I’m sat here yet again thinking about how to arrange my studio. I think it’s a recurring thing with musicians. And for me I also think there’s a little bit of prevarication mixed in as well. 😉

Sus-Sus-Studio

Although, I do have a bit of an excuse. We recently had a bit of a room swap upstairs casa Thorpe. After our own bedroom, we had the next biggest room as a spare room/guest room. I was in the smallest with all my kit. It was, OK, actually – but no room to to swing a cat.

Sara does a lot of crafting (check out her Etsy shop here –> https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/SarahJoMakes) and it seemed to make sense that she took the guest room, I took her room and we moved the bed into the smallest room – we don’t have a lot of guests stay over…

So that’s what we did. After lots of dragging Kallax shelves about and decanting various yarns, fabrics, synths and sundry electronic music paraphernalia from one room to another, we shuffled the rooms clockwise.

This happened a while back, and Im still in that ‘just moved in’ stage. My music Mac is all plumbed in, so I can do stuff in the box – but all my other kit is sat in various states of unpluggedness. I’ve got my urgent bits and bobs out of the way, so now I’m looking round my room thinking how do I want to do this….?

S-s-s-studioline

With more space has come the opportunity to work a bit differently to how I did in my little room. I can have more stuff out, and not hidden in cupboards. I’ve just got a bit more flexibility. So. Here I am thinking about how I want to set it out.

I’m thinking it’s going to be a game of 2 halves – my Mac workstation, and my synth station. With a loose coupling between them.

This is my MacStation.

Currently suboptimal. In my last room, I had the speakers up on a shelf, but did have the Ikea hack monitor riser covering half of my lovely Novation Nova II. Current plan is to get another shelf up for the Rokits to go on, and in order to get rid of that pesky riser, either mount a single 32″ UHD monitor or 2 x 24″ HD monitors on the wall. I’ll probably go for the latter, as it may give me some flexibility with the other half of the room. You can see my Mac mini tucked away inder the riser as well – I’m thinking of getting some sort of wire basket and mounting that under the table for that to live in, along with a couple of external SSDs I have as well – maximum table top space for music gear!

Studio Gribbly

The other half of the room looks like this.

The original idea was to plumb it all in so I could easily play & experiment with it all and then pump the audio from any of the kit into Ableton for recording. I just wanted it accessible.

But I keep getting the urge to sort out something live. My inclination has been to do live version of stuff I’ve already recorded. But more recently I’ve thought of doing something different. And I’ve 3 analogue monosynths there each with there own character. A super flexible analogue polysynth in the Minilogue, and a great workhorse analogue modelling synth in the Nova II. Chuck a couple of effects boxes in there, and I’ve definitely got something to work with. Probably still drive things with Ableton, but use the Push to control it. that said, I watched an ace video recently showing how Oribital do their live sets – that’s all Ableton clips driving hardware synths over MIDI though Lemur on a couple of iPads. Crackers. So I grabbed Lemur (‘cos I’m like that), but their web site looks to be dead, so that’s not too encouraging.

I’m curently thinking that 2 wall mounted 24″ monitors may be better than a single big one, ‘cos I can swivel the left one out so I could see it while sat in front of the Push and my synths….

Anyway – I’ll do a dedicated post about live gribbles shenanigans at dome point in the future. Right now, I think I just need to settle on getting all that stuff up, running and MIDI’d up back to Ableton. And start using the buggers more…

Just for completeness, here’s what’s on the other side of the room….

Right. It’s too hot to type any more. I’ll pop the odd update up as I decide what I’m doing, and do it. Which means they may be quite sporadic… 😉

.g