Rob’s Music Studio

With my MIDI controller keyboard at the center of a temporary recording studio in the basement and my Kawai synthesizer in the living room, I just wasn’t playing the piano as much as I would have liked. Linda and I talked about this on our trip to Jack Lake in Canada in the late summer, and we brainstormed on possible solutions. We decided that having both keyboards and all the recording equipment upstairs and in the same place would be ideal, but there was just no place we could think of that would accommodate that setup. It became apparent that my office would be the best place, but there just wasn’t room to add any more furniture.

I think Linda said, “You really don’t use your desk very much, do you?” And the light came on. I had recently updated my computer setup with a cool standing desk, and if I repurposed some of my old desk into a music studio, there would be plenty of room to have everything neatly in my office.

The most challenging part of this project then became designing a music studio desk to hold two full-sized keyboards, a laptop, a display screen, an audio interface and two monitor speakers and all the accompanying power and signal cabling … and still have everything organized and tidy. The 3D modeling in SketchUp started with full scale mockups of the two keyboards and I was off tho the virtual races. The photos below, along with their captions, will lead you through the execution of this project.