Remodelled Failed Muso Studio

As is customary here at Failed Muso, when I get a week off, one of two things normally happens. I either have a shuffle about with the gear in the studio in some vain attempt to re-kindle my musical inspiration or I reformat and rebuild my PC.

This week was an exception.

I did both ! :o)

The impending arrival of the Akai MPK49 had already got me thinking about reconfiguring the layout of the studio to accomodate it. So, when it arrived last week, just before my planned week off, I finally summoned up the energy and enthusiasm to shift things around. The problem I had with the last layout was 3 fold. Firstly, the Alesis Fusion took up rather a large amount of space on the desktop, but I needed a keyboard there for my work. Secondly, the central positioning of the desk meant I had keyboard stands either side which meant they all struggled to reach the Yamaha UX256 MIDI hub. Thirdly, the old Kenwood 5.1 system that I used for monitoring purposes wasn't being used anymore and taking up a large corner of space. See below:







So, I considered a number of possibilities and eventually plumped for putting the desk in the corner with the PC to the right and the keyboards to the right of that, meaning that nothing had a stretch to reach hubs and mixers. the Fusion went on to a stand and the smaller MPK moved on to the desk, giving me more space and the Kenwood was retired to the loft, substituted by a neater and smaller 5.1 system. Sadly, the Yamaha DTXpress drums have had to be relegated to the garage for now. My studio is right next door to the kids room and playing them in the evening (the only time I'm normally home) is a no go for obvious reasons. So they are now set up in the garage for me to use. So, this is the final result:







As for the PC, well, my hand was forced slightly, again by the MPK49 ! Being a USB Audio device, and being that Windows handles multiple USB Audio devices very poorly, I somehow managed to render my system useless by mucking about with the USB config. Quite how, I don't know, but suffice to say, the damned thing wouldn't boot in any mode, and when I inspected it using a Fedora Live Linux CD, it was unmountable. Thankfully, I'm a religious "backer upper" and I had an empty 120GB HD so I reinstalled XP and the installation process saw the supposedly faulty HD and did some reindexing and repairing and the contents are now visible and therefore recoverable so I am back on my feet again, with all my mail and settings restored and a much cleaner and lighter system too. I also bought some more RAM to give it 2GB in total, after finding that 1GB was causing great instability due to lack of resources.

So, it's only half way through my week off and I'm shattered. I'll be shifting the old sound system and empty boxes up to the loft later today and then moving the final bookcase and then I'm done. No wonder I always need a holiday after a holiday ! LOL ;o)