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Mix Blog Studio: Tear It Down and Start Over

I’ve had my home studio in its current location for about six years, and what started out as a relatively organized setup, has gotten progressively less so during that time. Between adding or replacing pieces of gear and temporarily adding and removing products that I’m reviewing, I’ve now got a rat’s nest of cables behind my rack and studio desk. I’ve got USB hubs daisy-chained, and a tower-style computer I no longer use underneath my desk. I also need to completely redo the power setup to add more RFI filtering and conditioners.

Yes, if I were one of those super-organized, OCD types, I would have carefully run the cables for anything new that came in and made sure that the power cables and AC cables were at right angles. I would have thought everything through and made sure that my studio was set up correctly. I would have cleaned out old gear immediately upon disconnecting it from my studio.

The cables would all be custom length to avoid buildup, the non-rack hardware would all be neatly placed (and velcro’ed down) on rack trays or stands, I would have used a laser measuring tool to precisely position my monitors, and so forth.

Read more Mix Blog Studio: Son of a Glitch.

Alas, that’s not me. To my own detriment, I’m just not that neat or organized a person, and I can tolerate a certain degree of chaos. That’s not to say you would mistake my studio for a hoarder’s lair. In fact, I can even make it look pretty spiffy when clients come around—as long as they don’t glance behind the racks.

Adding to the disorder is my studio storage closet. It was once efficiently set up, with labeled bins for various types of cables and accessories, but iy’s now hard to even walk into. Instrument cases block much of the floor space, and those bins are now spread haphazardly all over the shelves.

Much as I don’t look forward to the amount of work involved in reorganizing my studio, I’ve now arrived at a “bite the bullet” moment. Time to blow it up and start all over.

I have to first inventory everything, figure out what cabling and accessories I need to replace, and order what I need—and that’s the simple part. Then I have to disconnect everything and redo all the cabling, both audio and AC. Fortunately, a holiday weekend is coming up and I’ll have a lot of free time.

I don’t like the idea of several days of downtime, but in the long run it will surely be worth it. And this time, I’m going to promise myself to try to keep things organized as I go, rather than letting it all build up again. At least, that’s the plan.

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