Studio Console Part 1

Since I’ve moved into my house I’ve been using an office desk as, office desk, producer desk and DJ booth. Not an ideal combination, not even to talk about the effort to change everything every time. Since the start I always had the plan to build a nice full featured DJ Booth. But since I’ve started to do more production work and also have been buying more gear the need for a DJ booth has been caught up by the need for a studio desk.

Since most of the other stuff has been finished and we don’t seem to get a real summer here in the Netherlands, this is the ideal moment to start working on these 2 projects: A compact Studio Desk and a nice DJ Booth.
My production work is mostly done in Ableton Live and with other software. Additionally I have some hardware for remote control, an audio interface and monitor speakers. I want everything in one piece of furniture, being scalable for future expansion and very flexible.

After looking at a lot of pictures from mostly professional studio’s and ready-made furniture I’ve come to the following design so far:

The idea is to build two identical 19″ inch racks of 14 HE that can hold most hardware and have drawers for small loose equipment and cabling.

On both front and back will be 19″ rack rails so I can easily access the hardware from front and back. The idea is to equip the back on one or maybe both racks with patch panels in the near future. For the rest the back will simply have 19″ cover panels. The racks will have wheels for moving around when required. On top of the racks will come the actual desk of which the design is not yet finished. I’m still thinking about the size and whether I want to have 19 rack space there. Also cable management is going to require some thoughts, since I prefer to see as less cable as possible while I still want to have a configuration that can be flexible and scale in the future.

I will be posting more about the Studio Console project the coming days and weeks, but hopefully no months.