[Back to Nama page]
[Back to music page]

Recently, having had a friend to take some pictures in here, I decided to share my "studio accomodations" with you.

This shows the part of my room, which is dedicated to music making, which is more than half of the room. The room is four by four metres, carpeted and has a window to one side. The other side is taken up by a big wardrobe, which can be opened, so the clothes inside can absorb more sound.

We start on the left with a Yamaha DX7IID, sitting ontop of a Honer Clavinet D6. Underneath that, you might notice an empty stand, which will carry my Korg TR 76, once it's back from the repair.

The Arturia has become a trusty friend, since its appearance back in 2013. Its bass qualities are simply amazing!

The Prophet-12 joined the family of instruments about a year after the MiniBrute and is the main tool of sound design. While the Korg is gone, it's also the main control keyboard to play soft synths and rackmounts. An amazingly versatile and accessible instrument.

The stack of rackmounts, without the rack to mount them. From top to bottom you have the Waldorf Microwave XT wavetable synthesizer. Since back in 1998, when it first appeared, I yearned to have one. The time finally arrived in 2011, after having studied the manual, out of purely academical interest. :) Underneath that the MAM VF11 vocoder, which arrived in 1998. Actually this vocoder was the reason to get the first virtual analogue synthesizer, so its carrier input could be supplied with a suitable sound. LIke having a button and buying a dress to put it on. :) I thik the picture didn't catch the Roland JV-1080 sitting underneath that. This too is an addition of more recent years. It replace the Roland XP-30 keyboard, since there was no longer enough space to hold all instruments.

This is the centre piece of the studio. A cheap, big suitably big desktop keyboard, resting ontop of a braille display. For those of you who don't know what that is: a braille display is a display device for blind people. It can show a line - or part of a line - of text printed on the screen by means of small metal pins being raised by some clever mechanism. It's probably electro magnetic. Buttons on the side of the device allow the user to navigate over the "system screen" with all its lines, pull the braille display focus to the mouse or cursor and a few additional functions to ease the workflow. Small buttons above each character cell can be used to pull the mouse or cursor to the focus of the braille display. As you will also have noticed in the panorama picture - at the top of this site - there is no monitor on the desk. There is o need for one and the space is better used by a tape deck. :)

This, in combination with a desktop computer sitting under the desk, and a few small, acoustic instruments forms one home studio. The computer is running Linux for the DAW, MIDI recording and software synthesizers. It's not overly modern, but effective and flexible enough. It also offers some superb tools for sound design. In addition to all those hardware interfaces, which are all quite useable, there are some powerful software instruments to produce quality sampled instruments or do custom sound and synth design.

I hope you enjoyed that little tour, eventhough it isn't too special in terms of bedroom studios.

[Back to top of page]