This is how my studio looked like last Thursday (July 3rd 2008). It was full of hardware, guitar and bass amps, bass guitars, electric guitars, cables, effect pedals, synths, carry bags with equipment inside, and some odd brown stuff from one of our cats’ stomachs, too. In other words, a typical scenario where all I did was do dump stuff on the floor when coming from a gig and just picking it up later.

It certainly needed a cleanup, badly. Also, the desktop was a mess, controllers here and there. It didn’t help that I had some new hardware available including a new screen that was just gathering dust in one corner. Somehow it’s hard to switch gears, you always worry about incompatibilities and issues with projects when you switch from one computer to another.

Here’s the room July 4th 2008, a day later. All the amplifiers et rest have their own specific location in the room. All guitars and bass guitars are in a certain location, too, close to the practice amp and the audio interface so they could be quickly hooked in if needed.

I found an unused stand for music where I put my UC33-e controller and an USB mike. Finally have the MacPro up and running with a new monitor. And yes, the floor has been cleaned up from odd stuff found.

As part of this operation I got inspired to make more electronic music, have 15+ minutes in the pipeline. I hope to release a “Something/Everything” podcast soon, as well as take selected parts and release them as tracks or something similar. More about that later.

This is about chemicals. I had this somewhat old (10+ year old) Marshal JCM900 guitar combo amp that has been collecting dust in my studio. Not just literally, really.

And of course after such a long time of no usage, the potentiometers had squeaky sounds when I booted up the amplifier. I had a spray can of WD-40 back home, assumed that this miracle chemical would fix anything, but especially one of the volume knobs still didn’t work properly.

So today I stopped by one of the local Frys and looked at other solutions, I found Puretronics contact cleaner, it was a cheap can, $6, so I took one home. I sprayed the pots, and yes, now they work fine.

The local Starving Musician also sold me an old Marshall channel switcher, for $10, and of course this one didn’t work. So I sprayed it with Puretronics, and yes, now it works fine.

Lessons learned, keep a bottle of this around, there’s a lot of stuff in your studio that could get dust and dirt inside the volume potentiometers, sliders, contacts and so on. There could be many cases where you think your equipment is broken, while all it would take would be to fix bad connections with something like this.

The other lesson learned was that WD-40 is not that universal; use something dedicated for electrical contacts. No, Puretronics has not sponsored me. That bottle I purchased today should be enough for the next five years or more.

One of the most important tools you have in your studio is your reference monitors. If the monitors are muddy, your mixes are muddy. If they colorize your mixes in a strange way, your productions sound strange.

When you are looking for purchasing reference monitors, try to spend as much as you could, close to hurting the budget. There’s a reason good monitors are expensive, they sound and work well. Also, you will have this set of monitors for a very, very long time. The reason is that you need to learn how the monitors work, and based on that you know how they behave. Then, while mixing and mastering, you know how the characteristics, and you could compensate when you intuitively know from past experience how it will sound in other environments, a car, iPod, TV and so on.

You should never purchase reference monitors via mail-order, unless you have already listened to them, and know how they sound. One of the best ways is to purchase them from a store where you could do A/B testing. Burn an audio CD with material you really like and know inside out, and use this one to hear how various monitors sound. Some are very accurate, but it might sound tiring, others colorize the sound so you could work for a long time without ear fatigue, but then that impacts the exactness of the sound. The nice thing with a store with a decent return policy is that you could always return them back in case they don’t sound that well in your studio environment (more about that later).

There’s a lot of advice out in the forums about what monitors are the best. My only advice is, listen yourself and do not just assume. There are so many parts in a monitor, where some might like a certain sound, others not.

I would read qualified reviews online for particular monitors I’m interested in. Any source that has a decent to good test environment and tools would be good resources. For example, Sound on Sound has very good reviews, and they could point out if a certain monitor has flaws, or if the marketing info is from — let’s say they claim the monitor could go down to 40Hz, while in a lab test it was clear that the monitor could only handle 60Hz.

I would look for the following additional features in a monitor. As I work with dance music, the low end is important. The reference monitor should be able to go down to 35-40Hz so I could check out the bottom end. That means that the main cone should be 8″. Some claim sub-woofers are the way to go, but I prefer not to add that in, as it’s hard to over or under-compensate with different setups. For hip-hop where the sub-woofer in a car environment is a must, then that’s a big exception.

Balanced inputs! In this world of more and more electronics causing all kinds of nasty electrical fields, that is becoming a must. It’s also good if the front has a volume knob and power buttons. You might want to adjust the volume on the monitors in order to avoid those sudden huge volume peaks in case your computer setup wants to suddenly have max volume (happens now and then). As for the power button, it’s good to save energy today.

Some of the new reference monitors today have built-in DSP electronics to figure out the acoustical environment and adjust the output based on that. It’s a good idea, but usually such monitors are expensive. At least the monitor should have some kind of adjustment for the environment so you could do fine tuning of the output — however, this usually requires external tools so you could see on a computer screen how settings change the output, don’t just trust your ears.

As for placement of the monitors. There’s a reason they are called near-field monitors. Unlike the old-fashioned way of placing huge, expensive monitors in the wall in front of the mixer, these should be placed as close to the ear if possible. It means that you need to go with practicality compared with how it looks like in the studio. Sometimes you could find the sweet spot by moving around with your head, or placing the monitors around until it feels you are inside this huge world of music only.

Unless the manufacturer states that the monitors should only be placed standing, you could place them standing or lying by the side. This is how I have it just now in my studio. Whatever you do, don’t place them straight to the desk, the vibration will cause all kinds of subtle odd sounds. You could purchase somewhat expensive loudspeaker isolation mats, but you could get creative by checking out what’s in your kitchen and use similar material that is very cheap.

I would neither place the monitors on anything wobbly, such as high stands, this as I live in earthquake country, or if you have small kids navigating through your studio, or dogs…

The acoustical environment in your studio plays a big role in how the monitors sound, even with near-fields that try to eliminate some of these issues. This is often why the monitors sound good in the store, but nasty back home. I give you an example of the worst possible environment: a square room, with no damping material in the walls, no book shelves, sofas or anything to dampen, and a wooden floor. The square part means that the sound waves will bounce back and forth creating all kinds of funky new sound waves.

Remember that the total chain of audio has a weakest spot. If your monitors are excellent, but the D/A converters are not good, that’s where the quality levels will decrease. Fortunately most of the Firewire-based audio interfaces are very good today. Even the audio output from a Mac sounds really good, too. Also beware of too-long audio cables, or home-made audio cables with weak soldering. I would not go and get platinum-plated super-expensive cables, but it’s good to have something very solid cable-wise.

Some wonder if they could use studio monitors for private parties, sure, most modern reference monitors handle a lot of high volumes for a long time. However, party people tend to do odd things when they are intoxicated, so I would not risk to use expensive monitors in a party.

So what about the Yamaha NS-10 monitors? Well, long time ago the trick to get a balanced mix was to use those, as the mid-range in those sucked big time, and if you got the mix sounding good in those, they sounded good in most other places. The problem is that it’s a drag listening to production work with NS-10s day after day. You want to enjoy the music you are working with. You could set them up as an additional monitor, or use any old stereo monitors you have back home, or a set of computer loudspeakers. It’s always good to have a second set of monitors for A/B listening purposes. I still think that you need to do tests with iPod-like ear-buds, as the majority of music is listened to through such environments today.

This posting might be updated and annotated now and then, as I will start using it as my contribution on forums on postings where someone asks what monitor to purchase, and what to look for.

Here’s an image of the current summer studio I have set up at a small cottage by the sea here in Western Finland.

My MacBookPro is in the middle, and the little else I have connected is a Novation Remote LE, two speakers, a headphone set, and a mouse.

The laptop is on top of a Podium Coolpad. I really recommend those, keeps the laptop nicely elevated, and less heat is also generated. Those are good both in the studio, or for DJ setups.

As for the speakers, those were a cheap set of Viewsonic computer speakers I picked up at Frys some time ago, mostly as I saw that their power supply handled 110-240V. The problem is the low end, very minimal. A small woofer would be nice, but then those increase the weight, when traveling. I would actually now look for another set that are light-weight, but have a built-in low-end woofer or decent low-end.

The issue that bites me, every time, is that you can’t just set up an environment, and espect that creativity happens based on the nice views, or the weather. I ended up just going to the sofa and, eh, relax for a while.

Then, the times I’ve been really creative are in sudden places like let’s say a return trip from Boston to San Francisco, then all I need is to grab the laptop and start working. So, the best is to have a really good laptop, and just go with the flow.

Hey, I just got Komplete 4 and Massive from Native Instruments. It was a special deal — nice to work in the right division (pro apps) inside the fruit company. Massive is this new software synth that has very strong and analog-sounding oscillators and much more — good for electro house. Komplete 4 has just everything else: Reactor 5 that in itself could be used to build extremely complex synth setups, Absynth 4 for athmospheres, Kontakt 2 with gigabytes of samples, Battery 3 with tons of drum kids, Pro-53 that is a Prophet-5 virtual SW synth, and much much more!

Phew. I still remember the days when I had a Roland Jupiter-6 as my only synth and I used it for months, if not years, as the only synth. So now it’s just a matter of putting all my gear into use.

Let’s see, I have Logic 7 with all the synths, Reason with its arsenal, Zebra 2 that I could use for the rest of my life, Chameleon 5000, Octopus, and more and more and more… The best in this massive amounts of material is to just take one or two synths at a time, and use them for a month, and move on to the next one. So far that strategy has worked well, when I kind of get tired of one of them, I just switch to another ‘workhorse’ and use it.

But for anyone else, please, there’s no need to have tons of gear. What happened in my case was just a good deal, and I always wanted Reactor, anyway, as it’s this lego box of putting together all kinds of strange and new kinds of synthesis engines. And I wanted to write good PR about Native Instruments that provided me with this gear that I promise will be put into heavy use.

Same with the background.

I like simple studio setups, so my mind is not wandering.

My wife and I visited the local Ikea store in Palo Alto. We ended up getting a wide but narrow white board, with white legs, and a white lamp to it, too, including new white drapes to be placed in front of the window and the desk.

I think new studio this will remind of a dissection board of alien artifacts somewhere in a secret US laboratory…

The nice thing with a long but narrow desk is that I could have various controllers to the left and right, and drag them to the center when needed. This is much better than with wide desks, or specific studio desks — there’s really for me little need to spend a lot of money getting a studio-like desk, as I don’t have piles of external gear. All my effects are running inside the computer, same with the synthesizers.

But I would like to have various smaller MIDI controllers that I could use from time to time placed around on the desk, DJ controllers, other interesting and experimental ones over time, as well.

I just need to take apart this current desk now, and clean up the mess of cables behind, and dump a lot of junk that has been accumulated in this studio…

I think I will call this new studio setup The White Studio.

I stumbled upon mistake the back side of my studio setup, i.e. everything behind the desk.

What a cable mess! I think the power lines are also crossing with audio cables, and all kinds of nasty things are lurking there.

In addition, I want to make the room feel more spacious, so it’s time to open up the Ikea catalogue and plan for purching a new desk, and other new cool stuff to spiffy up this room.

This current setup has been around for over three years — it actually started as a stress-release exersice one summer weekend when I was a tech lead over at Palm, and the overwhelming amount of responsibilities and deadlines just got into my skin. So building a home studio was a good way to release the stress at that time.

Just now I’m not stressed out at all, but the amount of things that has been collected into this home studio setup over the years is just too much. It’s time to clean it all up.

Maybe it helped to look at the BT video with his home setup, too, to get me inspired.

This is my new studio setup. We started cleaning up the house, the garage, the rooms, and finally also cleaned up the studio environment.

I have a hard time naming studios, so this new studio is thus named Studio 2.0.

There’s a PowerMac 2x 2.0Ghz G5 actually underneath the desk.

It’s not fun moving software from one computer to the other — anyway, my son has my old 2×867MHz G4 PowerMac.

The whole household is Mac-only. Not that there’s one Windows box for ‘just in case’ situations. And a couple of Dell desktops that I purchased for $25 each and don’t know what to do with them just now.