THE PRODUCER’S GUIDE TO…
Building a studio desk
The desk is the heart of any studio, so make it your own with this guide from musician, producer, guitar builder and beard grower Rob Redman
If there was one thing that has been high on many people’s minds this past year, it’s the state of our home working environments. Even if you don’t work from home for your day job, having a space to follow your passions has, by necessity, become a much coveted thing, reaping rewards for those lucky enough to have one.
With that in mind, maybe now is the time to turn your attention to your musical working area, redesigning an existing space and workflow, or starting one for the first time. Many people make do with a dining table, or bedroom chest of drawers – but these are clearly easy to improve upon.
Desk jockeying
You may be put off by the space needed, or the expense of premade purpose-built desks, but in reality there are two issues to contend with there. Firstly, the cost. Even the lower-end producer’s desks can reach into the unjustifiable, especially for a hobbyist musician, but there’s also the workflow element. These desks are made as a one-size-fits-all affair. Admittedly, the needs of most of us are pretty similar but it’s also fair to say that you might not want monitors on separate stands, or you may have an abundance of rack gear that you need to house. No matter what your circumstances, you will be better off designing and building your own desk, that fits your requirements and budget. The construction is also pretty basic, so over the next few pages we’ll take you through the process we used to build our home studio desk. For our purposes, we wanted something with rack space under the monitor shelf, enough to hold some of our most used gear and a patch bay. The shelf needed to be deep and wide enough to accommodate our monitors and our 27” iMac.
The main desktop had to house the keyboard and mouse and we also wanted it big enough to seat other gear, like the Pro 3. A slideout drawer was a must for us, as we use a MIDI keyboard a lot, so easy access was vital. Other than that we needed strong legs, cable management and durability.