The Kitchen Table Studio: Five Bits of Cheap Kit That Actually Earn Their Keep

There's a ring on my kitchen table from a mug of tea I put down in March and forgot about. That ring is, functionally, my studio floor. Everything I've made this year — audio, video, the print thing I'm still not ready to talk about — has come out of about ninety centimetres of oak veneer between the toaster and the fruit bowl.

People ask what gear I use assuming it's a long list and an expensive one. It's neither. Here are the five things doing the actual work on the next project, what they cost, and what I'd tell you to avoid.

1. A secondhand dynamic mic, not a shiny condenser

Budget for a decent studio condenser and you'll also need to budget for the room. My kitchen has a fridge that hums in B flat and a hard floor that turns every word into a small slap. A large-diaphragm condenser in here sounds like a man shouting into a biscuit tin.

A dynamic mic — I use a Shure SM58 I bought secondhand for £62 — rejects most of that. It's the same mic that's been thrown across stages since the 1960s, it will survive being knocked off the table by a cat, and it makes a voice sound like a voice. Add a £12 foam windshield and a £9 stand and you're done.

Where to look: eBay UK, CeX, Facebook Marketplace, or the secondhand counter of a music shop. Test it before you pay — tap it gently, check the grille isn't caved in, and ask whether the seller has ever dropped it down a flight of stairs.

2. Reaper, because it costs less than a takeaway for four

Reaper's personal licence is about £55 and it never expires, which is a lovely change from the subscription model everything else has drifted into. It runs on a laptop most people would have replaced two years ago. It opens fast, it doesn't nag, and it'll record twenty tracks on a machine that struggles with a browser tab.

If £55 is £55 too much, Audacity is free and perfectly capable of a podcast or a voiceover. I used it for two years. The reason I switched was editing speed, not quality.

3. DaVinci Resolve (free) and a really boring folder structure

The free version of Resolve does everything I need for a ten-minute video, including colour work I'm not remotely qualified to do. It's a big download and it wants a reasonably modern graphics card, so check that before you commit an evening to it.

The more valuable tool is the boring one: a folder structure and a file-naming convention I actually stick to. Project name, date, version number. I lost an afternoon in 2024 to a file called final_FINAL_v2_audio.wav that turned out to be the wrong take. That afternoon cost me more than any software on this list.

4. A mono laser printer for about £35

This one surprises people. A secondhand Brother mono laser — mine was £35 on Marketplace, toner half full — turns a laptop into a desk. Scripts get printed and marked up with a pencil. Storyboards become physical. A zine draft gets folded and stapled and suddenly you can see whether the thing works, which you never can on a screen.

Third-party toner runs about £12 for a couple of thousand pages. It's the cheapest creative upgrade I've made in years, and it works the moment the wifi is down, which in my house is more often than I'd like to admit.

5. Cheap hosting and a domain you own

Hosting doesn't need to be clever. Mine is a small shared plan at around £6 a month, plus a domain renewal that comes round once a year and always catches me out. Cloudflare's free tier handles the rest. If you want to be properly frugal, a static site on a £3-a-month box will serve thousands of readers a day without breaking a sweat.

The important part isn't the host. It's owning the address. Anything you build on someone else's platform is a tenancy, and tenancies end.

What I'd skip

I once spent £300 on a "home studio bundle" — a USB condenser, a shock mount, a pop shield, a boom arm that didn't fit my desk and a pair of headphones that clamped my ears like a vice. I used it four times. The boom arm is in a cupboard. I'm still annoyed about the boom arm.

I'd also skip anything with a monthly fee until you've genuinely hit the limit of the free version. Almost every subscription I've cancelled was one I'd bought to solve a problem I didn't have yet.

The bit that actually matters

None of this is the point, though. The point is a door that closes, a lamp that isn't the ceiling light, and a chair that doesn't make your back complain after an hour. Those three things cost less than £60 combined from a hardware shop and they matter more than any microphone.

You can make interesting things on a kitchen table with a secondhand mic and a cheap printer. I've done it. The gear is not what's stopping you, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you can get on with the difficult part, which is having something worth saying.

Total spend on the five tools above: roughly £170, not counting the laptop I already owned. The tea was extra.