suggestions would be very appreciated.  new to this whole recording side of things and value the opinions of the other members of the forum.

thank you

[Eigen Bast]

Monitors exist to give you as clear of an idea of what the recorded output will sound like, whereas a guitar amp is going to color what you pass through it. You would generally mic a guitar amp then run that to your daw or recording device. I would invest in both, or at least a decent set of monitor headphones.

[deutscheasphalt]

Monitors exist to give you as clear of an idea of what the recorded output will sound like,

Exactly; to give you an idea what your music sounds like on a "normal" listening device. Therefore monitors task is to constitute a reference and to be as neutral/transparent as possible. If you mix down your music with a guitar amp as reference, you will mix it so it sounds "good" on guitar amps. Practically nobody listens to music on guitar amps though.
So if you can't afford active monitor speakers (e.g. Yamaha HS 8), then buy some headphones (e.g. Audio Technica M series).
In case you invest in the former, room acoustics are very important because it colors the sound a lot depending on shape, wall & ceiling materials, other objects, etc. So you should research that next. If you get headphones, make sure you take your time when mixing down your music and listen back on several other media (home hi-fi, car, laptop,...) without headphones to get a feel for if any part of the mix sounds off or not prominent enough.

[deutscheasphalt]

Audio Technica is great for electronic music but not so much for unfiltered music like noise and heavy metal, worse there is little to no spacial awareness at all when doing loud music on headphones (esp not on closed ear ones) and the sound will be too direct. This might be okay for wall noise or very dense stuff but anything with a more ambience or subtleties feel might suffer from it. I am advising against this.
(...)
edit: would add that doing unfiltered noise trough headphones will fuck up your ears sooner or later. Especially if you are doing lots of low or high frequencies. You might think it's okay now but say hello to tinnitus in the future.

I don't know what you mean by "unfiltered" or electronic music (most of noise is electronic music?), so I'm assuming you're talking about some form of techno? However nobody advocated for mixing at a high volume. It saturates your ears and hinders ability to properly judge/separate frequencies. When it comes to mixing you should always listen back at normal level and take breaks in between so your ears can recalibrate. I got AT headphones back in the day for their balanced frequency output, rendering the genre irrelevant. Maybe the models have changed since then though.
Obviously monitor speakers are superior here for the reasons you described and headphones only to be used as a secondary reference, given OP is able to afford speakers & potentially stands.

[host body]

I'm pretty happy with my setup, I have some mid range audio techinca headphones and a single yamaha monitor. My room is acoustically pretty horrible, so I prefer to use headphones. I check out every mix and single sounds with the monitor or use it if i want to just do longer pedal noise sets without my headphones on.

[muppet1]

I love how quickly non-music threads progress into bickering.

Friends of mine seem to be happy with their KRK Rokit or Mackie monitors.

[Soloman Tump]

I have to master / mix through headphones.  Its all I got.

[host body]

I've heard good things about behringer truths, even from professional sound guys. Best bang for your buck if buying new.

[Cementimental]

unfiltered music like noise

weird statement. Technically a lot of noise music consists entirely of gain and filtering :D

[Hatefukk]

Thanks everyone for the solid information. That is exactly why I wanted to ask this question here. I apologize if this is a noob question but if I was able to afford a pair of monitors would I just run my instruments through my effects pedals and then into my audio interface to my computer and then set up the monitors to be running out of my desktop? If so would I need anything to up the wattage going from computer to monitors or would I just use a regular old audio receiver between computer and monitors? Just want to make sure that I get an accurate representation of how things will sound when recorded using effects pedals. Also will feedback still work in the same manner if I have monitors instead of an amp?

[deutscheasphalt]

Depending on what kind of interface you have you would either connect the speakers to that (if you can assign monitor outputs via that interface) or you would use your computer audio out. In any case, you need to amplify the signal going out to your speakers. Active speakers have a built-in amplifier so you can just connect them directly as described above. For passive speakers you would need a separate amplifier inbetween output and speaker.
If by feedback you mean microphone or guitar feedback - this will work with any microphone/speaker loop at sufficient level. However the feedback sound will be colored slightly differently depending on the type of speaker or guitar amp you're using.

Just want to make sure that I get an accurate representation of how things will sound

In that case forget all the talk about loudness and look for monitor test results that report frequency representation on a graph that shows you how balanced the spectrum is. Ideally you want it to be flat (all frequencies equally loud) so the monitor speaker becomes completely transparent and does not color your sound. Your designated monitoring room plays a big role in this too.

[urall]

What he ^ said.
KRK Rokits are active monitors so you can hook them up easily to your audio interface outputs.
That's the way i have them setup. I then have my mixer outputs going to the inputs of my audio interface. Make sure you select your interface as your audio in and output (you can do this in yr general audio settings or even specifically in your DAW for example)

+ i have Audio Technica headphones with a pretty flat response (Audio Technica ATH-MSR7BK), imo some of the other AT headphones push the bass too much.

Like stated above, switch between headphones & monitors etc, not every device/output sounds the same.

[Atrophist]

Hey there peeps.  I'm looking to get into recording some stuff at home and I am wondering what the best option is as far as a studio monitor goes.  Should I get a dedicated studio monitor speaker that hooks up to my desktop or is there a way to use a guitar amp in it's place?  What are the pro's and con's to either setup?  I want to do it rather cheaply but not sacrifice quality.  Any suggestions would be very appreciated.  new to this whole recording side of things and value the opinions of the other members of the forum.

thank you

So you're recording into your desktop? Presumably you have an interface of some kind, so you could run the headphone output of the interface into your guitar amp. If you use the clean channel of the amp you'll probably get a resonable idea what the recording sounds like.

Even better in my opinion would be to play your noise through the amp, and route the amp's headphone/line out into your interface.

Sure, neither one of these techniques would be considered orthodox, but hey, it's noise, not brain surgery.

[host body]

I've kinda been toying with the idea of getting an isolation chamber or an isolation cab for recording at home. I have a tape player hooked to my setup that gives quite nice lofi sound, but I really want an old guitar combo with a spring reverb and to record that with high volume. I know building one isn't super hard. Problem is that an isolation box would be a bit too big for my current music room, but maybe when I get a bigger house.