It finally happened. After working at home since the beginning of the pandemic lockdown it has become apparent that I need a decent composition and mix room at home. The room I’ve been working in is pleasant to hang out in but it sounds terrible, and it’s been really hard to get good sounding recordings and translatable mixes out of it. So, with a combination of excitement, relief, and minor trepidation I am beginning a DIY studio build.
The Current Setup
The first thing I want to tackle, mainly because it’s the easiest to get my head around, is a composition desk. At the Music Orange Studios, I work on a sprawling custom desk with separate areas for composing, desk work, and a mixing console:
Music Orange Studio B
That is WAY too big for my home space, and in any case I want to take the opportunity to lose the dedicated console and desk areas and focus solely on the composition area. I spent a long time looking at all the Output, Argosy, and SCS offerings but in the end decided to design and build my own.
There’s something about the look of those old Hohner Pianets that I’ve always liked and that’s the initial inspiration for the look. Of course, I’ll need room for some rack gear and a computer monitor so my desk will end up being bigger than those Hohners, but it’s starting point.
I also want to address two issues that I’ve had with every other desk I’ve worked on. The first is that piano keyboards and computer keyboards want to be in the same space (why doesn't someone make a keyboard with a computer keyboard built into the top?). I could solve that with a sliding piano keyboard drawer or by constantly moving the computer keyboard back and forth, but I’m leaning towards having the keyboard built directly into the desk so that it takes up as little room as possible. This way both the piano keyboard and computer keyboard are pretty much at the right spot at all times. The second is the difficulty (or at least my difficulty) of always forgetting which keys correspond to the relevant keyswitches for a particular Kontakt patch, or where on the keyboard a particular virtual drum articulation lies. Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol starts to fix that problem, but after watching Hector work on one for awhile I think it has too many downsides for me to go that route. First, it’s a keyboard in a case so I’d lose the smaller footprint of building the keyboard into the desk. Second, while it’s helpful that it shows the ranges of keyswitches with lights, you still need to hunt around to find each particular articulation. Third, it does not work with ALL patches and ALL virtual instruments, and that really kills it it for me. As far as light indicators go, I usually only need to keep track of a few specific articulations for a particular track - maybe legato, pizz, and marcato for a string patch and a couple of hi hat articulations for a drum patch. Being able to have lights only over those keys would be more helpful to me. And, I think I’ve come up with a solution…
Stay tuned for Part 2…
-Michael