Sea-Dog Model 281600 Rectangular Base (click for Amazon product link) These are very robust, and easily handle the weight of even larger monitors: Instead of doing a bunch of carpentry, I used some 7/8″ stainless tubing and matching 60° railing mounts made by SeaDog for the marine market, and installed on the desktop with #10 flat-head machine screws. I considered picking up floor stands like some of the professional recording studios use, but they are major space hogs and famous for being dangerously top-heavy… the wrong tool for my living room.

That all translates into the speakers being 11″ lower than they should be, not to mention taking up extremely valuable shelf real-estate. When I’m seated at the keyboard, my ears are 53″ off the floor… and the KRK bass drivers on the little Rokit RP5 monitors are centered about 5″ up from the surface on which they rest.

The Creation Station desk comes with a nice top shelf that is 37″ off the floor. Let’s take the “desk hacks” one at a time and figure out how to put all this stuff together… Raising the Studio Monitors I originally wanted to rackmount the mixer (ears are available at a ridiculous price), but in an integrated desk environment that isn’t as easy as it looks… many connectors come out the back, and the available rack space is too short anyway unless you buy a producer’s workstation that is designed for such things. Shure SM57 on floor stand and MXL990 condenser mics at deskĪ few related items are cabled into the same mix: Icom 706mkIIG amateur radio transceiver, USB turntable for inhaling old vinyl, video tool, a docking port for the field recorders, and other random bits.Īll this adds up to a mish-mash of oddly shaped hardware.Apple iMac dedicated to music applications.Echo AudioFire2 firewire audio interface.Please note that these are from 2007, and I would mostly make different choices today and will thus skip the affiliate links… Since none of this was addressed by off-the-shelf components, I had to do a bit of custom work… and the intent of this article is to help others avoid wheel-reinvention when it would be much more fun to get on with playing. How can you get the studio monitors into a decent position with the bass drivers at ear-level without teetering them on tall stands that invite disaster? Where the heck do you put the computer keyboard when the synthesizer has to be on a low enough surface to optimize the height of the keytops? How do you mount the mixer so that it’s at a comfortable position with all the controls visible? And if you need to read music, where does the music stand go when there’s a big computer screen directly in front of you?

I’m not just talking about cable hygeine it’s all that other stuff that they don’t tell you about when you fill the online shopping carts with shiny gizmology. No problem.īut once I started unpacking boxes and actually trying to make everything fit, it became clear that there’s a bit more to it than that… at least if you want it to be an efficient system that is pleasant to use and doesn’t look like the proverbial rat’s nest. It seemed simple enough when I first gave in to the deadly GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome): get a bunch of audio tools, plug them all together, and begin making beautiful music.

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