OK... let's put this in perspective here... I second Bill's comment. Gear means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to anyone who IS NOT a sound engineer. Most people on these forums will try to tell you otherwise because most people on these forums are sound engineers AS WELL AS composers, songwriters, musicians, etc.

Most musicians, songwriters, artists, etc really don't care.

What they DO care about is how good your other projects have sounded. If you are graduating from school, then you pretty much have no experience.

You go to school to learn HOW TO LEARN. When you graduate you really know nothing. You have the building blocks to learn from your future experiences.

As your demo reel grows and gets better, your fee will go up. It doesn't matter how many bands you've recorded, or what expensive gear you have. The proof is "in the pudding". Period. How many of your recordings have received regional or national radio airplay? TV Licensing? 5000+ record sales? and so on. How many positive reviews of CDs you've recorded and mixed have there been? Are those reviews in national/international magazines like Rolling stone or your local town newspaper?

And so on... You have to BUILD your career. In doing so you have to start from the bottom and work UP. That might mean doing free recordings at first to at least get some decent projects under your belt.

Oh and by the way... most "clients" aren't going to be able to hear your excellent engineering skills SEPARATE from the skills of the artist. So if all you have is local garage bands who can't play in time or in tune and singer songwriters with no sense of rhythm and wouldn't know a key if it slapped them in the face... then people are going to hear THAT and associate you with it.

Building a career is ALWAYS an uphill battle. And it never ends... you are always only going to be as good as the last project you did and the artists you've worked with. As your clients grow in notoriety, so do you.

Also... another thing to consider with a home studio is who you are going to be bringing in?

The problem with a home studio is you live there. What if you get a call to do some gansta rap tracks or a band filled with alcoholics and drug addicts? Do you really want those guys hanging at your house and knowing where you live? I know a guy who had a home studio and took some sessions like that (doing a hiphop album for what turned out to be some gansters)... 6 months later his home was broken into... the only things stolen? All his recording gear (about $80,000 worth!). He could never pin it on the guys he recorded six months earlier.

I remember Dr Dre being asked one time how come he doesn't have a home studio... and he basically said, "Cuz I don't want these guys knowing where I live and being around my kids!"

So, that is something to think about when running a home studio. You are probably going to have to be more selective about your clients.

As for how much you can charge... it's based on how much your current clients can afford, and what your SKILLS (not tools) are worth to the people you are pitching your services to. That might be $5/hr. That might be $150/hr. It all really just depends. But just because you've heard of other sound engineers getting $50/hr or $80/hr or $150/hr, don't automatically assume you are worth the same.